Editorial Reviews
Solex Vs. The Hitmeister
Music Review:
Music Review
Make Me an Island: Best of Joe Dolan [Import]
Schumann: Piano Sonata in Fm No3, Op14; Impromptus in D Op5
Schubert: Sonata in F Minor/Galopp/Ecoxxaisen/Sonata in D Major
Music: Popular Songs from Bucharest
Tchaikovsky: The Sleeping Beauty, Op. 66
Presencia en el Festival Inernacional de Guitarra de La Habana [Import]
Amazon.com
As Dutch record-store proprietor Elisabeth Esselink watched the pile of CDs that would not sell in her Amsterdam shop grow larger, she figured out a way to make them useful after all. She listened intently to each crummy disc until she found an amusing melody or fresh beat. Then she recycled them all into the magnificent sound panorama that is Solex Vs. the Hitmeister. Her innovative musical ideas were then expanded on by the introduction of a character named Solex who inhabits every song. The sludgy trip-hop of "Solex in a Slipshod Style" is reminiscent of Portishead, but beyond that there is little with which to compare her music. The cut-and-paste jazz saxophone of "Solex Feels Lucky" and distorted banjo of "Waking Up with Solex" are utterly original. So are her sexy and literate lyrics about snagging her tights in a backseat make-out session and how the straps of her dress keep slipping off her shoulders. Rock & roll needs more enigmatic Europeans like this. --Lois Maffeo
Entertainment Weekly
If Bjork had a younger, moodier sister who made confessional homemade tapes, she'd probably be Amsterdam's Elisabeth Esselink (nom de rock: Solex).... [Solex Vs. the Hitmeister] is an oddly endearing Dutch treat of an album. The rattling, wind-tunnel music lends an even eerier power to her tales of obsessions.