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Perry Farrell's Satellite Party
Ultra Payloaded
(Columbia)
First Appeared in The Music Box, June 2007, Volume 14, #6
Written by John Metzger
Like most concept albums, Ultra Payloaded — the debut from Perry
Farrell’s new outfit Satellite Party — doesn’t make much sense. The liner notes
provided by the once and future Jane’s Addiction front man sketch a tale that
involves public protest, environmental devastation, and mankind’s inevitable
spiritual rebirth under the guidance of a mystical leader known simply as "Jim."
The songs themselves wrap Farrell’s frustration with the status quo in an
intergalactic veil of peace, love, and harmony. "The paradox of poverty has left
us dismayed/Sliding democracies washing away," he sings during The
Solutionists in what is an obvious reference to the Hurricane Katrina
disaster. Elsewhere, his message is more hedonistic: "I just want to celebrate
another day of livin’/I just want to celebrate life...I just want to party."
Farrell’s message of trans-global unification also pours through Ultra
Payloaded’s music. With help from an all-star cast that includes Thievery
Corporation, Hybrid, New Order’s Peter Hook, the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ Flea and
John Frusciante, Extreme’s Nuno Bettencourt, and the Black Eyed Peas’ Fergie,
Farrell fills Ultra Payloaded with a strangely intoxicating mishmash of
sounds. Throughout the set, metallic guitar riffs poke and prod at grooves that
were swiped from Sly Stone and David Bowie. The Solutionists slaps a
Prince-ly intro onto what essentially is a fusion of Electric Light Orchestra’s
Showdown with the Steve Miller Band’s Fly Like an Eagle, and
samples from Rare Earth’s I Just Want to Celebrate and The Bee Gees’
Lonely Days form the bases for Only Love, Let’s Celebrate, and Mr.
Sunshine, respectively. Tucked into the fray are hypnotic, Eastern rhythms
as well as bits of reggae, and during the symphonic soul ballad Awesome,
Farrell conjures his inner Bono.
Like U2’s Pop and The Rapture’s Pieces of the People We Love,
the albums after which it most frequently appears to have been modeled,
Satellite Party’s Ultra Payloaded is, at first, a little difficult to
embrace. Though the sterility eventually is overcome by the outfit’s outright
exuberance, there initially is a coldness to some of its dance-friendly grooves.
More problematic, however, is the oddball revelation that the shaman leader who
saves the world is none other than Jim Morrison. During Ultra-Payloaded
Satellite Party, Morrison’s disembodied voice offers a reprise of The Doors’
lounge single Touch Me before he fully takes the reins on the
post-apocalyptic Woman in the Window. It all plays out like an aural
depiction of a novel by Robert Heinlein. In the end, Farrell’s heart is in the
right place, and although the set fails to find the transcendence for which it
strives, Ultra Payloaded ultimately reveals itself to be a fun-filled
first step toward revolutionary change, if only it’s given time the time it
needs to congeal. 
Ultra Payloaded is available from Amazon.com.
To order, Click Here!
For Canadian orders, please
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For UK orders, please
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Ratings
1 Star: Pitiful
2 Stars: Listenable
3 Stars: Respectable
4 Stars: Excellent
5 Stars: Can't Live Without It!!
Copyright © 2007 The Music Box
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