- Feel It Coming On
- Make Me Smile
- Staying Hardcore
- Sick Buzz
- Get Up
- And Then I Woke Up
- No Rest For The Wicked
- The First Kiss
- Keep It Going
- Escapism
- Trippin'
- What Do I Know?
All tracks written, produced, recorded, mixed and mastered by Neil O'Brien.
Cover art by Neil O'Brien, incorporating screenshots from "Bumpy" by P-K and "Inverse Kinetics" by Sander Kupers.
Love Buzz is a personal all-time favourite album of mine - which I think is attested to by the fact I seemingly carried out two retro-fit re-mixes of it within two to three years of its initial release, and as a result I now don't have any solid dates for when it was first written as I had no reservations about just saving the revised versions over the original files. I can only assume a date range based on it coming after Moving Targets but before Nihilist-Hedonist.
This album was a sort of love letter to old skool rave, encompassing a broad range of period styles, from '88 style acid house to '96 style jungle, along with a load of early 90's hardcore breaks and techno. It's something I've periodically done again and again on various scales, but Love Buzz was certainly the most complete and comprehensive take on it I've done. However, that's not to say that it particularly sounds period-authentic: I've never been much interested in accurately replicating the specific sounds and techniques of 90's dance music, and at this point in 2004 I still knew fuck all about the technology underpinning them anyway. Instead I tried to make tracks that evoked those sounds and styles without just directly copying them. Listening back to it now after a spell of... shit, 21 years!? - I can say that some of the tracks are a bit mid, but they're all still strong enough collectively for the album to work, and there's 3-4 tracks that are real stand-outs, especially "Get Up", "The First Kiss" and "Keep It Going"; the intro on "The First Kiss" still actually gives me butterflies.
I should probably mention as well that the psychedelic cover art was grabbed from some of the visualisers on WinAMP - in fact most of my earliest attempts at doing music videos were just straight-up screencapped WinAMP visuals. I certainly had no scruples about sampling visuals in those days. And speaking of samples, unusually for a Rude Corps album, there are actually several used here: "Sick Buzz" contains a sample from "Freedom" by Rage Against The Machine, "Get Up" contains a sample from "Get Up Stand Up" by Bob Marley and the Wailers, and "Keep It Going" contains a sample from "Sugar Free Tekno" by Ultra-Sonic. The version of this album I'm making available is the re-mix from May 2007.