Alternate Worlds

Alternate Worlds is the second full length album of Amoeba Crunch, released in 2008. The album is a companion to their first album, Sixteen Worlds, which was released a year earlier. It is in part a remix album but also includes a four-track demo, a live performance, and entirely new tracks derived from those on Sixteen Worlds.

1 Description
2 Track listing
3 External links

Description

According to the official blog, the band conceived of the album on 3 March 2008 while playing with the Internet Anagram Server. The song titles from Sixteen Worlds produced evocative results and sparked the idea of creating new tracks based on the names.

The packaging makes several references to Sixteen Worlds and itself. The cover art depicts an underpass painted with warning stripes, echoing the warning stripes on the original cover. The catalog number, L9 214, is an anagram of the Sixteen Worlds catalog number, L9 124. The inner sleeve depicts the Sixteen Worlds and Alternate Worlds cover art. It also shows the sleeves color-inverted and titled Welders Toxins and Translated Lower respectively, which are anagrams of the original titles. This plays on the idea of "remix albums to remix albums," or perhaps extends the notion of a remix album in a direction perpendicular to that taken by Alternate Worlds. The band has not mentioned whether any such recordings are planned or already exist.

The liner notes mention one musical guest, noted multi-instrumentalist Nicholas Rizzo, who is perhaps best known for his songs, "We Are Making Eggs Together," "I Need A Drink (Thirsty)," and the blues standard, "Something Is Wrong." He contributes organ and drums to the live track, "Thereby Unrestrained."

Track listing

The album has 10 tracks, each of which has a title that is an anagram of its corresponding track on Sixteen Worlds. On 11 May 2008, these detailed descriptions of each track appeared in a fake Wikipedia article on the band's Web page.

"Pianos Unfold" (5:26) is a shortened version of "Pound of Nails" from Sixteen Worlds. It adds a regular drum kit playing a back beat over the original song's syncopated tribal drums. The resulting polyrhythm creates dynamic tension throughout the track.
"Easy Ale Pesto" (6:16) is a straightforward remix of "Pleasy to Ease" featuring new wah-wah guitar parts. Some copies of the album included an actual recipe insert for an "easy ale pesto" sauce which involved the cook drinking an entire six pack.
"Testier Thinker" (5:18) pits the bass line from "Strike Thirteen" against a crackly rhythm. It steadily grows into a crecendo of electric guitar riffing for perhaps' the band's rockiest song.
"Great Escapes" (7:55) starts like its predecessor, "Secret Passage," with the sound of a person walking through leaves. Piano and guitar briefly quote the end of the original song before introducing a new 16-bar chord progression. Acoustic guitars and percussion effects play across this framework before swelling into a chaotic guitar lead. The percussive effects include kicking a chain-link fence.
"Hogtie Row Bender" (2:29) is a 1995 demo of what would eventually become "Bridge to Nowhere" on Sixteen Worlds. The original recording, played on a Bentley 12-string acoustic guitar with rhythm provided by a can of bread crumbs (!), was mixed down, equalized, and overdubbed with another 12-string rhythm track (played on a different guitar) and a simple rhythm egg pattern.
"Damn This Money" (5:17) is a new composition based on components of "Hands on My Time." It is slower with a darker tone, almost a trip hop song.
"Sled Doggy Land" (4:22) is a thick collage built from "Daddy Longlegs." It is the first result of Amoeba Crunch's patent-pending "continuous remix" algorithm that blends all aspects of an entire song into itself to produce a textured soundscape. In addition to "Daddy Longlegs," it contains bits and pieces of two unreleased tracks, "Nick's Theme," which is played on piano and appears twice, and "Baby Boy," which is a rock song embedded in the middle. There is also an obligatory backmasked message running through the last two thirds of the song, a reading from Cherry-Garrard's The Worst Journey in the World, which ties in with the track title. It ends with a highly processed version of the bowling pin sample that ended Sixteen Worlds.
"Bakrecerkab" (7:39) takes its name as an anagrammatic palindrome of the original track's title, "Backbreaker." It is a remix that features the prominent bass line from "Backbreaker" and new guitar parts.
"Prolapsed Ruling" (6:12) is an extended version of "All Purpose Grind." It has a crunchier rhythm than the original, harder drums, and new guitar riffs. It preserves the original's vocoded lyrics.
"Thereby Unrestrained" (5:47) is an unspecified live performance of "Under the Binary Trees" which opened Sixteen Worlds. This version has organ parts and additional drums played by Nicholas Rizzo and is beefed up with live guitars.