Hot Trip To Heaven

What can a band do after taking its fuzz boxes to grandiose heights, scoring a hit single in America, and finally breaking through with a music video? If you're Love and Rockets, you opt for a five-year break and retool your band to make it sound nothing like the incarnation that brought you success. See also: Wire. HOT TRIP TO HEAVEN is Love and Rockets' logical response to the trance/ambient craze then sweeping Europe. The stylistic shift makes sense in this context. You'll be too dazzled throughout to notice its absence, but the trademark fuzz box finally makes a cameo on the title track. "Body and Soul," the album's 14-minute opening track, sounds like an homage to Aphex Twin, while "Trip and Glide" and "Ugly" wouldn't sound out of place on a Tricky album. Many assumed that Love and Rockets modeled its sound on the fuzzier side of the Jesus and Mary Chain, but the secret to L&R's success was always in the dynamic vocal interplay of David J. and Daniel Ash. These elements pervade HOT TRIP, taking it beyond the workaday to the limits of transcendence.