Writing

These are iTunes reviews that I decided were worth shar­ing outside of that propri­et­ary vertical music box.

A romantic paean in post-industrial Britain

Human League: Travelogue (1979)

Many reviews, both at the time, and retro­spect­ively, are dismissive or indif­fer­ent to a great deal of the mater­ial that formed the “first gener­a­tion” of the Human League. I’d like to think that it’s just because this music provided an uncom­fort­ably grim view of romance that was too close to true during the Winter of Discontent.

Hearing it today, Travelogue creeps me out at times, but it’s unmis­tak­ably bril­liant, and I can only imagine getting shivers if I had heard it in late 1979. Not only were its elec­tron­ics gurg­ling and grind­ing yet chip­per and concise, it captured a band split­ting apart, yet head­ing in the same direc­tion — both the Heaven 17 debut and Human League redux that appeared less than a year after seemed almost embar­rassed at their former dark­ness. Both Oakley and Ware totally over­did it in trying to appear fresh and pleas­ant in the decade to come, and this album clearly shows that trans­ition at work.

Why they aban­doned their darker mood never sat well with me — I’d like to think it was because they wanted girl­friends who’d stick around. So I consider this the last “crit­ical” Human League album — honestly, their first two albums and Dare! pretty much sum up the band’s total impact on British music.

“Marianne”, not part of the original album, stands alone as The Human League’s most heart­break­ing song.  I still get a lump in my throat when I hear it, because I know that for someone out there, that girl “runnning around the garden in [her] mother’s shoes” was as real as anything and still must be.

“Dreams of Leaving” is a frantic, anger­ing, trying piece of confes­sional poetry that combines soft sequen­cers with AM feed­back to excel­lent effect.  “Boys and Girls” is a virtu­ally drum­less synthpop oper­etta that feels like an altern­ate universe Queen song mixed with a taunt­ing children’s rhyme, and stands out as an example of exactly what they stood to both lose (dark­ness) and gain (bright­ness) in the years to come.  There are a few true throwaway songs, but the high­lights more than outweigh any rough patches.

You have to seri­ously commend a band for even trying to to do things like what was done in “Travelogue”, the fact that they did it at all proves that today’s music has little left to conquer.  Yet this band was ready to dissolve and move on, for they were in a hurry to lead the next decade’s trend of pop — as Mr. Oakey himself sang in “Boys and Girls,” “with your looks you could go far, but better watch the calen­dar” — indeed.  After listen­ing to this album, you instantly real­ize that he’s talk­ing about himself in the next decade.

The sweet spot for Vince Clarke

Yazoo — Upstairs at Eric’s (1982)

For those who don’t abso­lutely love the sacchar­ine, polished sound of Erasure, there’s really only one Vince Clarke-penned work that stands alone in terms of getting it right. Upstairs at Eric’s has become almost forgot­ten because the related singles are as popu­lar as ever as retro night dance stom­pers, usually danced to by people who forget the song’s name or that Alison Moyet is a woman, i.e. the masses. The regu­lar listener prob­ably only knows one or two or three Yazoo songs, and that’s a shame because the Moyet/Clarke pair­ing is as inspir­ing as synthpop gets — other than track 4’s preten­tious babbling, the album is a near perfect keep­sake. It might be the first widely-listened to synthpop album that finally succeeded in hammer­ing out a love ballad of seri­ous artistic merit (“Only You”), and that was further improved upon with “Ode To Boy” on their next album.

Clarke’s work after Yazoo is talen­ted, but I feel that this was his peak — not in terms of tech­nical prowess but in terms of styl­istic impact. To me, it never soun­ded quite the same or quite as good with the irre­place­able Moyet, a lovely singer whose husky, soul­ful voice clearly thrived juxta­posed against an icy synth veneer. Once you hear her, and once you hear Andy Bell from Erasure after­ward, you wonder if Clarke picked him for their strik­ing vocal simil­ar­it­ies and happily accep­ted the next best thing.

Pretending to be funk

Sparks — Pulling Rabbits Out of A Hat (1987)

I don’t get mad at the Maels for drum­ming out an aver­age album. But the cloy­ing, over­pro­duced synthetic sheen feels some­what like “Terminal Jive” had it been produced by Stock, Aitken and Waterman instead. Even so, an aver­age Sparks album knocks the pants off of almost all contem­por­ary artists, and they manage to charm and creep you out like they always have and always will. “Pretending To Be Drunk” is about as cute as a Ford Tempo. It looks like a dance song, and it kind of sounds like one, but you soon real­ized you can’t return the keys to the deal­er­ship so you suffer until your mistake is totalled and towed away. “Sisters” is one of the few standouts; forget Sparks in the Dark Parts 1 and 2. If a tent­at­ive Sparks fan is read­ing this, or someone who is not sure where to start off with them, don’t buy this album — it’s not the right way to dive into their amaz­ing canon of work.

Maybe you’re closer to here than you imagine

Sparks — No. 1 In Heaven (1979)

This is a triumphant piece of work. I would care to call it flaw­less, but Sparks is a band that prefers to make some kind of inten­tional mistake just to set them­selves apart. The joke’s always on them, but this time it’s on you too — people like them because they’re funny, but then they have the last laugh when you’re nearly in tears because what you hear is so beautiful.

And that is the true great­ness of this very short but entirely complete album. It’s an abso­lutely spir­ited and gorgeous piece of elec­tronic disco, which even without any lyrics would stand on its own as one of Giorgio Moroder’s best efforts. Adding the Mael broth­ers’ uncon­ven­tional brand image to that of Moroder’s was risky — but the gamble paid off. Like so many things in the late 1970’s, it didn’t make sense on paper but it sure felt right. By being unafraid to combine too seem­ingly dispar­ate musical spheres and succeed­ing, they raised their over­all import­ance as artists.

And they didn’t even do it at the expense of their ironic tongue-in-cheek lyrics or outsider status — they proved to the world that they weren’t just a funny glam rock novelty, unable to move forward without comprom­ising qual­ity or integrity.

I could have spent more time taking about the actual sounds the songs contain, but I always found descrip­tions of the after­world to be trite. It’s up for you to decide whether it’s heav­enly or not, but I for one still feel the goose­bumps when the title track hits exactly three and a half minutes. At that moment, it takes what was already a beau­ti­ful song and does what anyone would do in 1979 — increase the beat to as fast as humanly possible.

This is the #2 album in heaven

Sparks — Terminal Jive (1980)

It’s not nearly as good as #1 in Heaven, but then again I don’t know what else could possibly ace an album that was numer­ic­ally and tech­no­lo­gic­ally that gorgeous. The album repres­en­ted a slight detour for Sparks as during the ’79–80 time frame they were briefly big and kinda main­stream, espe­cially in contin­ental Europe (France especially).

Terminal Jive is a grower for sure, even as a Sparks devotee it took me a year or so of indif­fer­ence before I took it to heart. But once I did, I real­ized that it was, after all, synthpop and Sparks, so how could it not be bril­liant? It has a plod­ding, mid-tempo Europop beat through­out, which takes getting used to. It’s as if they slowed the entire album a few beats per minute in hopes of being paired up with the ulti­mate aging hipster fad at the time (Roxy Music’s effete drum machine disco ballads of heart­break and nightclub arti­fice, that is.)

Their trade­mark humor is harder to imme­di­ately recog­nize, lack­ing any auda­cious song titles, but the humor is defin­itely there — it’s just there in more subtle, sly, ironic ways, as if they hoped to fool someone who bought their album for its charm­ing sincer­ity. In fact, that’s exactly what seems to have happened — this album was very popu­lar in France, and if it took me some time to laugh or smirk, I imagine they’re still taking “When I’m With You” very seriously.

It’s a highly accom­plished, well-presented, remark­ably consist­ent piece of work — almost too clean, though. You have to have a real love of the Maels them­selves to give it 4 stars, and it helps if you enjoy combin­ing senti­ment­al­ity with snob­bery. It repres­ents the turn of that decade very well — for it approached the prospect of 1980 like you’d expect — with a bit of mater­i­al­ism, signs of grow­ing up and matur­a­tion, but never forget­ting to include the elements that got them there in the first place.

In short, it’s the most under­rated “Sparks for Sparks fans” album — others may miss too much context to see beyond its sugary Eurodisco shell.