As wonderful as Alpha's sophomore effort, The Impossible Thrill, is, Stargazing surpasses it in almost every respect; the album's perfectly dreamy, organic, and lush songs feel like more logical successors to the spellbinding Come from Heaven. Corin Dingley and Andy Jenks themselves admitted that they lost the plot when it came to melody and rhythm prior to recording the songs that make up Stargazing, but with these 14 songs, they've made a bold, gorgeous return to the heart of atmospheric trip-hop. But reaching for accessibility hasn't dampened the band's ethereal dynamics. If they previously sounded like they were channeling Massive Attack and Portishead, here they expand on influences ranging from Nick Drake, Lee Hazlewood, the Association, and John Barry. Strings and horns explode into fantastic musical flourishes, lounge-y ballads mix with sci-fi sound effects making for beautiful tension, and any kind of genre map is thrown in the trash as the duo and its quartet of vocalists paint evocative aural pictures with tender, freaky textures. Longtime vocal collaborators Wendy Stubbs, Helen White, and Martin Barnard see an addition to their fold with the soulful Prince-on-a-bender tones of newcomer Kelvin Swaby. Swaby's soulful voice is a perfect fit with Alpha, making for a brilliant change of pace on the soaring "Elvis." "Lipstick from the Asylum" and "Portable Living Room" are fine examples of the songwriting maturity of Dingley and Jenks; they allow Barnard's voice to be the focal point over sweet, bubbling electronic tones, where perhaps they might have overloaded the songs with atmospheric flourishes in the past. Anyone who appreciated the moody music of Come from Heaven will revel in Stargazing, and the album deserves to win the group new fans. While some of the group's contemporaries were releasing somewhat blundering, meandering albums, Alpha hit the ball out of the park with Stargazing and redefined intelligent and passionate electronic soul music. Stargazing sits easily among the best albums of 2003
Front Line Assembly, one of the premiere electro-industrial acts, has done much to help define what the genre is about. Tactical Neural Implant is one of the releases which has contributed most to this claim, setting a standard with its cool, calm, and collected electronic harmonies and driving bass. Tracks from Tactical Neural Implant have consistently terrorized the dancefloors, including the classic tracks "The Blade" and "Mindphaser." Track by track, Tactical Neural Implant becomes a landscape of a dark future, at times fragile ("Remorse," "Lifeline"), at other times a bold bordering on aggressive ("Bio-Mechanic"), but always compelling and somehow detached. It was perhaps this contradiction that forms the winning combination in Front Line Assembly's music of this period, and which guarantees that Tactical Neural Implant will stay compelling many years from its release.
Voyager is the first, and best, in Momus' trilogy of albums (the other two being Shyness and Timelord) addressing the near-future sci-fi androgyny of Japan. The mood is best characterized by "Summer Holiday 1999," based on the Japanese film of the same name that follows private school students (boys played by girls) alone in an empty school during their vacation. Both the song and the film are full of strange textures, impending suicide, melancholy, and hopeless love. The warm electro-pop that fills Voyager began in 1991 at the Edinburgh Festival, when Momus saw a play, based on a short story by Yukio Mishima, in which an old lady travels back in time to her youth. With this as a starting point, Momus recorded one of his most sentimental albums, exploring themes of adolescence, nostalgia, and wistful distance from one's environment and experiences. With the lush ambience of "Virtual Reality," "all you got to do is dream." "Conquistador" conjures up more of a slick utopia filled with emotions and longing. "Afterglow" ponders a mellow world, where Music for Airports plays and people are "too late to enjoy it, too soon to destroy it, too dumb to invent it, too smart to end it." Voyager may not contain the acerbic wit that Momus is best known for, but the bittersweet dreaminess of the album and its sincere vibe find the artist being endlessly smart, but not too smart for his own good. It's one Momus' best Records
With their 1983 debut, the Violent Femmes got the ball rolling for what would become alternative rock, using acoustic instruments to deliver an unexpectedly raw blend of punk angst and catchy-if-neurotic songwriting. The band's subsequent '80s albums were a mixed bag, yielding occasional highlights but not quite gelling into anything as consistently powerful as the first album. Released in 1991, fifth album Why Do Birds Sing? was something of a return to form, if only in terms of having song after song of the kind of weirdly fractured folk pop that represented the band at their most accessible. Upbeat and straightforward album-opener "American Music" is somewhere between campfire song and pop masterpiece, with subtle production details like sleighbells and sparingly used organ runs growing along with the song's steady build. More blatant stabs at pop come with a snarling cover of Culture Club's hit "Do You Really Want to Hurt Me," the inverted girl group appropriation of "Look Like That," and the driving college rock of "Used to Be." The band's penchant for sardonic and juvenile humor remains intact on the faux-blues stomp of "Girl Trouble" (vocalist Gordon Gano returning to the refrain "Have mercy on me, I've got girl trouble up the ass!") and the shadowy clunk of "Make More Money," a bitter revenge story of the tormented high school nerd becoming a rich rock star. When Why Do Birds Sing? was first released, the Violent Femmes were already a decade into their career, enjoying cult success but still living mostly in the shadow of their debut. The album would be one of their most commercially successful up until that point, despite some critics finding it disjointed and a little too all-over-the-place stylistically. Removed from the time it originally arrived in, Why Do Birds Sing? feels more solid, with its lesser moments strung together by some of the best songs the band ever penned, and production that makes space for both the Femmes' anxious demeanor and their not-so-secret love of big, dumb pop
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