During a tumultuous 8 years of existence, German techno-thrash trio Atari Teenage Riot became one of those rare bands whose very name perfectly summed up their sound without any outside explanation.Formed in 1992 by Alec Empire, a talented and prolific solo artist in his own right who has released a plethora of solo albums covering a wide array of electronic and rock textures (either released under his own name or ECP and Jaguar) and featuring backup vocalist Hanin Elias and rapper Carl Crack (whose drug-related suicide in 2001 effectively spelled the end of the band), Atari Teenage Riot aimed straight for the jugular with their groundbreaking fusion of hardcore punk attitude and feral speed-techno beats.
After having made a name for themselves in their homeland with all the subtlety of a bull in a china shop, Atari Teenage Riot managed to swindle themselves up a record label using a record company advance to do so. Utilizing the very aptly-named Digital Hardcore Records as a base of operations, Empire and Co. lured together a stable of similar-minded artists (EC8OR, Shizuo, Bomb 20, Speed Freak) in an attempt to politicize the youth of Germany into action to fight against the recent shift to the Right in European politics (and hey, what better way to get the kids sold on the idea radically Left-of-center ideals than lashing them with Euro-techno on steroids?).
Correctly figuring that the best way to cut through the background noise of everyday life was to make a godawful racket, Atari Teenage Riot's debut full-length release, 1996's Delete Yourself! was designed from the ground up as a sonic letterbomb that was supposed to scare the living hell out of anyone over the age of 30. By screaming at the tops of their lungs over lightning-fast breaks and power-chord-sounding synth patches (in effect, sounding like a KMFDM record played at 78 speed), Empire, Elias and Crack sought to proclaim that the German youth of 1996 were wising up to what was going on in the halls of power and weren't too happy about it.
In reality, however, listening to what was actually being shouted throughout such unintentionally hilarious Delete Yourself! tracks as "Kids Are United!," "Start The Riot," "Raverbashing," "Midijunkies" and "Cyberpunks Are Dead!" tended to undermine the intended effect of the record. Despite the amount of compressed righteous fury and coruscating sonics in their music, Atari Teenage Riot seemed just as interested in repeatedly and obnoxiously proclaiming their own bad-assed greatness than actually, you know, setting up an exchange of political ideas with the Powers That Be. Ahh, youth...
Will Powers was the creation of rock photographer 
Whatever you might think about the primitive sound of the record or the idea of getting "you are a special flower" advice from an aesexual, computer generated version of Stuart Smalley, you gotta admit that Dancing For Mental Health is certainly a unique record in the annals of pop music (I certainly can't think of anything remotely like Will Powers that has come out since, for better or worse).
In a visual sense, everything about Client's presentation was created to foil any preconceptions people might have based on the previous bands both women had played in before. Holmes and Blackwood didn't use their real names on the album or in any subsequent interviews, hiding instead behind the pseudonyms of Client A and Client B. All promotional photos and videos for Client revealed nothing of who was in the band: either their faces were obscured by special effects in their videos or they were missing entirely in the arty, almost surreal promotional photographs sent out to the media (all of which were deliberately badly cropped so that nothing above shoulder level on the duo was visible). Looking at these images, all a prospective fan would be able to note was that there were two women in this new band, and that they both wore matching, form-fitting 1960's stewardess uniforms (and often posed rather provacatively in them as well).
City also gained some additional coverage thanks to some notable guest vocal appearances, including Fletcher's longtime bandmate Martin L. Gore as well as Carl Barat and the infamous Pete Doherty of The Libertines who provided vocal cameos on "Pornography" (the band's first U.K. Top 40 single) and "Underground," respectively.
Over the course of five years and three albums, the British synthpop trio Dubstar had managed to accrue a decent (though uneven) measure of success with their beguiling swirl of lush pop styled music and sassy, occasionally jarring romantic lyrical concerns.
The first single from Disgraceful was also the most immediately-striking track on the album: the sublime ballad "Stars," which highlights Blackwood's sweetly angelic, layered vocals against a sumptuous, yearning background of string patches and processed breaks. An underrated classic of the form, "Stars" did manage to chart twice, once at #40 during it's initial release in the summer of 1995 and then again at #15 the following spring following the band's commercial breakthrough with "Not So Manic Now" (a cover song originally done by an obscure fellow techno-pop act called Brick Supply) and the slick, almost absurdly-catchy world pop of "Anywhere."
Prefaced by the uptempo "No More Talk" (which itself kicked off with a sample of Yes' "Owner Of A Lonely Heart," of all things), Goodbye was to be a two-pronged success story: capitalizing on the success of Disgraceful on the homefront while also launching the band in America. To achieve this end, two versions of the album were released, the U.K. version an all-original effort and the American release a splicing of new material with singles released from Disgraceful with a couple of remixes for good measure.
Instead, things seemed to go rapidly downhill for the band when Now was released in the spring of 1977. For starters, the new album wasn't a critical or commercial hit, and even the band themselves thought they might have pushed things a little too far at last. Worse, while performing overseas in support of the album, things really fell apart in a hurry after Waybill broke his leg onstage while acting out one of his outrageous onstage personas ("Dr. Strangekiss," "Quay Lewd" or "Hugh Heifer" were among his repertoire), which stopped the tour on a dime. With the label's promotional strategy now in tatters and the album tanking everywhere, what looked like promising momentum had quickly become a disaster, and the band desperately needed a hit to keep themselves signed to the A&M Records roster.
One of the Remote Control's most immediately addictive singles was the disco-leaning swirl of "Prime Time." On a musical level, "Prime Time" was one of the lovelier songs the Tubes had ever recorded, while lyrically it was a subtly disturbing paean of cooing devotion delivered by the protagonist (Waybill) to his flirtatious television set (seductively voiced by the band's "lead dancer" Re-Styles). While the overall sound of "Prime Time" is pure 1979 as far as production is concerned, I've always liked the contrast between the relentlessly pulsing bass synth line and the warm, glistening synth work laid around it by Rundgren as well as Tubes keyboardists Michael Cotten and Vince Welnick (I could also swear I hear Todd's distinctive vocals throughout the song's beguiling midsection).
Fired midway through the recording of The Wall in 1979, Floyd keyboardist Richard Wright found himself a salaried backing player on the following tour, which was a limited-engagement extravaganza staged only in four cities worldwide in 1980 and then again in London the following summer (these London shows, which ultimately became the final Pink Floyd concerts with Roger Waters, were professionally filmed and intended to create the framework of The Wall movie, but the footage was instead scrapped in favor of a totally band-free visual narrative).
While Roger Waters' Radio K.A.O.S. (which we looked at in 
A year later, a second solo album by drummer Nick Mason appeared to a slightly warmer reception. Mason's first solo release, a quirky, jazz-pop workout titled Nick Mason's Ficticious Sports wasn't really a solo project so much as a Carla Bley album in disguise (this was possibly the doing of Columbia Records in the wake of the explosive sales of The Wall a year beforehand). For his second solo effort, 
In the midst of an album's worth of ultraslick and incredibly faceless incidental-style music (which I'm sure was probably the whole point in the first place) was "Lie For A Lie" -- a charming, sequencer-driven lite-pop single featuring vocals from none other than Pink Floyd's resident guitar hero himself, David Gilmour. A fair amount of curious airplay from rock stations looking for anything new to air from Pink Floyd (or at least two members worth) resulted in "Lie For A Lie" just missing the Rock Radio Top 20 that summer. The popularlity of the song never translated to decent album sales, though -- Profiles never marched higher than Number 154 on the Billboard albums chart.
There are also some hints of past Spielberg achievements for those who love looking for these things (Jurassic Park is the most noticeable of the referential nods here) as well as enough Independence Day-styled widescreen destruction for two movies. With much of the staggering devastation used as a backdrop (as if seen out of the corners of our eyes rather then thrust into the foreground), Spielberg keeps a sense of dread and doom -- both alien-derived and otherwise -- at near-redline level throughout the first two-thirds of the movie. This more immediate and claustrophobic fear feels strange for a movie like this and probably comes to us thanks to War Of The Worlds never pulling back for a look at The Big Picture as most films of its ilk tend to do -- in a fashion reminscent of Signs, we stay with one family the whole way through the movie, but this time the characters are outside the safety of their home and fending for themselves in a world turned completely upside down.
While the subsequent synth-dominated solo efforts of keyboardist Richard Wright and drummer Nick Mason (which we'll examine in a special edition of this column next week) could kindly be described as "bland" and "harmless," such adjectives fail in the face of perhaps the most infamous of all the 80's solo Floyd albums - the second solo effort by the band's estranged mastermind Roger Waters.
Perhaps the biggest problem Joe Public had with Radio K.A.O.S. was the sound of the record itself. While The Pros And Cons Of Hitch-Hiking was essentially a familiar-sounding sonic continuation of The Wall and The Final Cut, K.A.O.S. was steeped in late 1980's white-boy funk and pop music and the music is dominated by busily chittering drum machines and chiming, buzzy synthesizers carried along on upbeat, propulsive rhythms -- a totally alien-sounding construction that sounds like nothing else in Waters' canon before or since.
Happily, there was an silver lining in this whole mess for the ex-Floyd leader -- while he acknowledged during interviews that the album, as a narrative, was "doomed to failure," the idea of a teenaged Stephen Hawking with the power to destroy the world (that is, until he watched the original Live Aid concert and got all touchy-feely instead) worked far better live than on record. Working around the time constraints of the vinyl/CD/cassette canvas, Waters utilized screened film/computer graphics elements, selected hits from the Floyd canon and a couple of additional songs that were not present on the released version of Radio K.A.O.S. to expand the narrative and flesh out the themes of the record. A true multimedia presentation, Radio K.A.O.S. On The Road enabled Waters to "sell" his ideas to the audience far easier than he ever could have done otherwise.
Now, you may be looking at this pic to the left right now and wondering what on earth these three people have to do with Pink Floyd, but we'll get to that part later. Some exposition needs to be taken care of first.
While it might seem comparatively tame by modern lyrical standards, the relentless, seedy porno movie atmosphere of the track combined with such immortal lines as "Slip and slide in your wet delight, feel the blood flow" and "Wrap your legs around mine and ride me tonight " caused a full-blown national epidemic of hand-wringing only recently matched by a certain wardrobe malfunction at some football game early last year. No, I jest -- barely anyone heard "Sex" since only a handful of stations in the United States would even touch it, but those who did hear it spread the word and the band found themselves attaining a national cult following, which then mushroomed considerably following the release of the similarly pulsating (but much more radio-friendly) europop of "The Metro." With a crucial assist from tastemaker MTV (who gave the track virtually blanket airplay during the second third of 1983), as well as an appearance at the 1983 
Released the following spring, the Mike Howlett-produced 
As it turns out, that "next level" was reached the following year when Berlin appeared on the soundtrack to the movie Top Gun. One of the great "synergistic" marketing exercises of the decade, Top Gun absolutely dominated the summer of 1986 in movieplexes, and was matched in success by its Big 80's bonanza of a soundtrack album. Specifically engineered to be a monster, Top Gun performed beyond even the highest expectations of Columbia Records: released in May of 1986, it ran over the competition like a bulldozer, spending over a month at number one on Billboard's album chart, staying listed on said chart for 93 weeks (i.e., all the way through 1987 and even into 1988) and selling somewhere north of 9 million copies.
It should be noted that Top Gun was as its sales peak at the same time that Berlin's contribution "Take My Breath Away," was riding high on mutliple charts worldwide. A stately synth ballad that, like everything else on Top Gun, sounded impossibly huge on the radio, "Take My Breath Away" was an immediate across-the-board smash that took the band all the way to the #1 position on the Hot 100 and provided the kind of "new album setup" most bands (or labels) would kill for. However, even moreso than their experience with "No More Words," this success was highly tainted. Most crushingly for the increasingly-unsure Crawford, "Take My Breath Away" was not really a Berlin song at all - it was simply Terri Nunn singing a song produced and arranged by Georgio Moroder (him again!) and written by Moroder and Tom Whitlock. Crawford and Brill did not even perform on the track, and aside from the wall-to-wall synths, "Take My Breath Away" had little in common with Berlin's material, old or new. One wonders exactly why it was credited to Berlin at all.
Despite the seemingly can't-miss nature of the project and a good critical reception, Count Three And Pray was a bitter failure commercially. It seemed that radio was not at all interested in the much louder and more strident sounds of the band's first new music in two and a half years. In fact, the album's first single, a galloping slice of upbeat pop called "Like Flames" barely made it to #82 before disappearing in less than a month and no other songs from the project were ever able to reverse the band's suddenly nose-diving momentum. Count Three And Pray itself managed to sleepwalk around the album chart for 3 months, but never cracked the Top 60 while doing so. You have to wonder if Geffen was thinking maybe we should have sicced Moroder on this one, too ...
Long before acts like The New Deal started attracting attention with winding, improvised sets in a style perhaps worst described as "jamtronica," Oxford's 
It's not often that you come across a would-be pop star who went all the way through med school before giving stardom a whirl. A pragmatic sort of gent, Submarine's founder and keyboardist Al Boyd at least made sure that he would have a rewarding career as a doctor in London to fall back on in case his musical aspirations failed to take the world by storm. Teamed with percussionist/lyricist Richard Jeffrey and Nigerian-bred singer Adaesi Ukairo, Submarine released their one and only record, the self-produced sampladelic gadget fest 
