The Crystal Method: Tweekend : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

The Crystal Method's last album, Vegas, was spectacularly mediocre, a poor man's amalgam of the Chemical Brothers, Orbital and various other more adventurous English artists. With their second album, the unfortunately titled Tweekend, the Sin City duo of Scott Kirkland and Ken Jordan have dumbed down their sound even more - and their music is all the better for it. From the freeze-dried Fender Rhodes riffs of "Over the Line,'' which, bizarrely, resembles both Oasis and Air, to the rap-rock rave of "Name of the Game," which will hopefully give Fred Durst some new ideas, Tweekend is a textbook definition of cheap techno thrills. The Crystal Method certainly haven't resorted to originality, but they have become the Bachman-Turner Overdrive of American techno. They use electronics to simulate some of rock's hoariest, and most dumbly pleasurable, cliches: The adrenalized "Tough Guy" isn't the only track on the album with synth lines that sound like wah-wah guitars. We can only hope that, by their next album, the Crystal Method have figured out how to get a sequencer to sound just like Peter Frampton's solo in "Do You Feel Like We Do.''

PAT BLASHILL
(RS 875 - August 16,2001)