The Time – Pandemonium

Great album but a subpar pressing. Too much music forum one disc: the volume is very low, dynamics are shy and surface noise is present.

Excellent album ! Probably the best one of « The Time » !

The songs are top-notch, but it's over 60 minutes of music crammed onto one record. That's way too much.

Great album...All the funky cuts are great. All the heavy cuts are great.

Even the balled "Donald Trump (Black Version)" is good!

Something tells me the song "Chocolate" was recorded years before this album's release however.

Most excellent review. The 2011 album Condensate album under the Original 7ven moniker was much closer to catching the original groups "The Time" signature sound.

This album was a fantastic swan song for one of the best funk bands of all time, The Time. Even from the front cover of the LP, it means business. The mix of vibrant colors, the way the album name is written, and the band being placed in a skillet, you know the LP has to match its outer funkiness. And it matches it in spades. The Dreamland introduction is funny, and the second record, "Pandemonium" comes in with it's funky chest out. The drum beat is pulsating, and it has a funky rhythm guitar with nice keyboards. The highlights of the album include the title track, an underrated song for "Best Funk Song of All-Time", "Jerk Out", the aristocratically player "Donald Trump (Black Version)", the hilarious and so James Brown esque funk bomb, "Chocolate", and what I see as a sequel to "Gigolos Get Lonely Too", the Monte Moir penned "Sometimes I Get Lonely". It's an album that I play all the time, and it is the unfortunately oft-forgotten Time album. It's fantastic, funky, and fun.

Being that this was the first "Time" album to follow the 'pandemonium' surrounding "Purple Rain" ("Ice Cream Castles" came out in 1984 during the "Purple Rain" era) a long six years earlier, there were very high expectations for this album to do well. Problem wasn't a lack of talent --- even Morris Day's 'persona' still worked with the new material --- the problem was too much talent. When last we saw The Time together they were considered one of the best live acts in the country, even prior to "Purple Rain." The film, while making their characters out to be the arch nemeses of The Kid (Prince), allowed them to show off their talent and the ' individual careers took off. Morris Day had a couple of albums that were hits... Jellybean Johnson and Monte Moir started successful careers producing and mixing other artists... St. Paul co-lead the band The Family... Jesse Johnson had an incredibly successful career with his first three albums, both with and without his "Revue"... and of course Jimmy Jam & Terry Lewis went on to, well, become Jimmy Jam & Terry Lewis, producing more hits than you can count.

Point being, after six years of separate individual successes, when The Time got back together again, they weren't The Time. "Jerk Out," the lead single and easily best track on the album of course featured Day on lead vocals, but the remaining elements of the song - what were part of one complete unit before, were separate and distinct elements, i.e. Jesse Johnson's way too short guitar solo. The remaining tracks on the album, with the exception of "Chocolate" and "Donald Trump (Black Version)" are three to five minute snapshots of a band trying to find that intangible X factor they used to have as a group, but realizing that the X factor they had was really with a lowercase 'x' compared to the uppercase 'X-factors' in that each member had realized they had in themselves and grown into on their own.