"Formed a Band" was such a brilliant first single, and summed up Art Brut's aesthetic so perfectly, that there almost seemed to be no need for more songs from them. Driven by a jagged, ragged guitar riff, it sounded like it was thrown together in ten minutes tops, and had lots of great, quotable lyrics ("I wanna be the boy -- the man -- who writes the song/That makes Israel and Palestine get along"), which were held together and topped off by Alfred Molina look-alike Eddie Argos' speak-singing -- which he informed his listeners wasn't irony, and wasn't rock & roll. Actually, it's both, and there's a lot more of both on Bang Bang Rock & Roll, an album whose title kills and celebrates rock & roll at the same time. "Formed a Band," which appears here in a slightly more polished version than the original Rough Trade single, is still Art Brut's calling card, but the album has plenty of nearly-as-great songs to choose from. Chief among them is "Emily Kane," a plea Argos wrote to find his lost teenage sweetheart. He doesn't just pine for her, though, he wants "school kids on buses singing [her] name." Truly brilliant in its sweet simplicity -- especially on the breakdown, where he lists, to the second, exactly how long it's been since he's seen Emily -- it's an incredibly vivid distillation of how large your first love looms in your memory. On the album's title track, Art Brut return to "Formed a Band"-style, tongue-in-cheek meta-punk: while Argos snarls, "I can't stand the sound of the Velvet Underground!" the backing vocals chime in "White light! White heat!" and a John Cale-like violin screeches in the background. While all this irony could be suffocating, there's a pure, unadulterated joy underneath most of Art Brut's best songs that prevents their witty stance from becoming too clever-clever; the way Argos roars, "I've seen her naked twice!" about his new girlfriend on "Good Weekend" feels entirely genuine. Indeed, a lot of Art Brut's appeal lies in Argos' way with storytelling, whether he's singing about impotence ("Rusted Guns of Milan"), drinking Hennessey with Morrissey ("Moving to L.A."), or indulging his fascinations with Top of the Pops or Italy ("18,000 Lira"). Though it runs out of steam slightly (at least in comparison to the pop art brilliance of the band's best songs) on its second half, Bang Bang Rock & Roll is a terrific debut, and Art Brut are smart, catchy, and fun -- everything you could want in a band, even if they do sound like they formed ten minutes ago. [This edition of Bang Bang Rock & Roll features two CDs and ten bonus track)
Blondie turned to Britain-based pop producer Mike Chapman for their third album, on which they abandoned any pretensions to new wave legitimacy (just in time, given the decline of the style) and emerged as a mainstream, contemporary pop/rock band. But it wasn't just Chapman's influence that made Parallel Lines Blondie's best album; it was also the band's own songwriting, including Deborah Harry, Chris Stein, and Jimmy Destri's "Picture This"; Harry and Stein's disco-styled "Heart of Glass"; and Harry and new bass player Nigel Harrison's "One Way or Another"; plus two contributions from non-band member Jack Lee, "Will Anything Happen?" and "Hanging on the Telephone." Together, they were enough to give Blondie a number one on both sides of the Atlantic with "Heart of Glass" and three more U.K. hits, but what impresses is the album's depth and consistency -- album tracks like "Fade Away and Radiate" and "Just Go Away" are as impressive as the songs pulled for singles. Still, Chapman's contribution is not to be discounted; a producer with a track record full of punchy British pop hits with his former partner Nicky Chinn for Suzi Quatro, Mud, the Sweet, and Smokie, he brought his sense of precise arranging and playing to a band that previously had been quite sloppy in execution, and he did it without sacrificing the group's spirit, particularly Harry's snotty yet sophisticated vocal style. The result is state-of-the-art pop/rock circa 1978, with Harry's tough-girl glamour setting the pattern that would be exploited over the next decade by a host of successors, led by Madonna. (The 2001 reissue adds four bonus tracks, among them a live rendition of T. Rex's "Bang a Gong (Get It On)" and a previously unreleased preliminary version of "Heart of Glass" called "Once I Had a Love (AKA The Disco Song).
Where Pyromania had set the standard for polished, catchy pop-metal, Hysteria only upped the ante. Pyromania's slick, layered Mutt Lange production turned into a painstaking obsession with dense sonic detail on Hysteria, with the result that some critics dismissed the record as a stiff, mechanized pop sellout (perhaps due in part to Rick Allen's new, partially electronic drum kit). But Def Leppard's music had always employed big, anthemic hooks, and few of the pop-metal bands who had hit the charts in the wake of Pyromania could compete with Leppard's sense of craft; certainly none had the pop songwriting savvy to produce seven chart singles from the same album, as the stunningly consistent Hysteria did. Joe Elliott's lyrics owe an obvious debt to his obsession with T. Rex, particularly on the playfully silly anthem "Pour Some Sugar on Me" and the British glam rock tribute "Rocket," while power ballads like "Love Bites" and the title track lack the histrionics or gooey sentimentality of many similar offerings. The strong pop hooks and "perfect"-sounding production of Hysteria may not appeal to die-hard heavy metal fans, but it isn't heavy metal -- it's pop-metal, and arguably the best pop-metal ever recorded. Its blockbuster success helped pave the way for a whole new second wave of hair metal bands, while proving that the late-'80s musical climate could also be very friendly to veteran hard rock acts, a lead many would follow in the next few years.
[Hysteria first saw a Deluxe Edition in 2006, when it was expanded to a double-disc set plumped up by all the live and studio B-sides that came out on singles supporting the album's 1987 release. In terms of sheer size, the record's 30th anniversary reissue trumps it, weighing in at five CDs and two DVDs. Despite that massive size, not everything from the 2006 edition made the cut. The B-sides "I Wanna Be Your Hero" and "Ride into the Sun" are present in the rejiggered versions from 1993's Retro Active, not the originally released flip sides, and a live cover of Alice Cooper's "Elected" is also MIA. Apart from that, the rest of the B-sides from Hysteria are here, along with a BBC Radio Classic Albums documentary and the first-ever audio release of the 1989 home video In the Round, in Your Face, a DVD with promo clips and live performances (including three appearances on Top of the Pops), and a DVD featuring Hysteria's appearance on the Classic Albums TV series to boot. That's a lot of Hysteria, so it's naturally only of interest to die-hard Def Leppard fans, but the astonishing thing is that most of this is top-notch. True, there's nothing truly revelatory here -- all the non-LP songs have been heard, most of the cuts have been easily available -- but the cumulative effect of hearing Hysteria in the studio and on-stage is the realization that Def Leppard were truly firing on all cylinders during the late '80s.]
Chilled-out or downbeat acts swept through the electronic scene during 2001 and 2002, prompting dozens of identikit compilations, all conjuring up images of exhausted clubbers returning home early in the morning and enjoying a cup of tea or a smoke after a hectic night out. And although downtempo electronica had always been largely album-based, most of these trackmasters didn't do much on the full-length front. The Norwegian duo Röyksopp, however, displayed a careful hand with the boards on their 2001 debut Melody A.M.. Röyksopp balances the haunted atmospheres of Boards of Canada with the more traditional "songwriting" sensibility of downbeat specialists like Groove Armada or Koop. The opener is proof enough, with a chunky bassline undergirding the spooky, ethereal refrain from Bobby Vinton's "Blue on Blue" recorded by some long-forgotten vocal chorus. There's much beauty on Melody A.M., very textured and imaginatively produced to sound like few of their contemporaries; it's saying much to even admit that Röyksopp is occasionally the equal of such otherworldly acts as Boards of Canada or Goldfrapp.
Mandalay is composed of Saul Freeman, the musical performance half of the esoteric "gallery band" Thieves, and his soaringly vocal counterpart, Nicola Hitchcock. Marginally lumped in with other ripple-free trip-hoppers of the mid-'90s, they enjoy moments of innovation and independence from the trappings of trip with the sprawling and ambitious Instinct. Hitchcock's voice is chilly but not shrill, eerie in the high, womanly tradition of Sandy Denny and even some of Joni Mitchell's furthest flings, but she is pure bone-chilling rock & roll and then some. Her songs rock out the structures of girl issues and romantic contemplations, aggressively feminist and argumentative. The sentiments of "Too Much Room" and "Don't Invent Me" echo some randy but not preemptive commentary along the lines of Sinéad O'Connor; you get the feeling she's not necessarily annoyed with men at large but with some common pattern dynamics. There's a tendency to compare Mandalay with the far poppier Moloko, but Hitchcock and Freeman are simply more serious and musically clustered together. Freeman supplies metallic electronics, avant-jazz samples, and drop-ins (Jon Hassell passes by), and even classical contributions (if you're quick you can catch Gorecki's "Symphony No. 3" that opens "Not Seventeen"). Such thoughtful lyrics and provocative musicianship defy comparisons to pop, but ultimately, pop it is; and it's pop of the classiest variety
By the time of their fourth full-length album, 1999's The 3 Way, Lilys had already gone through a more dramatic evolution in just a few years than many bands experience throughout an entire career. Centered around songwriter and sole consistent member Kurt Heasley, Lilys began as a fuzzy shoegaze band, making sounds heavily influenced by My Bloody Valentine for their first few albums before taking a dramatic left turn toward orchestral mod pop created in the likeness of the Kinks, the Zombies, and the Small Faces on 1996's Better Can't Make Your Life Better. Compared to that album, Lilys' output from just a few years earlier sounded like the work of a completely different band. This '60s-steeped phase of the band reached its highest form with The 3 Way, an album where Heasley's British Invasion and baroque pop influences felt less like faithful recreations, and bled more into his own cracked songwriting sensibilities. The overwhelming influence of the Kinks is still undeniable as album-opener "Dimes Makes Dollars" kicks things off with a bumbling garage rock riff and the kind of cheeky melodies Ray Davies perfected on Face to Face. As the song goes on, however, Heasley's eccentricities start leaking into view as the melodies become more angular and winding. The album splits its time between quick stomping jams and drawn out song suites like the quickly shifting "Socs Hip" and "Leo Ryan (Our Pharoah's Slave)." On these longer, more meandering tracks, Heasley assembles a pastiche made up of Left Banke harpsichord sounds, fuzz guitar borrowed from the Action, and quick-turning genre exercises following the blueprint of The Who Sell Out. The wildly mapped song structures rarely stay in one mode for more than a few bars, and sometimes the songs start in S.F. Sorrow territory and end up traipsing through disco strings and bursts of free jazz saxophone. Throughout The 3 Way, Heasley's distracted muse becomes the main attraction. He recalls Bowie's sultry Aladdin Sane balladry on "The Spirits Merchant" before offering up what sounds like an Arthur outtake moments later with "The Lost Victory," throwing in nods to the Monkees, lounge pop, and even the smallest traces of the blissed-out shoegaze guitar that defined earlier iterations of Lilys. Indie bands fixating on '60s pop was fairly commonplace by the late '90s, but the way Lilys explored this muse would have more of a ripple effect. There are links in Heasley's circuitous melodies and rapid key changes to Elephant 6 peers Of Montreal and Apples in Stereo, and the sense of groove that guides The 3 Way's funkier experiments would resurface four years later on Belle and Sebastian's far more visible effort Dear Catastrophe Waitress. While the bold-faced influences are easy to pick out, the way Heasley used them as a starting point to break new creative ground requires deeper listening. Once you get past the Kinks references emblazoned in many of the songs, Lilys' own silent influence on the course of indie rock that followed becomes more apparent.
Th' Faith Healers' outstanding full-length debut is a wonderfully visceral experience; while often lumped in with the concurrent shoegazer movement, the group's sound is far darker and grittier, their guitars churning instead of shimmering and their attitude menacing instead of blissful. Songs often spring from simple, hypnotic riffs and rhythms which inevitably swerve out of control, screeching with peals of feedback and shooting off sparks -- "Hippy Hole" is a white-noise roller coaster, while the taut "Don't Jones Me" slowly builds from a loping drum beat and a muted guitar line to arrive at a crashing climax. To top it off, Lido even sports a taut cover of Can's "Mother Sky." Great stuff.
Having traveled the dusty road previously with alt rock singer Mark Lanegan, U.K. production duo Soulsavers turn to the equally tortured soul Dave Gahan on The Light the Dead See, but this European union still opens their album with a mournful harmonica. Of course, Soulsavers have long been the production duo who prefers the sounds of spaghetti westerns to synthesizers, while making their guests sound as grand and grave as Leonard Cohen lost in the high lonesome, so this Depeche in exile is a perfect fit. Brooding across canyons here, Gahan is somewhere between James Dean and a preacher in this atmosphere, and even if his talk of darkness, the Devil, saviors, and the price you pay has all been covered with the Mode, he still sounds renewed, making sliding the downward spiral sound as intoxicating as ever, even when he explains what waits for those who hit the bottom. It's the grand closing suite of "Take" (just guitar, voice, piano, and that harmonica, but as emotionally big as any of the orchestral numbers) and "Tonight" (an actual rock number designed to the return the listener to earth after such a dour journey) that seals the deal, making The Light the Dead See not just an exciting meeting of troubled minds, but a well designed full-length, offering a persuasive rainy day soundtrack that works even when there's not a cloud in the sky.
