FREE 1993 (Seeland 009) CD Approximately 9,000 copies sold.
The Onion U2 may have sued Negativland into oblivion, but the world's premier sampling maestros have only improved artistically as a result of the messy legal encounter. FREE is quite possibly Negativland's best full-length release to date, bursting forth with a whole new load of bitter cynicism and hilarious soundbites. Where Negativland finds this stuff is anyones guess. Recordings of lectures by fanatical handgun advocates ("The gun and the bible carved this nation out of the wilderness!") and previously forgotten '70's TV ads are spliced together into a tight, hard hitting message of the American dream gone sour. FREE is an important recording with a whole mess of social commentary, but don't get scared off; the songs are injected with enough humor to keep them from being heavy-handed, and the ten-minute folk story/song "Happy The Harmonica" is weird and downright silly. If you're a Negativland fan, you probably have this CD already. If not, FREE is a terrific introduction to one of the best concept bands of the last decade. No, it's not actually free, but it's undoubtedly worth every damn nickel.
College Music Journal A new full album Negativland, and not one snide mention of U2, Island Records, or even Negativland's former label SST, whom Negativland dropped after the devastating U2 lawsuit a year and a half ago. Nope, all those unhappy times are behind Negativland now. As the band might say with one of it's countless film and TV soundbites, "When the going gets tough, the tough gets going," for FREE is Negativland's most mature and inspiring release to date. While past efforts have tended to be somewhat unstructured, and even unmusical, the new disc is pieced together with divers melodies and a sobering coherence. "Cityman" intertwines a C&W lament with snippets from a Cadillac commercial, the haunting, near gothic "View To The Sun" is speckled with quotes from a church organist, and "Our National Anthem" lays ironic samples about racism and nationalism over a music-box rendition of the "Star Spangled Banner" and snippets from "Proud To Be An American." Other cuts like "I Am God" and "Pip Digs Pep" use a modern array of industrial beats and hip-hop textures to drive their points home. Regardless of what style they're couched in, the songs on FREE are intelligent and overtly political, candidly and unflinchingly addressing such issues as gun control, drunk driving, religion and patriotism with a tinge of humor that lightens their didacticism. Positively on target. -Jon Weiderhorn
Wired Magazine Negativland is a sample band with a mission: grab media fragments of the mass media to highlight what a perverted culture we swim in. After being saddled with years of lawsuits for releasing a single that made wicked fun of U2, they're back with a scathing indictment of everything that makes America, er, "great": gun worship, religious intolerance, bad ads - the whole nine yards. It's not too preachy - the samples do the talking instead of the band. The samples are woven into a song structure that's fun to listen to. Here are some guys with strong political beliefs who aren't afraid to voice them. -Nick West San Francisco Bay Guardian The manic cut-and-pasters known as Negativland (Don Joyce, Mark Hosler, Chris Grigg, Richard Lyons, and David Wills) could rightfully be consumed, like Lenny Bruce in his last years, by the legal imbroglio that strangled And killed their U2 CD - a bitter tangle that left the band on the short end of a big stick carried by Island Records and Warner Chappell Music, and eventually pitted them against their previous record label,. SST. But their obsession with the "fair use"/copyright issue has given their satire a harder political edge on this, their first full-length recording in four years. In a dozen different aural collages, the band mixes up such found sounds as samples from radio call-in shows, television commercials, public service announcements, and trucker CB communications, with computer and synthesizer noise, original story-telling, and "real music." It's as if they'd been standing outside the department store of pop culture, smashed the giant plate glass window, and stepped inside to rearrange all the displays. And the mannequins have no clothes. Such hallowed middle-American practices as drinking and driving, worshipping, and gun toting are recast in a panoramic sonic tableau that alternately recalls the Firesign Theatre, Laurie Anderson, Byrne and Eno, and Consolidated. As on 1989's HELTER STUPID LP, the results are uneven, perhaps indicating that the U2 is still the group's most inspired work to date. But the meticulously engineered 59 minutes yield plenty of thought provoking yuks, if not uncontrollable belly laughs, and an almost infinitely textured universe of headphone euphoria. -Derk Richardson Back to PRESS US Back to NMOL 
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