This Is the Day...This Is the Hour...This Is This!

Music

This Is the Day...This Is the Hour...This Is This! features the band's unique "mesh and mix" of pop culture from the United States and particularly the United Kingdom with "metal riffs", "disco backing" and "monster drum stomps." Throughout the album, there are "intriguing surprises," including multiple "moody goth/post-punk touches" which have been credited as inadvertently predicting "where Massive Attack partially ended up."

Critical reception

Ned Raggett of Allmusic rated the album four and a half stars out of five, saying it was "brilliant" and "underrated", adding that "the band's sound has never been thicker and more detailed, and while the sampling and arranging are always clearly a product of their late-'80s times, like the Beasties did that year with Paul's Boutique, PWEI comes up with its own sharp synthesis." He said that "the brilliant, shuddering singles alone" are worth the album's price, and commended Flood's production skills, saying he "brought his considerable production skills to the fore and helped shape an album that was its own sprawling but self-contained universe." He later described the album as "Pop Will Eat Itself's crowning moment–an exciting, energetic, and very modern English response to the Beastie Boys' own culture-gobbling antics."

Trouser Press were very favourable to the album, calling it an "aurally exciting sonic collage" and concluding that, "bright, vital and bitingly funny, this record teems with invention."

Samples

Preaching to the Perverted

Can U Dig It?

Poison to the Mind

Def.Con.One

Radio P.W.E.I

Not Now James, We're Busy

Wake Up Time! to Die

Personnel

Adapted from Discogs