Ultravox - Systems of Romance

This was Ultravox's last chance, having previously struck out (in my mind) with their debut, which I think is called David Bowie's Players, and their Vienna which, other than the phenomenal title track, didn't seem like the New Wave statement I was searching for.

Systems of Romance was produced by German Conny Plank, who is better associated with Krautrock and early electronica.  Here, Plank grafts Ultravox's guitar lines onto a more synthetic backdrop.  Indeed, take out the vocals and some of these tracks might as well be a Neu! outtakes.  Basically this is a sound that others would put to better use on some of the best albums of the coming decade.  (Gary Numan in particular credits this album as his Polaris for Pleasure Principle; Julian Cope hints that Numan's 'inspiration' was closer to 'duplication'.) 

So Ultravox finally delivered on the kind of album I was looking for.  It's unlikely to displace anything in my list of favorite New Wave albums, but Systems of Romance works as a bridge between two genres I severely enjoy: German motor-tik Krautrock and New Wave/Romantic.

on deck

Deep Puddle Dynamics - The Taste of Rain...Why Kneel?
Gastr del Sol - The Serpentine Similar
Moebius - Tonspuren
Emitt Rhodes - Emitt Rhodes
Suburban Lawns - Suburban Lawns

dead ends

Adam Ant - Dirk Wears White Sox

This one didn't do much for me. A bit awkward and all over the place. I'm probably done with Adam Ant.

Cluster - Cluster '71

This is beatless, distorted ambient. I need the beats. I'll move on to other Cluster-related albums.

Peter Hammill - The Future Now

This one didn't immediately strike me but I may give it a few more listens. Also, I'll probably check out Hammill's group, the Van der Graaf Generator.

Public Image Ltd. - The Flowers of Romance

Like Metal Box but without the good parts.

David Axelrod - Earth Rot

No, not that David Axelrod. The one who produced and composed some pretty fantastic music in the '60s and '70s, working with Lou Rawls, Cannonball Adderley, the Electric Prunes, and many more. His first two solo albums, Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience, still sound fresh. The break-beat rhythm style he favored became staples for crate-diggers like DJ Shadow; listen to "Holy Thursday" and you'll hear the foundation of the future of hip-hop.

So his third album, Earth Rot, is a bit of a weird turn. Labeled as "a musical statement on the state of the environment," it's basically an album about environmental destruction--the first side is about warnings, the second about the signs themselves. The music here is amazing. It's jazzy, it's funky, the arrangements are amazing, it's all very fluid; parts of it I like even better than his first two albums.

But there's a catch, and that happens to be a choir that delivers the vocals. Lordy, they are annoying. Just when you start to enjoy the music, the choir comes in, singing about the decaying environment: "There! Is! A! Grow! Ing! Rahhh! Tennnnn! Nesssssss!"

I so wish there was an instrumental version of this album; it would be really phenomenal. As it is, the vocals are just too distracting and I can't get past them.



Allmusic characterizes this as 'obscuro'--a label they also applied to Bill Holt's Dreamies. I imagine I'll be checking out a few more obscuro albums in the near future.

on deck

Cluster - Cluster '71
Gruff Rhys - Hotel Shampoo
Nilsson - Pandemonium Shadow Show
Public Image Ltd. - The Flowers of Romance
Ultravox - Systems of Romance

The Mighty Sparrow - Hot & Sweet

I came across the Mighty Sparrow, also known as the King of Calypso, through Van Dyke Parks; the Sparrow sang the first song on Parks' 1972 album Discover America, "Jack Palance." VDP also produced this album (also in 1972) for the Mighty Sparrow, and recently Parks has re-released it on his very own Bananastan label.

Apparently if there's one calypso album to own, this one is a top recommendation. It's not just straight calypso all the way through, as the styles are more diverse than one label can convey. And there's quite a mythology to this album as well; allegedly it was recorded during the middle of a hurricane. At times the studio was running on a backup generator while recording. VDP worked with those sessions and added his own flourishes, resulting in a really fun listening experience--perfect for being stuck inside until the hurricane blows over.

The Wedding Present - Seamonsters / Watusi

I've had The Wedding Present on my computer for years; I probably came to them from a thread on albums produced by Steve Albini, and maybe I found the cover art enticing. I'm relatively sure I had tried these albums before but nothing really stuck. So upon revisiting these and giving them dedicated, relatively focused listens, well, I arrived at the same conclusion: nothing really sticks here.

Seamonsters is the one produced by Albini, and I don't think he did the band any favors. Sure, by placing the guitars and drums at the front of the mix, you get a pretty amazing sound, but since there's not really much range to their sound, the songs tend to get samey. The vocals are mumbled anyway, so Albini relegating them to the background doesn't help. The opening track is impressive for it's slow build; don't expect this much action on the rest of the album, though.



Watusi is a bit more varied and the production is a bit more balanced, bringing some definition to the vocals. Still, I don't expect to really return to this band. It's not that their sound is bad--I just don't find interesting enough for multiple listens.

Toro Y Moi - Causers of This / Underneath the Pines

The hype is strong with this one. Instead of starting with his most recent release, I went to his 2010 debut, Causers of This. On the first few listens, it sounded pleasurable enough--very relaxed, fuzzy. With repeated listens, though, it seemed nothing really emerged from the muck. The initial track, "Blessa" is representative enough.

So I approached his 2011 follow-up expecting more back-up music. Underneath the Pines, though, is a step in a slightly different direction. Most of it sounds reminiscent of indie-electronic bands from prior decades, like Stereolab, Air, and Broadcast. That sound wasn't exactly new when those bands were doing it, so it's not like Toro Y Moi has conjured up a distinctive, new sound. But still, this album is well-produced and at least offers some memorable moments.

The penultimate track, "Good Hold," offers the best example of a memorable moment. It's a short track; in its two and a half minutes, it builds a hazy melody from a dissonant piano loop. Just when things get nice and breezy, the sound becomes muddled, as if you've been plunged underwater and your ears are adjusting to the pressure. There's no drowning here, so you're allowed to surface just in time to catch the coda. The submerged effect doesn't translate too well through speakers, but the effect through headphones will leave you wringing out your ears.

on deck

Adam Ant - Dirk Wears White Sox
David Axelrod - Earth Rot
Peter Hammill - The Future Now
Mighty Sparrow - Hot and Sweet
Toro Y Moi - Underneath the Pine

Ultravox - Ultravox!

Two strikes so far for Ultravox. I'll try Systems of Romance before I call it quits, though. The two Ultravox albums I have tried seem too inconsistent. Most of this album (their debut) sounds like Space Oddity leftovers, so if there's something special here, I'm missing it. Brian Eno is credited as a co-producer on the album, but as far as I can tell, only the closing track "My Sex" has his touch. Compare that track with what Eno did two years prior on Another Green World:

dead ends

Gong - Camembert Electrique
Hawkwind - Space Ritual

I suppose the genre here is space rock. Gong was formed by a co-founder of Soft Machine, which seemed promising. And Hawkwind was a name I saw as an influence of several prog and even (inexplicably) some punk bands. But really both albums are of the wankish prog/hippie jam band variety; I have little tolerance for that.

Nilsson - Son of Schmillson

Most of what I had read about this album characterized it as the indulgent follow-up to his most popular work. That description also fits two of my favorite albums, the Clash's Sandinista! and Todd Rundgren's A Wizard, A True Star. But if Schmillson sounded just as charming as Nilsson looked on the cover of that album--waking up in a bathrobe, hash pipe in hand--then Son of Schmillson sounds like what he probably smelled like later that day. Perhaps I'm going in the wrong direction with his discography; from now on I will only venture into the albums leading up to Schmillson.

'O'Rang - Herds of Instinct

This band is basically the rhythm section of Talk Talk, and the album was 'written' in much the same way as later Talk Talk albums: improvised sessions were recorded then pieced together. But unlike Talk Talk, they didn't really have a rough blueprint prior to the sessions. Also, the sound here is much more diverse than Talk Talk's. Later Talk Talk albums were already treading delicately on a tightrope above a vast pit of pretentiousness; 'O'rang's more esoteric approach is just as audacious but not quite as skillful.

The Art of Noise - Who's Afraid of the Art of Noise?

This is a bit frustrating, but I'm trying to remember how I came across this band. I know I had seen a few of their albums when flipping through the 'punk / new wave' sections of record stores, but unless an album has a very distinct cover and I made a note of it, that's typically not the way I find things that might be worth exploring.

Every now and then you come across something that sounds as if someone made a mistake somewhere and perhaps time and space are not one-way vectors, as surely for an album like this to have existed in 1984 is evidence of a rift in the space-time continuum. It's not that it sounds way ahead of its time; it's just that assigning this to any specific point in time seems arbitrary.

Who's Afraid is best described as a sound collage, two words that normally translate to 'stay away'. But what a mistake that would've been--I wouldn't have heard the full 10-plus minute version of "Moments in Love," a beautiful, chilling opuses of avant-garde synthesized goodness. Of course it has been sampled numerous times since then; even the band made dozens of different versions of the song.

(Ignore the video; it's the only full-length version of the song I could find on YouTube)



But really, most of the album isn't really like that. The remainder is closer to the other big hit from this album, "Close (to the Edit)." By no means is that a bad thing; it's just been copied so much that it's hard to separate the original from the cliche imitations. Witness the fables of the deconstruction:

on deck

Hawkwind - Space Ritual
Nilsson - Son of Schmilsson
Toro Y Moi - Causers of This
Ultravox - Ultravox!
Wedding Present - Watusi

Japan - Adolescent Sex

YES, how did it take so long to come across this. An album from 1978 that straddles funkish punk or glam-rock of the 70s and the synthesized New Romantic movement of the 80s, confidently dipping its essence square on your head. It's as if Nile Rodgers of Chic produced a David Bowie album...except that actually happened in 1983 and it's not as good as Adolescent Sex. Or if Gang of Four sang about sex instead of politics, although Japan does have a song about "Communist China." Maybe I'm not good at analogies. At any rate, this album is swagger incarnate. Witness halfway into "Performance," when those high xylophone notes hit. YES.

Pure X - Pleasure

I want to aim for new music to be about 10% of the albums I'm exploring here. Finding new music is not an easy task, and I find Pitchfork to be unreliable and too scene-happy. So when Pure X's debut album Pleasure was mentioned in a thread about how Pitchfork's Best New Music category seems to skip over the, um, best new music, I thought this might be a good one to start with.

At first glance, there's a lot to like about this album: a swirling, pedal-heavy guitar sound, peaceful vocals that might as well be Sigur Ros, and simple, clean songs. In reviews you'll see mentions of 'beach album' and 'rainy day', two seemingly contradictory moods that nonetheless are simultaneously conjured up here. On repeat listens though, that swirly sound blurs to the point where it's tough to distinguish tracks. It's strange--for an album that rewards headphone use, it still never seems to emerge from the background when played through speakers.

Overall I think favorably of the album and expect it will end up on several year-end lists, but I hope they can expand their palette, as Pleasure is proof that guitar pedals do not an album make.