The album samples many 1970s and 1980s soft rock songs that Mylo heard on the radio as a child. The single "In My Arms" combines hits by Kim Carnes and Boy Meets Girl. The title track samples a fundamentalist Christian sermon, while "Drop the Pressure" is based around a vocal recording made by Mylo himself and edited with a vocoder.
Many of the album's tracks come from 1970s and 1980s radio-friendly soft rock. Mylo grew up on the remote Isle of Skye, where in his childhood the only available radio station was Ireland-based Atlantic 252, which played such music.[3] After being exposed to the first time to house music on the radio, and having expanded his musical influences while studying in Los Angeles, he committed himself to music at the age of 22.[3]
Mylo - Destroy Rock
Review aggregator Metacritic gives Destroy Rock & Roll a score of 80/100 from 14 reviews by music critics.[4] Tim DiGravina of AllMusic gave the album four stars out of five, finding cohesiveness among Mylo's different influences and concluding that it "only seems to cement his status among the elite of electronic cut-and-pasters of his time".[5] A rare negative review came from Dave Simpson in The Guardian, who did not find that the album's quality matched its provocative title: "There are moments of promise when Mylo ups the pace, but rock'n'roll faces a greater threat from a feather duster".[7]
All of the vocals and lyrics are sampled from "Invocation for Judgement Against and Destruction of Rock Music", a 1984 recording[3] by religious organization Church Universal and Triumphant. The original recording heavily condemns rock music, and many popular artists from the 1980s; it appears on a release entitled The Sounds of American Doomsday Cults Volume 14.[4]
"Destroy Rock & Roll" begins with the voice of a Preacher[5] condemning "All perversions of the third eye through distorted and exaggerated images, perverted movements of the body and breakdancing and other forms of dancing." The same Preacher calls for "the destroying of rock music directed specifically against children through the videos that were portrayed," and "working specifically through" certain individuals. The Preacher also calls for "the judgement of the sacred fire on this hour before the throne of Almighty God" through these individuals.[6]
The title's misleading: Nothing gets destroyed here, and there's hardly a rough noise across this hour of music. Destroy Rock and Roll is electronic dance music, pure and simple. Mylo's tracks read a bit like a cross section of the genre's history. All the happiest tricks of each era-- disco groove, synth-pop melodies, house rush, downtempo foot-tapping, French filter sweeps, cut-rate Daft Punk, choppy edits-- sharing space. And yet this is anything but one of those big, bursting pastiche albums, packed with ideas and flailing everywhere at once. No, these tracks go in straight, simple lines, and they rarely take their eyes off whichever hooks grab you fastest. Don't count on the dance cognoscenti to approve of them: If anything, this is house music as Saturday-morning cartoon-- all bold lines inked in bright, primary colors.
And as much as every one of these things comes across like a coloring book next to an oil painting, that's exactly what gives this record its dreamy charm-- even during its tamer lead-ups, which run Röyksopp, trip-hop, and Air through similar homemade Platonic-essence filters. And questions about how effective this kind of simplification can really be get answered by a one-two punch: "Otto's Journey", bouncing like nuts around wet, flickering synths, and the vocal cut of "Muscle Cars", which is as sleek, sexy, and quaintly unhip as its namesake. There isn't much in here that could be considered hip, or that shows technical skill. But there's a total gut-level joy, as if these were tracks made by an ecstatic, well-meaning kid who hadn't yet encountered the complicated concerns of the places people might actually dance to them. This is to dance what Art Brut is to rock: cheeky, charming, too straightforward to worry about style, ramming through the fundamentals as if pure enthusiasm is the most important part of making music.
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