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The lack of commercial success for this group is criminal. Don't take my word for it: go read any of the reviews from when this album came out, and check out what the music critics had to say about them. Or read the comments sections of their songs on youtube. People who like this group REALLY like this group. You can't find a critical review, from the professional crticis or the fans. The reviewers all throw around words like "unique" and "eclectic," but that doesn't really come close to capturing the magic of this outfit. Rise Robots Rise didn't just combine styles and influences. They created their own musical atmosphere and vocabulary. They are unique the way Pink Floyd or the Grateful Dead or Fleetwod Mac are unique. You'd never mistake any of those bands for anyone else, and you'd never mistake Rise Robots Rise for anyone else, either.Rise Robots Rise are what you get when Frank Zappa, A Tribe Called Quest, Steely Dan, Prince, and Nine Inch Nails are each on their own tour buses, and then those buses all crash into each other real bad, and then the crash survivors all have babies together somehow, and then those babies grow up, go to art school in NYC, and start a music collective which blends their tastes as young adults in the 90s with the influences of all their dead forbears who were killed in that horrible crash.This band is it. One of the greatest things to come out of the 90s music scene. They just never got the right breaks, business-wise, and I suspect it was too costly to keep a project like this afloat. They got signed to TVT Records not long after Nine Inch Nails released their first album, and the story I heard was that TVT threw their limited budget behind NIN once "Pretty Hate Machine" started blowing up. That left no money for sending Rise Robots Rise out on tour to support the first album.There were a few main singer/songwriters and a core of singers and musicians who played on most of their songs on their two studio albums, and a long list of guest musicians on both albums. RRR reportedly put on some raucous live shows in clubs like Manhattan's legendary Wetlands venue, incorporating what was known in the early 90s as "mixed media" components.They were decades ahead of the curve where live shows are concerned, incorporating computerized music tracks with live playing and using complex video and lighting systems that woked with the computerized tracks. Every club in every city now has computer-controlled sound and lighting systems, but it wasn't very common in 1990/91. In those days, most clubs had a soundboard and a lighting board, and humans had to sit there and operate them while bands were playing. The Robots would have had to bring all of the necessary computer/light/sound gear themselves, plus the people to move it, set it up, and keep it running, plus the 8 or 10 musicians on stage. That's a lot. It's especially a lot for college students in Manhattan in the 90s, when all that gear was expensive, computers and other gear were bulky and weighed a ton, and moving things around the city was a huge pain in the ass under the best of circumstances.I was a club owner/promoter in Tampa when I first heard their debut album. Sadly, I heard it about two years after it was released, and it seems as if it was too late. We reached out to see if we could book them down here (we knew full well we'd lose money if they brought even half their live show, but we were quite willing to do so , but we couldn't get a response from any of the contacts listed in their liner notes. They made two albums back to back, maybe a year or so apart, and that was it. Nothing more from them in 30 years. Like I said, it seems that a bad record deal left them without financial support for going on tour. That's tragic, because based on the few video clips I've seen of them playing live, they probably would have destroyed audiences in college towns all over the country instead of fading into obscurity.