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The Monochrome Set Eligible Bachelors

The Monochrome Set Eligible Bachelors 

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One of the classic albums of the early '80s by a band that doesn't get the love it should, the Monochrome Set's Eligible Bachelors from 1982 is a tour de force of wit and musical imagination. This was their first album for their new label, Cherry Red, and they certainly made the most of their opportunity. Songwriter and vocalist Bid turned in a set of witty, urbane, and hooky tunes that fulfilled the promise of the quartet's earlier recordings, guitarist Lester Square showed himself to be a master off catchy riffs and perfect fills, and the rhythm section of bassist Andy Warren and drummer Lexington Crane kept things light and swinging. Bustling through 11 songs so sharp and intelligent that it's easy to listen to the album multiple times without getting bored, the band and Bid are at the absolute top of their game, a game that others like Haircut 100 and Orange Juice were also playing. The Set and their ilk merged jangling guitars, jazz-influenced chord changes, painfully arch lyrics, deadpan vocals, and jumpy rhythms into something shiny and fun, quite often with a dark undercurrent. Eligible Bachelors is certainly the equal of Pelican West or Rip It Up; the surplus of songs that sounded like hit singles everyone forgot to buy ("Fun for All the Family," "I'll Scry Instead"), trenchant bits of social commentary set to a jittering dance beat ("The Jet Set Junta," "The Ruling Class"), and pretty pop tunes ("Cloud 10") see to that. Unlike those albums, it didn't catch fire with the general public, and left the Set pondering just what they had to do to break through. If creating their masterpiece couldn't get the job done, what was left for them to do? Luckily for fans of Bid and his band, they didn't give up, but even if they had, Eligible Bachelors would stand up as a definitive work of the post-punk/new wave era. [Though the album had been reissued a few times in the intervening years, it wasn't until 2018 that Cherry Red gave Eligible Bachelors the expanded reissue treatment it deserved. Along with remastered sound and a nice booklet, the album is expanded to three discs. Along with the album proper, the first disc adds 15 singles released between 1978 and 1983, including the one song that actually became something of a hit in 1979, "He's Frank (Slight Return)." Disc two includes a treasure trove of radio sessions; a snappy demo for "The Ruling Class"; and a batch of fun rarities. All the rarities had been released previously in different places, but it's good to have them together under one roof. The final disc comprises Fin, the live album released by Cherry Red in 1986 featuring recordings made at various venues between 1979 and 1985; a solo demo made by Bid in 1986; and the three-track single he released in 1986 for Él Records, a label run by Mike Alway, who had initially signed the Monochrome Set to Cherry Red. The extras are all well chosen and really give an incisive and fun look at the band around the time leading up to and after the release of Eligible Bachelors.]

Colin Newman Bastard

Colin Newman Bastard

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Although he doesn't cop to it on the accompanying literature for Bastard, Colin Newman's seventh record since the dissolution of Wire is heavily influenced by contemporary pioneers of trance/dance like Orb and Aphex Twin. But Newman goes at it in a brash, singular and typically erudite fashion: After recording several of Bastard's tracks with his vocals—Newman was Wire's primary singer—he made a conscious decision to remove them. As such, the record shows a less obvious personality than his sung material. But there's still a sense of humor: Newman's take on drum 'n' bass, the skittish "Slowfast (Falling Down The Stairs With A Drum Kit)," is so dizzyingly fast it'd be virtually impossible to dance to. Other tracks, especially "Sticky" and "Spaced-In," vibrate with an almost robotic funkiness. Unlike late-period Wire (or Wir, as it were), Bastard's grooves are not coldly antiseptic and numbly detached; a thick mix of insistent guitar and pointedly plucked electric bass on "May," and the spiraling "Spiked," show Newman's musical ideas to be as flexibly coherent as ever. Through his Swim~ label, Newman has been releasing an interesting slew of esoteric and ambient music in various permutations—usually electronic. But this time, he seems to have purged much of those minimalist/house elements, and has wisely avoided saddling these songs with too much technology. Bastard represents his first rock-oriented material in a long time, and while Newman claims to have been interested in (and unsatisfied by) recent similarly inclined music, his album ends up owing nothing to anything but itself. It's an impressively visionary, futuristic record from a musician who's still important.