Magazine - Real Life

Real Life (1978) ****

Abandon all punk all ye who enter here.  After quitting the Buzzcocks after the seminal ("Orgasm Addict") Spiral Scratch EP, singer/lyricist Howard Devoto tilts full shove into art-rock mode:  this sounds more like Genesis on steroids than anything else, with its melo-melo-MELO-dramatic flourishes and smothering weight of synth-heavy keyboards.  A modernist goth Genesis, mind; this is another one of those albums where the music inside more or less accurately reflects the cover.  Better than that, actually, as the cover is pretty amateurishly crappy, isn't it?  Mastermind he may be, Devoto is actually the weak link musically.  His eerie venomous off-key spit suited garage punk to a tee, but on this more melodic fare, his portenteously delivered vocals let down the drama:  it helps to be able to sing when you're being this melodramatic.  Keyboardist Dave Formula dominates, but guitarist John McGeoch (later of Siouxsie & the Banshees and PiL) peels off enough hooky riffs to keep this squarely in the realm of rock not synth-pop, and in post-punk fashion, bassist Barry Adamson has his moodily grunting lines pushed forward in the mix.  Ah, forget what I said, this doesn't sound like Genesis at all unless all keyboard-heavy rock does, that was a lazy comparison:  touchstones are more typical post-punk likes as early Roxy Music and Berlin-era Bowie/Iggy. 

The nine tracks mostly fall into the category of mid-tempo mini-melodramas, with dashes of punky energy.  The lead single and band's most famed track, "Shot By Both Sides," is in fact a recycled Buzzcocks tune co-written with Pete Shelley; the Buzzcocks rewrote it as "Lipstick," and Magazine as this tune, a paranoid bleat of an outsider who gets squeezed from both sides of the ideological/punk gang spectrum and finds himself running "to the outside of everything."  It's simpler, punkier, and more direct than most of the other tracks, and generally the better for it, though it doesn't overshadow the other material:  it's a consistent album of evenly flowing quality and stylistic unity.  "Recoil," is another frenetic punk blast, and the closer, "Parade," also sticks out by virtue of being a ballad, with the hook-chorus line, "Sometimes I forget that we're supposed to be in love."  That icily modernist emotional detachment sets the tone for this debut and pretty much the rest of Magazine's entire career (which would get even icier on the followup LP), whether it's the quirkily cold sci-fi hooks of the opener "Definitive Gaze," or the retelling of the JFK assassination from an omniscient third-party point of view in "Motorcade."  The carnivalistic waltz of "The Great Beautician in the Sky," may come across as a little hokey, but it's followed by perhaps their defining slice of mid-tempo building drama, "The Light Pours Out of Me," which is oddly rousing in a detachedly anthemic way even if I couldn't have the faintest clue of telling you what it's about.  As one of the founding musical cornerstones of that vaguely but easily defined genre known as post-punk, this is only a shade less essential than the first three Wire albums and much more listenable than what John Lydon was pantomiming at the time.  The definitive gaze of this darkly gothic, melodramatic synth-rock works its mope-rock hypnosis compulsively and compellingly.

The New Pornographers - Electric Version

Electric Version (2003) ****

My last review of this band was pretty silly, but this is a silly band that's impossible to take seriously, like They Might Be Giants with bigger amps.  Three years on the New Pornos still sound the same, which is to say they still sound like Weezer, but the good Weezer, the Weezer that had stuck with the same style and songs of their debut and never delivered the crapfest that's been their career since their first two albums.  If only someone had assassinated Rivers Cuomo in 1996, the world would be a sunnier place.  Ooo, they've just released a State Farm Insurance jingle!  I'm not kidding, Weezer just sold that shit OUT!  But back to Neko Case, who I and most North American het males with a pulse want to fuck, and a bunch of other Canuck douchebag dudes nobody even bothers to remember their names or gives a shit.  Yeah, go ahead, NAME a single OTHER member of this band off the top of your head without consulting Altrockapedia.  Can't do it.  Didn't think so.  Also, in post-Pixies Slacker-Generation-XYZ fashion, the words are of no great importance, they're just there as part of the sonic elegance even when the lyrics are trying to convey something meaningful, they still amount to meaninglessness.  Which is a roundabout way to say that I can't remember any of the song titles unless you shove the CD coaster in front of my nose when I'm not using the back of it to snort coke like the monkey on the front.  Just kidding, I've never snorted coke.  But I have watched other people snort it, so maybe I've accidentally received some of that secondhand contact high I keep hearing people go off about as an excuse to ban cigarettes and alcohol from pubs.  Might explain this review.

Anyway, songs.  This album has songs.  Songs on it.  Songs played on electrical instrumentation, as you can title by the title, by a sextet (tee hee, I just said 'sex'), in a modern rock style, sung in modern indie rock fashion by soulless hipster nerds who sound like they've had their balls cut off by their emasculating girlfriends, like that pussy-whipped asshole in Arcade Fire.  The guitar tone never varies that it's a beyond orgasmically pleasurable relief when for once the guitars CHANGE and "Loose Translation," starts off with some strummy ACOUSTICS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!  LIKE SHIT WOW MAN.  The songs are all good but the song quality dips towards the end of the disc, but I'm not sure if that's because the songs themselves are actually weaker or my ears have fatigued on the style.  I suspect that latter as much as the former.  Like I said in my last review, why bother reviewing this track by track when all the songs are in the same style and vein, and by vein I do not mean that in either a heroin or vampire way.  Heroin sucking vampires?  No, the New Pornographers seem like comfy Canadian yuppies from the suburbs.  That doesn't make the New Pornographers any less great.  You're not going to criticize the Ramones' debut for all sounding the same, are you?  Not when all the songs on the first Ramones LP all sound so bloodyfantasticGREAT.

You like bubblegum?  Of course you do.  You wouldn't be human if you didn't, you'd be some sort of sick psychopath who needs to be isolated from society for his own good and that of the community.  Here's the odd thing I do with bubblegum, is that I don't chew it and spit it out, I bite off little chunks and chew it and swallow it.  Yeah, I eat bubblegum.  It tastes good.  And no, despite what your momma told you, your stomach will not explode.  That only happens if you mix Pop Rocks and Pepsi.  The New Pornographers are a band that Pop Rocks but they don't Pepsi.  This may be the worst review I've written so far, or the best.  It's so easy.  Somehow, when you just type out a bunch of rambling stream of consciousness, the words just POUR OUT.  Just ask Lester Bangs or Mark Prindle!

Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark - Best of

The Best of OMD (1988) ***

OMD's career trajectory soars to the highs of synth-pop's chillily lush New Romanticism and grinds its wheel in the mud with the genre's limitations.  Their debut single, "Electricity," must have been disarming in 1979, one of the first salvos of a fresh new synthesizer-based sound striking for its complete absence of guitars, unusual at the time for the pop-rock format.  Exciting in the early '80s to many, nearly thirty years on most synth-pop sounds thin and dated; still, early tracks such as the even more beguilingly melodic, "Messages," and "Enola Gay," (their first U.K. hit) possess a lush elegance that remains to charm.  The problem is, there's a fine balance between pop and artiness, and after getting the art pretensions out of their system with not one but two in a row singles concerning Joan of Arc ("Joan of Arc," "Maid of Orleans"), OMD made a beeway straight for the charts with cringeable results.  The programmed drums that are mixed way too high to pound annoyingly away in the mix in "Tesla Girls," and the idiotic dance-floor chorus of "Locomotion," (yes, it bears something of a similarity to Little Eva's equally stupid and obnoxious early '60s hit) flash the least likeable qualities of '80s music.  Their early singles shined with cold reserved grace, but while they kept the cold reserve they lost the grace, as they progressed from the Wire-y early Human League to the yuppie Jam & Lewis era Human League.   At the '80s mid-point they regained a bit of grace and learned how to write heavenly pop hits, as the sumptuous "So in Love," and swooningly swooping "If You Leave," remain two of the era's most crushingly romantic and memorable pop singles, with "Secret," and "Dreaming," a league or so behind but still quite chocolately delectable.  But, alas, such smidgens of highlights from their latter days are not quite enough to cancel out the CD ending with a pair of six-minute 12" remixes of garishly subpar subpop fare as "We Love You," (unrelated to and much inferior to the Stones') and "Le Femme Accident" (writing song titles in grammar school French makes you seem so much more sophisticated).  Look, an extended dance remix makes sense when you are on the dancefloor, but drawing out brittle 3 minute pop tunes to twice their bloated length with tacky extended drum solos, is not the sort of crap to invite into your home stereo.  When OMD were at their dreamy, heart-fluttering best, they bested Flock of Duran Twins at the party of '80s pop by effeminate Englishmen with Vidal Sassoon haircuts who shall effortlessly become gay icons.  That best happens all too rarely, somewhere between only a third to half the time on this disc. 

The Soft Boys - Underwater Moonlight

Underwater moonlight sets the body free

Underwater Moonlight (1980) ****

Talk about self-conscious.  Frontman Robyn Hitchcock has spent his entire career trying very, very hard to fit the role of the English eccentric, trying to out-weird Syd Barrett - but he doesn't succeed, because you're aware that Hitchcock is archly pushing the envelope with deliberately oddball metaphors and imagery that he's carefully chosen for lyrics.  His songs are just too well-constructed and his lyrics just make too much clever, linear sense to convey genuine disjointed bent madness the way that the shambles of Syd Barrett's or Roky Erickson's solo albums do.  What this amounts to is that the New Psychedelia, this touchstone of the Paisley Underground, isn't particularly psychedelic or druggy at all - it's merely a rip-roaring gem of a punky power-pop album, ragged and jangly in all the right places.  The weirdness comes not so much in the music, which self-consciously touches on '60s hippiedom in only a few places (the fake sitars on "Positive Vibrations," are as annoying as the smarmy title), but in the lyrics, which are positively Freudian and as such no doubt heartfelt, if humorously and quirkily written as well as they are sincere.

Robyn suffers from that most common of mental maladies, a mild sexual neurosis.  The key track is "Kingdom of Love," which begins with Hitchcock smoothly delivering softly sung romantic lyrics appropriate to the title, before the band suddenly, savagely segues into the chorus as Hitchcock rips out lyrics quaking with the fear of pregnancy:  "You've been laying eggs under my skin / Now they're hatching under my chin.....All those tiny insects look like you!"  Getting pregnant is sort of an invasive Alien infestation, isn't it?  Elsewhere he wonders why people bother to get together when all they're going to do is settle down and breed.  OK, so you can say the man has some committment issues.  Other song titles such as the sarcastic "I'm in the Mood," blues parody, "I Got the Hots," make it clear that mocking the idea of love and romance is going to be Hitchcock's forte, at least on this album.  Do "Old Pervert," "Insanely Jealous,"  and "I Wanna Destroy You," make that even more crystal clear?  The thing is, Hitchcock offers such fare with a wry, dry humorous touch that leaves the listener grinning and nodding along, "Right-o, the old boy he does have a bit of point, does he - romance can be such a silly notion if you try to look at it analytically."

Not that anyone would bother listening if the songs weren't great.  "I Wanna Destroy You," opens with a searing scald of high-density p-p-power p-p-pop!, and "Tonight," an ode to the pleasures of stalking, is even more anthemically soaringly catchy.  "Queen of Eyes," allegedly inspired R.E.M. to imitate the Byrds via secondhand osmosis, as probably did the title track that majestically closes the album with its ultra-memorable chorus hook.  Of the ten tracks on the original LP, only the instrumental, "You'll Have to Go Sideways," which is far too repetitive to go anywhere sans vocals, and the flat-out ugly Beefheart blues, "Old Pervert," weigh the proceedings down. 

But wait, you get 26 bonus tracks on the 2-disc reissue!  Which isn't quite the bargain it seems.  "He's a Reptile," a blatant steal from the Crystals' "He's a Rebel," was a fine non-LP single, and Syd Barrett's "Vegetable Man," a choice cover.  After that it gets shaky.  The remaining seven bonus tracks on disc one are all outtakes of varying quality, with some more polished than others.  It's easy to see why none made the cut to graduate to the original LP, but they are enjoyable tracks of the second-rank if you happen to love the LP and want more of the same in a similar style.  The second disc, however, is a total waste.  It's entitled "...And How It Got There" and is merely a collection of rough demos from the studio sessions.  Why anyone would need four run-throughs of "Old Pervert," is beyond me; it's a disc that even hardcore fans will be hard-pressed to listen to more than once or twice.  Oh well, it's not as it's all herded on a separate disc and you can ignore it, can't you?  So just play the glorious first disc and pretend disc #2 doesn't exist, which I've been doing for years.  Oh, and this was the second and final Soft Boys album during their original lifetime (they reformed briefly in the early '00s), as they broke up shortly after this release.  Guitarist Kimberly Rew formed Katrina & the Waves who hit the charts with the most annoyingly, obnoxiously catchy song of all time, "Walking on Sunshine".  Robyn Hitchcock went on to a long and illustrious solo career, which I may or may not get around to reviewing someday - but nothing he's released since matches this peak of power-poppy punky neo-psychedelia.  He only forgot one of the three P's - where's the prog?  Where are the prawns?

The Teardrop Explodes - Kilimanjaro

Kilimanjaro (1980) ***1/2

Julian Cope, one of the most interesting rock personalities ever, has for the most part been more interesting as a drug-addled Druid-obsessed personality than for his actual music.  Though he claims his ouvre as Krautrock-influenced modern psychedelia, what this debut (and most of his subsequent albums, as well) amounts to is shiny, bouncy '60s influenced pop.  Not that that's a bad thing, mind you - these are nearly all some catchy tuneage.  The core drums/bass/guitar/keyboards quartet slather extra horns all over the place, on practically half the tracks, for a bright, colorful swirl that's brassy-poppy and soul-punchy.  It's all catchily entertaining if much more lightweight than Cope probably intended; his ripe baritone melodramatically bellows lyricisms that are meant to sound deep but are easily discerned as little more than the teenage scribblings about teenage romance appropriate to a boy barely out of his teens when these songs were recorded.  "Comic books are all I read," Cope admits at one point, and I believe him.  It's a refreshingly consistent and reasonably diverse debut, with each track standing out as individually memorable piece.  Tracks like "Second Head," and "Went Crazy," with their bubbling bass lines and tribal thumping, showcase the rhythm section effectively, while "Bouncing Babies," soars on a ethereally punchy keyboard ascendation, and the opener, "Ha Ha, I'm Drowning," carries the horn section as its musical core.  "Treason," and "Sleeping Gas," sound like the obvious picks for A-sides; the former an urgently pleading pop number to a girl that Cope is confused to declare his troth to (or something), the latter simply chronicling the confusion of a drug-induced euphoria (duh-err, just look at the title, it's an ode to nitrous oxide, dummy).   Needless to say, "Treason," is bouncily melodic and heartachingly upbeat, while "Sleeping Gas," drifts prettily in a fading in-out haze.  Not all of these songs register (I could do without the snoozy "Poppies in the Field," about guess what, and "Books," is rather hectoring), but hey, here's a sleeper - "Thief of Baghdad," buried near the end, marches into my room with full-on psuedo-psychedelized, psuedo-Orientalized bliss.  This album is most likely the highlight of Cope's career, for which the journey of 1,000 trips on acid begins with but a single dozen steps.

The Fall - The Early Years

The Early Years, 1977-1979 (1981) ****

This is their best-ever collection of material but you don't really need this, as nearly all of the songs have by now been scattered around as bonus tracks on reissues (Live at the Witch Trials in its expanded form now possesses around half of these).  But it's nice to have these early singles collected in one place, and if I do want to hear such a string of death-defying classics from "Psycho Mafia," to "Second Dark Age," I'd rather listen to them all in a row here than digging around the bonus discs of Dragnet and Grotesque et. al.  The first salvo in the packet is the three-song 1978 debut single, A-side consisting of "Bingo Masters Breakout," in which Mark E. Smith's intriguingly enigmatic collection of imagery that leads the way, creates the Fall style that can best be described as Dylan goes to Hell.  But this CD opens not with the A-side, but its B-side, "Repetition," a novelty goof that nevertheless lays down the band's aesthetic statement of purpose as firmly and emphatically as any band has done so on a debut:  no time for boring fancy music, the Fall are dedicated to the three R's, the three R's, these are the three R's, repetition, repetition, repetition.   But this CD opens not with the A-side, but its B-side, "Repetition," a novelty goof that nevertheless lays down the band's aesthetic statement of purpose as firmly and emphatically as any band has done so on a debut:  no time for boring fancy music, the Fall are dedicated to the three R's, the three R's, these are the three R's, repetition, repetition, repetition.  But this CD opens not with the A-side, but its B-side, "Repetition," a novelty goof that nevertheless lays down the band's aesthetic statement of purpose as firmly and emphatically as any band has done so on a debut:  no time for boring fancy music, the Fall are dedicated to the three R's, the three R's, these are the three R's, repetition, repetition, repetition.  The other B-side to that 1978 screed of purpose arrives here as track #3 and is considerably more conventional than the preceding two tracks, but if anything the near-conventional pop-punk anthem, "Psycho Mafia," (about Smith's teenage gang of ne'erdowells) is even better.

Who makes the Nazis?  Why were UK youth in the late '70s so obsessed with the Third Reich?  "Various Times," introduces the first Fall in slow grind mode, and it's about working at a death camp.  "I hate the prisoners, I hate the officers, I hate them all."  There's punk for you, songs about SS camp guards who hate everybody.  "It's the New Thing," disjointedly bounces and stop-starts constantly for a musically jarring effect,  so I suppose it does live up to its title.  Nobody sounded like that in 1978, did they?  Well, nobody sounds remotely like the Fall today, either.  They're inimitable.  They're ineffable.  They're indescribable.  They're indestructable.  They are the Fall-uh.  Next up they deliver their first example of Fall rockabilly from hell, and perhaps their best in the genre (one of the several genres they might as well have invented because they are the only practitioners):  "Rowche Rumble," a pro and anti-drugs song that condemns the hypocrisy of doctors prescribing bored housewives valium while outlawing speed and grass.  Oh sure, the Rolling Stones covered the same territory a decade earlier with "Mother's Little Helper," but the Fall do it a hundred times better.  OK, not that much.  Not even a dozen times better, actually.  Maybe once and a fractionality better.  But still better. 

I have no idea why "Dice Man," and "Psykick Dancehall," are on here, seeing as they both appeared as album tracks on 1979's Dragnet.  At least "Psykick Dancehall," differs fractionally with a spicier disco beat, which only amounts to them using more of a salsa snare on the drum track, which they probably downloaded from one of those pre-set rhythm tracks that cheap, crappy synthesizers used to cheaply and crappily offer back in the day.  Actually, cheap synths still do - does anybody actually turn those programmed drum tracks on and try to play along with them?  Why would anyone want to?  "Dice Man," on the other hand, sounds not a whit different from the Dragnet version, and thus is superfluously redundant.  "Second Dark Age," was another excellent single, apparently about Muslim women forced to wear veils or whatnot, with its A-side or B-side or whatever, "Fiery Jack," a rowchely rumbling number celebrating the life of a middle-aged pisshead who just burns, burns, burns.  From this one can gauge that Mark E. Smith's life ambition was to become a 45 year old barfly, a feat he finally achieved in 2002 by turning 45.   The getting-ready-for-a-pub-crawl "Stepping Out," and the anti-authoritarian, "Last Orders," were recorded live at some later date and are excitingly belligerent and punky.  And that wraps it up....oh wait, I forgot to mention "In My Area."  It's pretty.  No, really, it is, it's a nice little mid-tempo pop ballad, if you want to give it a stretch and call it that.  It is pop by Fall standards, for what that's worth.

Now to wrap up, I already said it before in the first line:  this may or may not be their best set of songs all collected in one place in a row, but you don't really need this album because you can find all the individual tracks on other albums.  But it's a nice place to start.  Oh, to hell with it, just start here anyway.  You might as well start from the very beginning.  After all, you are going to listen to every single of the Fall's 30+ studio albums they've released in the past three decades, aren't you?

Hall and Oates - Private Eyes

Private Eyes (1981) ****

Topping the charts with their blue-eyed state-of-the-'80s soul style with the previous year's Voices, on the followup Oates & Hall perfect that style with even more artistic and commercial success.  The title track may work a similar piano-pop new wave vein as "Kiss On My List," but it's arguably even catchier, adding a naggingly sleek guitar hook to the bounce.  And in contrast to Voices, the material is much more consistent, with no real low points:  Oates' "Mano a Mano," may be cheese but it's winsomely likeable cheese, and the closer "Some Men," may be a slightly irritating rocker, but only slightly, and those two songs are really as bad as it gets, which is to say not bad at all.  "I Can't Go For That (No Can Do)," was the other #1 hit, and since I was still in the first grade in 1981 I have no idea whether that song coined the annoying catchphrase or merely copped it.  Either way, it's slick mainstream R&B that's the rare bird that gives slick mainstream R&B a good name, with its slow silky-grind funk groove and insinuating chorus.  It's easy to see why H&O had the knack for hitting the charts with every single, as they not only know their way around a hook but understand the importance of a solid chorus that falls on the right line between oversubtle and overbearing, memorable but not hitting-the-head-with-a-mallet so, as too much Top 40 pop does.  Geniuses they are not, but there's a little too much of the ineffable magic fairy dust that's sprinkled over the most transcendent pop to claim that they're mere craftsmen.  Hall has a bright but shallow but undeniable talent; let's call him a lightweight mini-genius and be done with it, agreed?

The brightly shining synthesizer hook of "Did It In a Minute," scored the boys another hit, a considerably smaller one than the two #1's, and it's one of those rock solid products of sheer pop craftsmanship where every song sounds like a potential single.  The album sticks closer to the pop-soul than pop-rock side of the duo for the most, though Oates' "Friday Let Me Down," is a ringingly soaring slice of pure power-pop that wouldn't sound out of place on a Shoes or Knack album.  Nearly every song has some sort of winning combo of hookcraft and melodic insinuation to emerge forth on the right side of a pleasure.  They may not have made another album before or since quite as consistent (some swear by their '70s albums, but those are all too hit-and-miss in comparison), but for once they really delivered the goods with a record that's as entertaining as mainstream '80s pop gets.  That's a recommendation, BTW.  Not a super-strong recommendation, since I only gave it four not five stars.  Let's face it, mainstream '80s pop by definition has an artistic glass ceiling.