Friday Fivehead: Our Daughters Wedding, Landscape, Cut Copy, Moby, and More Buggles!
April 10th, 2008
Yowza, yowza, PEGRITZ(.com)!/The New Pollution listeners! Here cometh another Friday Fivehead, and this week we’re spanning decades of music here, folks: we start in 1980, leap to the Dawn of the 21st Century, then turn around and zip right back the early ’80s…because back then literally all music was Wicked Awesome. But no matter how far apart in time these albums are, they all share one particular characteristic in common: they seamlessly mix electronic sounds with traditional instrumentation to produce dance-pop so goddamn infectious it will invade your DNA so that your kids will all be born wearing jelly bracelets, Hammer pants, and Day-Glo fishnets. Seriously, people—a scientist told me, so it must be true! Like, his newborn son came born wearing a Men At Work t-shirt after he spent six weeks listening to Boy Kill Boy, so…do be warned, mmmkay?*
Let’s get started with Our Daughters Wedding. I recently discovered that you can score hundreds of oldskool New Wave albums on Amazon.com. Many sadly forgotten acts like Polyrock, EBN-OZN, New Musik, and, of course, Our Daughters Wedding have had their music remastered and re-released on CD…and you can get every damn one of those CDs on Amazon for ridiculously low prices! At any rate, Nightlife: The Collection is a sort-of “Greatest Hits” compilation that gathers up material from all of the singles and albums ODW ever put out, remasters it all so the sound is absolutely pristine, and offers it up to you at a damn good price. If you like classic synthpop full of weird, awkward-sounding lyrics, lush analog synth bleeps and bloops, and live bass and drums, then ODW is definitely for you. In some ways, they sound a bit like Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark when that band was first starting out, but Our Daughters Wedding has a darker, stranger angle that OMD: even seemingly-straightforward dance songs like “Love Machine” have a subtle menace to them, a sneering cynicism that is pure post-punk. Most folks only know one or two ODW songs—either “Lawnchairs” or “Target For Life”—from various New Wave compilations…but trust me: those are not their only two good songs. This collection is jam-packed with jams of a most bootyrocking order. Get those skinny ties out and get ready to hit the dancefloor in your livingroom when you get this CD!
Landscape is another sadly forgotten, but monumentally entertaining, synthpop group from the early ’80s. Best known for their insanely-catchy single “Norman Bates”, Landscape was actually a rather prolific group that released three albums and quite a few singles, and had been touring since the mid-’70s as a rock/jazz/punk experimental outfit. Eventually, though, they began to flesh out their sound with synthesizers. This jazz-influenced electropop sound was most prominently featured on their second album From the Tea-Rooms of Mars to the Hell Holes of Uranus. The version of From the Tea-Rooms that currently appears on Amazon is not their second album, alas, but a best-of collection that collates great material from the entire span of their recording career. Jaunty analog synths, buzzing basslines, fuzzy synth-percussion, and vocoded lyrics all slam together in their music to create a very unique sound that lies somewhere between Herbie Hancock and Nintendo soundtracks. “Einstein A-Go-Go”, their second biggest hit after “Norman Bates”, is a bouncy number that has been used so many times in commercials and TV shows about technology that you’re almost guaranteed to recognize it from somewhere the second you hear it kick in. Nonetheless, if you like melodic, yet still experimental and twitchy synthpop with a very pronounced post-punk edge to it, then Landscape are your boys. But don’t blame me if, after listening to “Norman Bates” six times in a row, you can’t stop saying, “My name is Norman Bates / I’m just a normal guy (doo-doo dooo)”!
Now it’s time to leap forward two decades to find Cut Copy offering up their second album In Ghost Colours. Though the members of Cut Copy probably weren’t even born when New Wave was riding high, their music captures the unique “synths-and-real-instruments” sound so brilliantly, you’d swear they have a time machine and spend their weekends hanging out with Thomas Dolby in 1981. Their music is so beautifully lush, with multi-layered synths, guitars, and pumping beats, that it’s easy to lose yourself in a state of trance-like ecstasy on the dancefloor when “Feel the Love” with its unearthly, vocoded chorus kicks in. Cut Copy’s particular brand of New Wave synthpop adapts the lushness of Violator-era Depeche Mode with the funky glee of Our Daughters Wedding and Industry. The songs blend together seamlessly on the album, but it’s always clear when a new track has started, because despite the mingling of intros/outros, each song is quite distinct. This is most definitely not an “every-track-sounds-alike” album, but a dense, lovely collection of modern New Wave songs that soar on their notable melodies and their unrelenting energy. And like all the best synthpop, their lyrics evince a certain shoegazing melancholy while the music and beats swell majestically all around as if they’re trying to save their singer’s life.
And then there’s Moby. When I first heard of Moby in 1991 or ‘92 (via the Cool World soundtrack), Moby was one of the guys at the forefront of the “techno” craze, making music that was edgy, jarring, and entirely artificial. I liked techno for about ten minutes, but quickly tired of it because it’s so relentlessly artificial and repetitive that it eventually sounds like you’re just listening to an old modem squelch when you’ve dialed up CompuServe. Fortunately, Moby has grown over the years since then, and has put out a number of consistently enjoyable albums that feature a more full array of instrumentation yet still maintain ol’ Mobe’s sense of producing a great dance song. His newest album, Last Night, is a rock-solid chunk of dance music with a very pronounced disco influence (hence the first single, “Disco Lies”). Whereas Moby’s last two albums have been rather relaxed, adventurous affairs, Last Night is all about last night at the club. Diva vocals, swirling strings, buzzing bass, and thumping beats all slam together to form a giant audial disco ball that casts shattered reflections of a hundred different layered sounds onto your ears as you move to the unstoppable beat. But this is definitely not techno. Not by any means. This album is pure synthpop, and would’ve been welcome in dance clubs all over the world in 1982.
And, finally, if last week’s feature on (The) Buggles‘ first album was enough to get your curious about the band, then here’s a review of their legendary, almost-impossible-to-find second album from 1981, Adventures in Modern Recording. Unless you want to pay over $100 for the Japanese import of Adventures in Modern Recording, then you’re going to have a hard time getting hold of this album, aren’t you? Nope. Some dedicated Buggles fan has made a torrent for the latest reissues of The Age of Plastic and Adventures in Modern Recording! Now you, too, can experience Trevor Horn’s final Buggles effort, a collection of pure synthpop tunes that are literally all over the map. “I Am A Camera”, the only single from the album, is the most straightforward synthpop song on the album, and is so filled with hooks you’d think it’s a tacklebox. The other songs, like “Beatnik”, “Vermillion Sands” (a tribute to sci-fi author Robert Heinlein) and “Rainbow Warrior”, take more experimental approaches toward the concept of the “pop” song, and as such may be a little more challenging to folks who just want straightforward jams like “Video Killed the Radio Star.” But fear not! Never once does this album become too experimental: each song is built from a flawless pop melody, and the vocals are all clear as crystal and catchy enough to sing along to. This is a mighty album, and a true lost gem. Do yourself a favor and grab the torrent so you can enjoy the pillowy synths of “I Am A Camera” and the alienating Moog bassline of “Rainbow Warrior” and the vitriolic beauty of “Lenny.” This is one that just cannot be missed.
And there it is, folks—another Friday Fivehead in the can. Next week, stay tuned for the previously-promised review of Dragonforce’s blistering power metal masterpieces Sonic Firestorm and Inhuman Rampage, plus another Friday Fivehead stuffed with more mutant music and superpowered jams!
*PEGRITZ(.com)!/The New Pollution accepts no responsibility for genetic mutations resulting from the reading, appreciation, or ingestion of this blog item.
Technorati Tags: music,review,synthpop,new wave,our daughters wedding,nightlife,landscape,from the tea-rooms of mars to the hell holes of uranus,cut copy,in ghost colours,moby,last night,buggles,adventures in modern recording
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BTW: I'm now complete obsessed with Warhammer 40K. Between reading every damn book from Black Library that I can get my hands on and playing Dawn of War all damn day long, it's amazing I have time to listen to ANY new music, but, hey...the Galaxy needs to be made safe for the God-Emperor, damn it!
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- Dave
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