Here's another one from the former bestie who no longer talks to me because I think I'm cool. Oh well. This was to be a tape on my Do Easy label, but never came out because I'd lost enthusiasm for the whole enterprise, and crap and inferior though my tape covers were, I wasn't sure how I felt about Paul going against my Rotring pen minimalist aesthetic with his admittedly superior cover art. Also he'd taken to changing the name under which he recorded about every three months, and by this point was apparently calling himself Pröl, derived from his spelling his name Porl, which I find a slightly irritating affectation; so it's still Acrobatic Champions, so far as I'm concerned, just as it was with the first two tapes.
Not sure what to make of this one. It's not as amazing as I remember it being, possibly because I'd forgot about the inclusion of live tracks, material he'd been trotting out since Die Brücke - and I wouldn't be surprised if he's still playing some of that stuff in pubs even now. On the positive side, I still genuinely love most of this material, and think they were great songs, and that Paul could have been fucking enormous but for his tendency to keep shooting himself in the foot, time after time after time, ultimately alienating even hardcore sad sack fanboys such as myself. In his defence, he was - shall we say - unwell at the time of recording some of this, a combination of certain unfortunate recreational habits and circumstances described on Nightshift - actually the soundtrack of a video he shot about working nights in a plastics factory, which apparently wasn't as much fun as it may sound.
If only Situation Two or one of those labels had chucked a bunch of money at the poor fucker and got him started with No Heart and Tin Men as a single. We'd still all be talking about what a great record it was now, but never mind.
Tracks:
1 - Not This Time
2 - No Heart
3 - Tin Men
4 - Compression
5 - Watching from Outside (live)
6 - The Audience (live)
7 - You Fill Me (live)
8 - Hallo Hallo Hallo
9 - Tabbs
10 - Nightshift
11 - Heart Like Glass (live)
12 - The Car
13 - Secret Architecture
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