The Backdoor of Reality

Ok, how to describe this... If you've ever seen Lexx, I don't need to continue, but if you haven't, well, it was a racey, sexy (perhaps a wee bit too sexy), mildly twisted sci-fi TV series from Europe, that gained a fairly sizeable cult following worldwide. It features five main characters: Stanley H. Tweedle, the bumbling captain, Xev Bellringer, a formerly obese woman that was taken and processed by the bad guys to be a sex slave and is now hot as hell, Kai, a long-dead Brunnen-G warrior that was captured and reanimated by said bad guys to be their mindless, unstoppable assassin/puppet, 790, the disembodied head of a robot that's completely infatuated with Xev as the result of being zapped by the machine that converted her into supreme hotness, and finally, Lexx, a giant, living ship with enough power to destroy a planet with a single shot, and an IQ that continually brings the viewer back to thoughts of Of Mice and Men.

So, together the guy (he loves Xev), the gal (she loves Kai), the dead guy (he can't love because he's dead, or so he keeps reminding everyone constantly), the robot head (he loves Xev), and the ship (he loves Stan, in a loyal puppy sorta way) all flee from the evil bad guys that are slowly taking over the entire universe.

I think the thing about Lexx that bugged me (no pun intended for those familiar with the story) was that, although I like a good satire, and although I like a good sci-fi space opera, Lexx, --at least for me--, couldn't ever decide which one it wanted to be. It didn't have the humor of Red Dwarf, nor did it maintain the drama of, say, Babylon 5. No, it landed awkwardly somewhere in the middle, and I think it would've been better had it chosen one side of that fence.

Still, it had its moments, and one of the best was Brigadoom.

Every good show needs to have a musical episode. No, really. (And the first person that mentions Buffy gets set on fire.) Some are actually talented. Others aren't, but know it, like That '70s Show's musical ep, where they obviously couldn't sing, but had a blast doing it anyway. Brigadoom, again, falls somewhere in-between. None of them are professional singers, but somehow they do manage to pull it off. Perhaps the backing of actual pros playing the incidental parts helped, and perhaps it was that all the songs were basically new, story-centric lyrics set to the familiar tunes of various well-known German nursery rhymes (not so well-known in North America, of course). The songs slowly recap the origin story of Kai, and of the last battle, and defeat, of his people, the Brunnen-G. Kai is the last of his race, albeit in a dead, reanimated sorta way (so, really, none of the Brunnen-G truly still live).

It really is an amazingly well-done piece of work. You'll find yourself listening to it again and again, and feeling the emotion of the story as it plays-out. For a musical production, that's what we tend to call "a good thing."

Ok, so what I'm presenting you with today is a bit of a custom jobbie. Several people recorded the songs at the time of airing, and posted their results in various places. I've taken the best pieces (some had badly timed edits that chopped-off portions, or included unrelated dialogue), combined and tweaked 'em a little, and then added some extra tracks to beef the whole thing up and give it some grandeur and flair. The musical tracks from the actual episode are still sequential, though, with most of the additional material placed after, to give the listener more Lexx-y score to experience while digesting the initial story. I must say, I'm extremely pleased with the end result, and think it worked out ideally. Hope you enjoy it as much, too.

One note: In a bit of a departure from the usual, I'm releasing this in "Album" form. If you're unfamiliar with the concept, it's a way of "wrapping" the tracks into a playable archive, kinda like a big RAR file, but with an .MP3 extension. The entire album will play as a single MP3, but the individual tracks are safely stored inside, and can be unpacked if desired (say, for example, if you wish to burn them to an audio CD). I use this all the time, and love the hell out of it. More details on this format can be found at www.makeitone.com, where you can download the free tool for making and unpacking Albums. Also, I inserted some simple cover art (the graphic you see at the top of this post) into the Album's ID3v2 tag, so if you've got a player that shows such things, it'll be visible. Apologies for the bitrate. It's the best I could do. Some of the original tracks were slightly higher, but were obviously transcoded and sounded like crap as a result, and the extra score tracks were only ripped at 128 when I got them, so the decision was out of my hands, and I evened things out for better sound. It still sounds pretty good, but if I can ever get the ep on DVD (was it released?) and the score CD, I'll redo the entire thing.




(MP3/60MB/128 kbps)
Lexx - Brigadoom (Extended Version)


Enjoy!