Overthrow Groove dabs you on the head immediately with a Subway horn of sorts being blown in a tunnel while a basic piano riff plunks forward over lo-fi kick drums and dubbed atmospherics. Add to the mix cavernous vocals and hodgepodge production, this Kraftwerk moment with a psychotropic twitch produces the scheme that All About The Money triumphantly plods along at.
Spontaneous Overthrow, the 1984 project from Nathaniel Woolridge and Anthony Freeman, has been priced on random Discogs pages for anywhere from $800 to $3,200 for the original vinyl copy with the comment “sounds like shit, why the buzz about it”.
You champion All About The Money in the same fashion one extracts joy from a cheeky Ed Wood movie or rooting for the underfunded and overproducing Oakland Athletics Baseball team. The ROI always pays off, no matter how slim the start-up budget.
So at times, the lo-fi project cooks along like a jumbled bag of unfussy space funk. Mismatched audible ideas, at certain times clashing against one another, do sometimes align. In other machinations these sounds butt heads, creating nonsensical frequencies that force your head to bob, bypassing any type of logic. That’s what a strong feel does. An 808 drum machine provides the canvas, minor and off-key vocals along with keyboard plinking resembles the paint, delivering more times than not, a reckless splash of erratic bliss.
According to the projects liner notes, Nathaniel Woolridge’s negative experiences with a band called Everyday Soul in the late 1960’s and 1970’s kept him out of the music business until the late 1970’s when he met Freeman and began this collaboration. Injuries sustained by Woolridge during military service contributed to a case of manic depression. That painful history is built into the record’s DNA.
Spontaneous Overthrow’s All About Money was reissued on Numero Group November 16, 2018 and available on vinyl HERE:
Listen to All About Money via spotify