I’d love to be able to review this, but I can’t. Well, more accurately, I could, but I haven’t been able to listen to it enough. When I unwrapped the package I noticed a little sign – the one that says “Copy Controlled” – laughed, and stuck on my iTunes. Cheers EMI. You fucking goons, treating people who buy music like criminals.

So I can’t listen to my music, that I have paid for, on my own iPod. Fuck you EMI. I’m off to the free p2p filesharing networks. I’m not being dictated to by your ridiculous profit margins and corrupt technology. Nor am I paying for bits and bytes. That’s vapourware, and you should know better. People like something they can touch and hold.

So if this review sounds as if I haven’t listened to it enough, send a letter to EMI : the ones who will be shortly adding Copy Controlled technology to Beatles CD’s so you can’t listen to the world’s biggest (but not best) band on your iPod. Unless you go to P2P networks. Or pay to own the songs yet another time.

Hey! How’s this for an idea EMI? Install a programme that rips the songs as MP3’s but adds a iPod-specific code so it can only work with one version of iTunes? Nah, that’d be too much like giving a shit about the customers. One can almost imagine the suits at EMI saying “Nah! We don’t need customers anyway!”.

Nonetheless, it’s all about the music. And what is “Battleship Potemkin”? Sadly, it’s not very good. Stripped of the visuals, “Potemkin” is a 68 minute suite of orchestral semi-techno that sounds dated already. And whilst they already chose a limited palette of sounds, it doesn’t do them any favours. Everything blurs into a generic sludge of soundalike techno, occasionally punctuated by deft orchestration and the odd concise and effective vocal.

A soundtrack should flow and move from one scene to the other like a symphony. This veers around, jumping tempos and keys like a epileptic with Parkinsons. A simple, and effective classical piece fades, and is replaced by the Pet Shop Boys ever-quainter techno that is, unfortunately, easily the most dated and jarring thing about the piece. As soon as a moment of orchestrated promise finishes and the listener is fooled into thinking that maybe something fantastic will happen out of this unlikely colloboration, a standard, and dated, drum thwack and bass grinds on like a old ZX81 set on loops as random percussion falls about and occasionally the Dresden Sinfoniker try to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat.  And occasionally, for minutes at a time, the soundtrack veers away from a monotonous thumping backbeat and rises gracefully to include things that sound oddly like songs about revolution where masterful orchestration meets a subtle, and complimentary electronic backing. Where man and machine meet. For about three and a quarter minutes.

One could listen to this and think that maybe it sounds better when accompanied by the film. Which it undoubtedly does. But not that much better. Standing in a town square with 20,000 people in the rain watching it performed live with an orchestra is one thing, but shorn of the visuals and the people, “Battleship Potemkin” is an interesting concept doomed to abject failure, like communism. It’s almost as bad as 1994’s ill-fated and pathetic 12”-megamix album “Disco2”. Almost. This one has good parts that last about 3 minutes and 17 seconds.

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