Sunday Synthpop Brunch: Dubstar

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.

Formed in Newcastle in 1992 by ex-DJ Steve Hillier and guitarist Chris Wilkie, and later completed by their discovery of strikingly glamorous singer Sarah Blackwood, Dubstar spent a couple of years recording demos and knocking on doors before finally gaining the attention and backing of Food Records in early 1994.

In an inspired bit of casting, Food immediately paired their newly-signed trio up with super-producer Stephen Hague, whose impressive resume in the genre (OMD, Erasure, Pet Shop Boys, New Order, later-era Siouxsie & The Banshees) appeared a suitable fit to the detailed, catchy tunes that synth programmer/songwriter Hillier had been cranking out since the band's formation. Going by the initial results of the collaboration, 1995' s Disgraceful, it turns out that Hague and Dubstar made for a perfect combination. Packed with shimmering, richly-produced pop goodness, Disgraceful became a sleeper smash: while it only grazed the lower end of the Top 30 on the U.K. albums chart, it launched a squad of singles up the Top 40 list over a period of months and eventually achieved gold sales status.

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."

In the vein of such outwardly sunny/inwardly glum popsters as The Smiths and The Beautiful South, there was often an undercurrent of weary, admonishing cynicism in Dubstar's lyrics that was often masked by Blackwood's beautiful singing and the luscious production. A fine example of this approach is on the lazy reverie "Just A Girl She Said":

It's alright I'm just a girl she said,
Talk down to me and take me to bed,
I don't feel,
I don't think,
And I don't really matter at all ...
I'm a person who speaks,
I'm a person who thinks,
But you hope I'll forget as you ply me with drinks,
And you cannot buy me and you cannot use me,
But I know that you'll want to try

Pretty lacerating sentiments for what on the surface is such a pretty song, eh?

A remix-appended reissue of Disgraceful filled the product gap in mid 1996 (and gave the band another Top 30 hit with "Elevator Song") while Dubstar recorded what would become their sophomore effort: 1997's Goodbye.

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.

Sadly, Goodbye failed to make any kind of waves in the States, but a bigger surprise was it's underperformance in the U.K.. While the new album was in many ways the equal of its predecessor with a more orchestral pop feel to the new songs (see the strangely-carnivalesque, midtempo confection "Wearchest" and the heartbreaking, atmospheric ballad "Ghost") and yielded three Top 40 singles, there was no breakaway hit to carry the band to that "next level" and and the album wound up with a disappointingly brief appearance at #18 on the U.K. albums chart before vanishing in a near-instant.

Spring of 2000 saw the release of Dubstar's last significant hit single, "I" (that is if you call a one-week flash onto the singles chart at #37 "significant") followed by the release of their third album best-of collection for Christmas 2004 has been the only release from the trio since.

According to the FAQ on the band's official website, Hillier moved onto writing and production roles (occasionally with help from Wilkie) with artists such as Mark Owen, Keane and Bebel Gilberto. Blackwood, however, soon found herself another high profile electro-pop gig, which we'll talk about in greater detail next week...

Sunday Synthpop Brunch: The Tubes

By the mid-1970s, The Tubes were one of the most notorious traveling "shock-rock" acts on the road. While they weren't ghoulish enough to stage their own public executions during their sets a la Alice Cooper, the San Francisco-based lineup had no problems making a lasting impression on their audiences (anyone seeing heavily made-up lead singer Fee Waybill standing nearly 8 feet tall in his platform boots while clad in bondage gear and wielding a running chainsaw is probably either in therapy or denial to this day). Also, unlike many of their contemporaries in the theatrical rock biz, The Tubes utilized a highly developed sense of satire, which is certainly apparent in their twin radio hits from 1975: "White Punks On Dope" and the gleefully over-the-top satire of "What Do You Want From Life?"

Following their FM radio breakthrough, The Tubes made a decent commercial inroads with their second album Young And Rich in 1976 (featuring the hilariously suggestive minor hit "Don't Touch Me There") and seemed on the verge of breaking into superstar territory on the next go-round.

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.

While a hastily-released live album (What Do You Want From Live -- taped during the same run of shows that the band were playing when Waybill sustained his injury) briefly occupied the lower rungs of the Top 100 in early 1978, the Tubes hooked up with ace producer Todd Rundgren and recorded the album that many consider to be their masterpiece: Remote Control.

Released in March of 1979, Remote Control found The Tubes firing on all cylinders. As a concept album revolving around a man unhealthily obsessed with television and packing plenty of the band's trademark lyrical barbs, Remote Control was greatly enhanced by the band's increased focus on songwriting and stretching themselves out musically under Rundgren's admittedly-heavy hand (there aren't many albums dear Todd has produced that don't wind up sounding like one of his own). Bursting with excellent cuts ranging from the ballad "Love's A Mystery," the zippy pogo pop of "Turn Me On" and the near-Utopia soundalike "I Want It All Now," this was an album designed to put the band over the top at last.

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).

Despite the fact that Remote Control pretty much mirrored the chart performance of their previous high watermark Young And Rich (both albums reached #46 and were listed on the charts for 4 months), The Tubes found themselves dropped by A&M Records soon afterwards. Apparently, A&M had expected far bigger things from the album, which had failed to launch a single hit of any kind despite its rich variety of accessible material.

As it turned out, A&M were a tad premature in letting The Tubes go -- the band quickly found a new home at Capitol Records and found far greater success than had ever come their way before after adopting a more mainstream rock-friendly sound. Over the next four years, the band had great success with the format staple (and early MTV favorite) "Talk To Ya Later," as well as a pair of bona fide pop hits in the form of the startlingly-MOR ballad "Don't Wanna Wait Anymore" and their lone Top 10 smash "She's A Beauty." The band's newfound commercial success didn't last long, however: following the commercial failure of 1985's rather gimmicky Love Bomb (also produced by Rundgren), the Tubes quietly disbanded.

The Great Gig In The Park

Strangers passing in the street
By chance two separate glances meet
And I am you and what I see is me.




For long you'll live and high you'll fly
And smiles you'll give and tears you'll cry
And all you touch and all you see
Is all your life will ever be.



Down
And out
It can't be helped that there's a lot of it about
With
Without
And who'll deny, it's what the fighting's all about



There is no pain, you are receding
A distant shipsmoke on the horizon
You are only coming through in waves
Your lips move, but I can't hear what you're saying
When I was a child, I caught a fleeting glimpse
Out of the corner of my eye
I turned to look but it was gone
I cannot put my finger on it now
The child is grown
The dream is gone



And when the fight was over
We spent what they had made.
But in the bottom of our hearts, we felt the final cut.


If that 23 minute miracle in Hyde Park this past Saturday night was indeed the last hurrah for Pink Floyd (and signs point to yes), then the most impossible reunion in the history of rock music was perhaps the genre's most aesthetically perfect finale as well.

Following 18 years of unending public acrimony, a long-festering wound was healed (or at least publicly bandaged) at last. For those who had only discovered Pink Floyd in the eleven years since the release of The Division Bell, it was a chance to see what they had missed. For those in my age bracket who had come of age in the era of A Momentary Lapse Of Reason and the attendant media-fueled not-so-Cold War between Roger Waters and David Gilmour, it was an improbable wish come true to see and hear Pink Floyd in its most potent artistic incarnation one more time. Lastly, all of us, old and young, were given one last chance to see the band as they once were -- not barely-visible players in a high-tech traveling light show, but instead four very different, yet commonly driven men making music that moves and soothes just as easily as it jeers and attacks.

Pink Floyd's set was not the seamless, polished entertainment package we've come to expect, and yet that made all the difference in the world...my god, they were fantastic. Sure, Nick Mason was a bit rusty on the rhythms here and there, but it was also the first time in nearly three decades that he was the sole drummer on stage, and he made it through with reputation and dignity intact. Waters sounded like he was channeling Bob Dylan when he sang and seemed to move around just as much as his demonized post-Final Cut replacement Guy Pratt (though Pratt never sang along so lustily off-mic), single-handedly displaying enough emotion and enthusiasm for the other three main players. Rick Wright was left off to the side of the camera image far too much, but he was solid and instantly identifiable as he deftly filled in spaces in the dry middle section of "Money." Gilmour, ever workmanlike on stage, wore his dispassionate "game face," sounded alternately ragged and clear as he sang, and played the kind of aching, blazing solos that most guitar players would kill to create.

I think what strikes me the most about Pink Floyd in this day and age is that they have never been bettered or upstaged by younger pretenders to their throne. In the early days after Syd Barrett was put out to pasture, there were attempts made by the band to keep themselves in the limelight of the pop singles scene, and all of these songs rank among the least-essential in their entire catalog. Once the decision was made to abandon the pursuit of the Top Of The Pops is when the band became something that has never been duplicated in the three decades-and-change that followed. Punk, disco, new wave, heavy metal, grunge, techno, nu-rock -- all of these emerging cultures and scenes were eventually called up to the majors and carefully homogenized for mass consumption, and the stars of each genre replicated by dozens of other bands eager to hop on the gravy train. To date, however, no one has ever been able to replicate Pink Floyd, and I'm fairly sure by now that no one ever will. In an industry that seemingly lives and dies by its ability cash-in by cloning the work of a handful of genuine visionaries, Pink Floyd are among the very rarest of bands in that they remained absolutely, untouchably unique.

On a personal level, this was the band that broke it all open for me -- their music was like a gateway drug that opened my mind to a rich, mysterious world beyond the poppy three-minute confines of American Top 40, Solid Gold and MTV. This was a band that didn't want to be seen gallivanting around the world's exotic locales in their videos (in fact, they preferred to let your imagination take care of the visuals instead). These were people who couldn't have cared less if their singles (when they deigned to release them) were routinely ignored by Top 40 radio in favor of the current pop idol of the month. These were lyrics and viewpoints that talked to me as a person and not just a potential consumer looking for something to dance to. Particularly in the case of Wish You Were Here (how many albums can you clearly remember falling insanely in love with the very first time you listened to them?), this was a band who released at least six albums and countless tracks that completely ripped my head from my shoulders, and left me in amazement or awe at the power of music itself like no other band has ever done before or since.




Thanks for the ride, guys. You truly were, and always will be, the best.

Sunday Synthpop Brunch: Pink Floyd -- The Other Two

The writing may have been on the wall ever since the shambolic end of the Animals tour in July of 1977, but it was nearly six years later in the anticlimactic aftermath of The Final Cut that Pink Floyd seemed to disappear for good. Despite whatever has been written or said in the decades since, there was a period in the mid 1980s during which the band no longer existed in the minds of anyone involved (of course, there are many who believe that the band didn't really exist after this time frame either, but that is another matter for another forum).

During the period between the release of The Final Cut in March 1983 and the appearance of A Momentary Lapse Of Reason in September 1987, every member of the "classic" Pink Floyd lineup released their second solo album and pursued a musical career outside the Pink Floyd framework with varying degrees of passion and success. Also, being the 1980s and all, each member also dabbled in the synthpop genre, with almost universally disastrous commercial results.


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).

Following the last of these concerts, Wright began work on what would become his second solo project. Unlike his rather sleepy 1978 release Wet Dream, however, this new album, titled Identity, would not feature Wright's name on the cover at all. Instead, the spring 1984 release was billed as the debut album by Zee -- a creative project created almost entirely on a Fairlight synthesizer by Wright along with ex-Fashion singer Dave "Dee" Harris.

While Roger Waters' Radio K.A.O.S. (which we looked at in last week's column) also embraced synths and modernized production techniques, the ex-Floyd leader's highly-recognizable vocal and lyrical sensibilities managed to give the music at least a vaguely Floydian feel. In the case of Identity, the lyrics and songs on which were written and sung entirely by Harris, and the distant, arch voice combined with Wright's icy, clattering synthpop textures, sounded absolutely nothing at all like Pink Floyd.

Dominated throughout by the sound of the hugely-(over)popular Fairlight CMI synth, Identity was perhaps the most deliberately plastic-sounding record ever recorded by any member of Pink Floyd. It might be a sign as to how much faith Harvest Records had in the project that it was only ever released in the United Kingdom. Even then, Identity failed to make any kind of commercial impression and the project was abandoned quickly thereafter. Wright has since written off Identity as "an experiment that didn't work out," which might explain why it remains to this day the sole Pink Floyd solo recording never to make the transition to CD.

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, Profiles, Mason teamed with his production company partner, ex-10cc guitarist Rick Fenn, to create a kind of "showroom" soundtrack album -- in effect, music created to be used in movies and television shows or commercials to come later.

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.

War Of The Worlds

I've always been a big fan of The War Of The Worlds ever since seeing the 1953 version on T.V. one night when I was a kid, thus I was looking very forward to seeing what Steven Spielberg would do with it. Since Sarah had no interest in going, I headed over to the theater alone earlier tonight and caught the 10:25 showing of the new version (which was missing the beginning definite article), unable to wait for the weekend.

Holy cow.

I'd heard that Spielberg's intention was not a "straight remake" of the 1953 version of the movie, but rather a modern re-telling of H.G. Wells' original telling of the story. What I was not prepared for at all for just how dark and unsettling this would be on the big screen. War Of The Worlds isn't the kind of escapist "America (Fuck Yeah)!" moviemaking you might be expecting at all - in fact this isn't so much a "war" as a fucking rout (to paraphrase a line spoken by an ancilliary character). There is also something about those Tripod machines that just gets under your skin and won't leave: that weirdly-classical yet alien look to them, the roving heat-rays that can flash-cremate dozens of extras at a time, or (most likely) that soul-shattering siren of doom they emit just before they engage in battle -- a minor key death knell played at stupendous volume.

I also like that there are no overall explanations of what the hell is really going on while it happens: what little you know of the war is either inferred instinctually or by overheard conversations which may or may not be correct. That, and a host of visual cues (some of them subtle, some of them a bit more blatant) bring to mind the mind-numbing chaos of September 11 - that familiar helpless sense of complete shock and stunned surprise was replicated in a style that I'd normally describe as "beautifully" if it didn't feel morbid to say so.

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.

A couple of points before I finish about two issues a lot of people will likely have with War Of The Worlds...

First, of course, is the movie's ending, which is done in exactly the same way Wells intended. Even to those familiar with the original book or movie, this ending cannot help feeling like a sudden cop-out following the incredible carnage wreaked almost nonstop beforehand (there is also a secondary plot resolution which is what really strained plausibility for me, but it was forgivable in the wake of what I'd seen until that point).

The second issue is the main character being played by the new favorite American celebrity pinata Tom Cruise (thanks to his propensity to come off as a raging gigglemuppet when he steps off-camera and interacts with the real world). While I do wish to hell the man would just vanish into some ethereal celebrity Asgaard when he walks off of a movie set, Cruise still has the ability to surprise me from time to time with his acting or his choice of roles. This time around, I am relieved to say that he plays a human being instead of a cartoon -- in fact, his character is a selfish, rather gladly average witted asshole who is anything but a hero figure when the shit hits the fan. While the usual movie cliches abound when dealing with Cruise's relationships with his estranged children, Cruise still comes off likable and believable in the end.

Needless to say, I highly recommend this flick. Happy Fourth!

Sunday Synthpop Brunch: Roger Waters

The writing may have been on the wall ever since the shambolic end of the Animals tour in July of 1977, but it was nearly six years later in the anticlimactic aftermath of The Final Cut that Pink Floyd seemed to disappear for good. Of course, there are many who believe that the band never truly reappeared after this time frame, but that is another matter for another forum.

During the period between the release of The Final Cut in March 1983 and the appearance of A Momentary Lapse Of Reason in September 1987, every member of the "classic" 1970s Pink Floyd lineup released a solo album (in many cases their second) and pursued a musical career outside the Pink Floyd framework with varying degrees of passion and success. Also, being the 1980s and all, each member also dabbled in the synthpop genre, with universally middling-to-nonexistent commercial results.

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.

While he had found a measure of success in the spring of 1984 with his weirdly tuneless (not to mention grossly self-centered) debut solo release The Pros And Cons Of Hitch-Hiking, it was with 1987' s Radio K.A.O.S. that Waters found himself going head-to-head with his ex-bandmates what what, in retrospect, was the worst-possible album to challenge them with on any grounds.

Slated to be one of the dominant albums of the summer, Radio K.A.O.S. appeared in June of 1987, accompanied by a big push from Columbia Records at radio, print and MTV. Realizing early on that he would be fighting a publicity war against his ex-bandmates, Waters finally doffed his carefully-constructed anonymity by appearing in T.V. interviews, magazine articles and even in his own music videos. In spite of his newfound accessibility, however, Waters was never able to sell the idea of Radio K.A.O.S. to the public (though there sure was a lot of appetite for sniping comments at his ex-colleagues and vice-versa), and he could only watch in frustration as the record just grazed the bottom end of the Top 50 while two cuts ("Radio Waves" and "Sunset Strip") briefly reached the Top 20 of the Rock Airplay chart before dropping straight away.

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.

While the reunited Pink Floyd album A Momentary Lapse Of Reason was certainly no one's idea of a spartan, back-to-basics rock record, at least that machine-made monster still managed to sound enough like a Pink Floyd record in the end to keep the fans interested -- with K.A.O.S., Waters sounded like a guest vocalist on his own remix album.

The other drawback to Radio K.A.O.S. (and this is a big one) was the concept itself, which was quite possibly the most harebrained in the history of the form. Imagine if you will a fusion of The Who's Tommy and Planet P Project's Pink World with a dash of the 1938 radio broadcast of The War Of The Worlds thrown in towards the end. Even Waters himself seemed aware of the unweildy nature of his narrative -- while declining an opportunity to discuss the backstory of the album with MTV, he uttered the immortal words: "I can't, it will sound crazed."

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.

Aye, but this is where we come to the final rub ... the unkindest of all, you might say: very few people ever saw the Radio K.A.O.S. On The Road tour. While Waters' name and history might have been enough to sell more tickets in a year without any competition from his ex-bandmates, that year was not 1987. In many cases, tickets for the reunited Pink Floyd tour were actually put on sale weeks before K.A.O.S. was even released, and the resulting overwhelming stampede towards the familiar brand name stomped the Radio K.A.O.S. tour into a bloody smear at the box office. Disheartened and bitter, Waters retreated from the road for what turned into a twelve year layoff, with only his excellent 1992 solo album Amused To Death (his only release that truly stands up to any of his work with Pink Floyd) to fill the gap.

Sunday Synthpop Brunch: Berlin

In celebration of the forthcoming reunion of the classic Pink Floyd lineup at the Hyde Park Live8 concert on July 2, there will be a subtle shift in the subject matter of the Sunday Synthpop Brunch in the next couple of weeks as we focus on bands or music with a Floyd connection in one form or another.

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.

Their career now following a hopeful upward trajectory, Berlin had achieved a mainstream breakthrough in 1984 thanks to the single "No More Words" which had nearly cracked the Top 20 of the Billboard Hot 100 that spring. However, this breakthrough had come at a cost: the confidence of their leader, bass player and primary songwriter John Crawford. The pressure on Crawford to succeed had been mounting ever since Berlin made their unlikely breakthrough in 1983, a surge in popularity which was equally attributable to a) being the right band in the right place at the right time, and b) the all-powerful promotional element of controversy.

It was around February of 1983 that Berlin's debut EP Pleasure Victim, recorded on the cheap and initially released on the independent label Enigma (before being picked up for distribution by then-newbie Geffen Records), suddenly became a hot property. At first, all of the commotion surrounding the band was due to the absurdly button-pushing lyrics sung by Crawford and lead singer Terri Nunn on the single "Sex." 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 US Festival, Berlin suddenly found themselves poised for stardom.

Released the following spring, the Mike Howlett-produced Love Life represented a compromise of sorts between Crawford and the powers that be at Geffen Records, who had now become the band's full-time landlords. When first presented with the album masters, the label wasn't overly enthusiastic with the results and wondered where the hit single was. To help in this process, Geffen tapped noted disco producer George Moroder and his protegé Richie Zito to produce a couple of rejected songs from the Howlett sessions -- "No More Words" and "Dancing In Berlin." The results of that idea, as mentioned above, was the band’s first verifiable major hit. Score one for Geffen.

While Crawford may have been understandably upset that Geffen was already focused on recouping their investment and turning Berlin into a hits machine rather than letting the band grow at their own pace, he certainly couldn't argue with the commercial results of Moroder and Zito's interaction, either: in comparison to "No More Words," the Howlett production "Now It's My Turn" peaked at a lowly No. 74. Love Life also didn't maintain its sales pace for long -- despite being certified gold, the album represented a drop off from the platinum sales level achieved by its predecessor.

It was during 1985 that, according to Crawford, Berlin was adrift without a rudder. Instead of listening to where his heart thought the band's music should be going, Crawford began listening to what other people (namely, record executives and producers) were telling him instead. After all, he reasoned, they were right about "No More Words," weren't they? Writing on his recently-started website, Crawford attributes the dismissal of guitarist Ric Olsen, as well synth players Matt Reid and David Diamond (the latter a key collaborator in the band's early sound) during this period to the musical uncertainty and additional pressure to succeed spawned by Love Life. As the founding member of Berlin, Crawford was fiercely protective of his position as the leader, even though he was increasingly relying on the consultations of others who were now steering him away from the sound of "The Metro" and towards a more mainstream rock feel. With the three "other" members gone, and the band now down to a core trio of Crawford, Nunn and drummer Rob Brill, it was time for Berlin to make a move to the much-vaunted "next level."

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.

Perhaps moreso than any other record from that time period, the Top Gun soundtrack is one of those "guilty pleasures" that is filed well out of sight these days by people who wish to keep their musical reputations in one piece (cough cough). The shame with owning up to liking Top Gun isn't so much the songs themselves being so brainlessly, diabolically catchy, but the production on the album itself. Talk about a record that just screams 1986 -- Top Gun was loaded down with some of the most cheesetastic production values to ever grace a soundtrack album, mixed red-hot and designed to be cranked up louder than hell on your IROC-Z stereo system.

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.

Still, with an international #1 single to kick off the proceedings, Geffen figured they had a guaranteed smash on their hands and released Berlin's second full length album Count Three And Pray a month later. Representing a near-total change in musical direction for the band, Count Three And Pray featured Nunn's increasingly-assured and dynamic vocals in a setting not terribly unlike the songs on the Top Gun soundtrack -- thick beds of rock guitar chords and glistening synth chords pinned down by that intricately-created, larger than life 1980's drum-and-bass sound that was all the rage in those days (best evidenced on the track "Heartstrings"). There was also a lot of well known names on hand to lend assistance (Ted Nugent, Elliot Easton, Patrick O'Hearn, Kane Roberts), thanks to the considerable rock credentials of producer Bob Ezrin.

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 ...

While Geffen was bitterly disappointed by the public's rejection of Count Three And Pray, the band themselves were devastated. Perhaps unsurprisingly, things fell apart quickly in the early part of 1987, and the band effectively ceased to exist after Terri Nunn departed for the solo career the label figured she was destined for in the wake of "Take My Breath Away." The last official release from Berlin after that was a decent best-of album released for the Christmas 1988 sales rush. End of story.

Crawford and Brill bounced back almost immediately (at least in artistic sense) with their next project, The Big F. Functioning as pure catharsis for Crawford after the flameout of Berlin, The Big F was a blistering alternarock/metal hybrid that was intended as an angry upraised middle finger to the music industry (thus the subtle band name) and received about the level of promotion you would expect for such a project on a major label (a subsequent Big F release on a different label met a similar fate in 1993).

Surprisingly, Nunn's solo career crashed and burned on startup in 1992 when she released The Moment Of Truth. A year later, following the dissolution of The Big F, Crawford and Nunn made an abortive attempt to write music together once again, but Crawford's disillusionment with the music industry at that point ultimately rendered the reunion moot. End of story again.

Ah, but in 1996, Berlin magically reunited as a totally new (and apparently very Goth-friendly) lineup fully under Nunn's control (this followed her acquisition of the Berlin name following some name-ownership dealings with Crawford that left the two at odds for years). A live album of this new lineup featuring a couple of newly-written songs and titled Sacred And Profane tested the commercial waters for this new lineup and apparently found them good (though sales were a fraction of the albums done by the "classic lineup"). In 2002, Voyeur , the first studio album credited to Berlin in sixteen years appeared in record stores. While researching this article, I also became aware during a visit the reconstituted band's website of a brand new Berlin album apparently being released on July 5 -- an all-covers effort, cheekily titled 4play.

Now for that Pink Floyd connection I was talking about ... while producing Count Three And Pray with the band in 1986, Bob Ezrin was also starting work with guitarist David Gilmour on what would become Pink Floyd's first album since the departure of Roger Waters: A Momentary Lapse Of Reason. To keep himself in playing shape over the intervening years since The Final Cut and his About Face album and tour, Gilmour had become an in-demand session player on various albums by artists like Bryan Ferry, Pete Townshend and Arcadia. While most of his guest appearances on these albums are pretty easily recognizable to any Gilmour fan, perhaps his greatest non-Floyd guitar solo appeared on the epic ballad "Pink And Velvet," the final track on Count Three And Pray. Let loose for nearly three minutes over the song's extended outro, Gilmour lays down a breathtaking, fiery solo that at times brings to mind his fretwork on "Comfortably Numb" and on the future Floyd classic "On The Turning Away."

THE DEAD WALK!

Holy fucking shit.

O.K. then, now that Hell has truly frozen over at last, I am going to go to the corner and get a nice, tall, icy soft drink. I will also thank providence (or whomever) that this is happening overseas and not anywhere within 500 miles of where I'm sitting. My bank account is therefore safe.

If these guys announce a tour, however, all is lost.

Sunday Synthpop Brunch: The Egg

Long before acts like The New Deal started attracting attention with winding, improvised sets in a style perhaps worst described as "jamtronica," Oxford's The Egg blazed the trail by fusing instrumental virtuosity and cutting edge recording technology through two rich, varied albums and a series of rapturously-received (and highly visual) live performances at sundry U.K. music festivals.

One of the most unique (and sadly overlooked) acts to come out of the England during that high-flying period between the ascent of "BritPop" and the arrival of "Girl Power," The Egg (not to be confused with the early-70s prog-rock outfit which lacked a definite article) was formed in 1994 by twin brothers Matt and Ned Scoff (drums and keyboards, respectively) with bassist Dave Gaydon and guitarist Mark Revell filling out the lineup.

From the start, The Egg sounded like two or three different bands mashed into one as funked-out, itchy guitar licks danced madly around a bouncing, busily chattering rhythm section while beautiful, thick sheets of shiny synths and dreamy piano arpeggios cascaded all around. Perhaps due to their music being almost entirely instrumental in nature (and the band being unafraid to break out the synths when the occasion warranted), it was tempting to think of the The Egg as another would-be player in the exploding electronica scene that was moving forward at flank speed in their home country at the time. While such comparisons almost certainly bought the quartet some added notice when electronica was briefly flirting with mainstream popularity in the U.S., The Egg never truly belonged in the same category as their more explicitly beat-driven "contemporaries."

The first and most immediately noticeable difference between The Egg and, say, The Chemical Brothers, is the music itself, which (in the case of the former) was always actually played in real-time by the band rather than programmed on sequencers, samplers or effects boards. Secondly, the Egg's music was fun to listen to, and nowhere near as arms-length perfect (or predisposed to darkness, for that matter) as most of the electronica crossing the ocean at the time. These factors alone made The Egg's debut release Albumen a complete surprise when it appeared stateside in early 1997.

With the exception of Prodigy'sThe Fat Of The Land and The Chemical Brothers' Dig Your Own Hole, nearly all of the imported electronic music of 1997 that was supposed to break wide open in the U.S. failed to do so. As part of that intended new wave, Albumen went down with the rest of the pack and marked the first and last time The Egg would have an album released in the States. Back home, while the quartet remained a cult-level attraction, their fortunes were beginning to look up by the time their more overtly electronic sounding follow-up (Travelator) album appeared in late 1998. While this second Egg album also failed to dent the U.K. charts, the single "Getting Away With It" managed to make an appearance on the U.K. Top 75 singles list and, if nothing else, gave them a signature song to close out their sets with.

Of course, it was from this very promising stepping stone in their career that The Egg stumbled. Doh! At least in this case, though, the blame does not lie with the band but with their label, which fell victim to that New Era bugaboo called "corporate reorganization." Set carelessly adrift just as they looked ready to make a decent commercial impression at last, The Egg seemed to just vanish into thin air.

Happily, the story does not end there: while researching this post, I discovered to my surprise that the band did not break up at all, but continued recording and performing and released their third full-length album late last year. Titled Forwards, it appears from all accounts that The Egg are still successfully persuing the same dizzying multi-genre approach they have been over the last decade, though with a more chilled-out feel to some of the tracks (many seem to bring up the work of fab French duo Air in comparison).

Sunday Synthpop Brunch: Submarine

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 SkinDiving, in the fall of 2000.

Despite the Boyd's thickly layered production, a melodic and accessible batch of songs, and a range of samples giving inspirational props to everyone from Chet Baker and Billie Holiday to Perry Como, the arrival of Submarine on U.S. shores couldn't have come at a worse time. Attempting to play catch-up with far too many similarly-styled trip-hop duos and trios that had arisen and disappeared in recent years (such as Mono, Baxter, Olive, Morcheeba, and Lamb) put the trio at an immediate disadvantage from which they were never able to recover. Thus, the only sizable splash Submarine were able to make was on the Billboard Dance Music charts, where their uptempo single "Sunbeam" managed to scrape the Top 15.

There was another song on the SkinDiving, however, that I feel deserves special mention on its own, and that is the yearning, loping reverie "Evergreen." Thick with the kind of squelching, slightly off-kilter synth tones that bring to mind the antics of cartoony fellow countrymen Moloko, "Evergreen" is a perfect blend of Ukairo's aching, emotive vocals and Boyd's detailed electronics. With a bit of tweaking for length and perhaps some additional sugar coating via. remix, "Evergreen" just might have given Submarine the hit they needed to stay afloat (sorry) for at least one more album.

Sunday Synthpop Brunch: Julee Cruise

I realize this is a bit of a late post for a "brunch" this week, but I'll make up for my tardiness with a full plate of dreamy goodness.

Having spent the early part of his career as a musician on the Catskills resort circuit (as well as a songwriter/arranger for artists such as Shirley Bassey and country singer Mel Tillis), film composer Angelo Badalamenti first met director David Lynch when he agreed to score Lynch's 1986 masterpiece Blue Velvet. The two have been an inseparable creative team ever since this first collaboration, though Badalamenti has kept himself very busy between Lynch projects scoring films in nearly every conceivable genre, from Nightmare On Elm Street 3: The Dream Warriors and City Of Lost Children to National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation, The Beach, and A Very Long Engagment.

It was during the process of scoring Blue Velvet, however, that Badalamenti stumbled across the voice that would provide him with his best-known musical achievements. While searching for a voice to sing "Mysteries Of Love" (the film's central "love theme") with the kind of naked, angelic innocence Lynch was after, Badalamenti eventually realized that the ideal choice was none other than his talent scout, Julee Cruise.

The results of Cruise's whispery, delicate voice singing Lynch's intentionally naïve lyrics set to Badalamenti's gorgeous bed of synths were so striking that a full-length collaboration between the three was inevitable. Finally released in the summer of 1989, Cruise's Floating Into The Night was an almost ambient work of weightless sonics and heartsick paeans to love and loneliness, much in the same style as "Mysteries Of Love," though the occasional dramatic flourish injected a rather menacing undertone to the album at unexpected times. Unsurprisingly, Warner Bros. had no idea what to do with the record, initially marketing it to accounts in rather shallow fashion as a new spin on The Cowboy Junkies album The Trinity Sessions. While both records did share a soft, shuffling swoon to them, any comparison bewteen the two ended at that point: Badalamenti's rich repertoire of influences made Floating Into The Night sound like an almost indescribable mix of modern synthwave, late-1950's romantica, and classic torch song laments. There was also a weird, alien feel to the record that (at the time of its release) had no stylistic label, but what would eventually be known a few years later as trip-hop.

The next collaboration between the three was a bizarre, surreal performance piece staged at the Brooklyn Academy Of Music in November of 1989. Titled Industrial Symphony No. 1: The Dream Of The Broken Hearted, this piece was constructed of a couple of new compositions and several selections from Floating Into The Night. Staged on what looked like a burned-out, half-completed Broadway stage, the symphony was prefaced (at least on it's video release) with a dramatic prologue acted out by a Nicolas Cage and Laura Dern (stars of Lynch's 1990 cinematic release Wild At Heart). The rest of the "symphony" was about as strange as anything Warner Bros. ever released in the 1990s (with the possible exception of the Mr. Bungle catalog): as the "voice of heartbreak," Cruise appeared nearly throughout the performance, singing songs while suspended thirty feet in the air or while being filmed trapped in the trunk of a car parked on stage. Even better, at some point what looked like a bipedal skinned deer staggered about the stage, and there were lots of midgets running around with work lights ... well, I guess you'll just have to see it.

While it was almost completely ignored upon release, Floating Into The Night, became a hot property in the late spring of 1990 thanks to the wild popularity of Lynch's dramatic television series Twin Peaks. Not only did the T.V. show feature an instrumental version of "Falling" as it's theme song, but Cruise appeared in the show singing songs from her album as well. Since no soundtrack album for the show was available at the time Twin Peaks-mania hit, Floating Into The Night had to suffice, and Cruise suddenly found herself floating just under the A-list radar as "Falling" took off at Modern Rock, and exposure from the TV series propelled Floating Into The Night as high as Number 74 on the Billboard Top 200. The phenomenon even made it overseas: while Cruise's album never managed to crack the U.K. list, two singles managed to make the lists as "Falling" hit the Top 10 in November of 1990 and "Rockin' Back Inside My Heart" skimmed the Top 75 the following spring.

For a couple of years after Twin Peaks took off and Lynch's star rose in Hollywood, there was hardly any new music from Cruise and Co outside of "Summer Kisses, Winter Tears" (which appeared on the soundtrack to Wim Wenders' Until The End Of The World in 1991), and "Questions In A World Of Blue" (from the soundtrack to Lynch's disastrous feature-length prequel to Twin Peaks subtitled Fire Walk With Me). During this period of relative downtime, Cruise made the head-turning decision to join The B-52's on their Good Stuff tour in 1992 as a replacement for the departed Cindy Wilson. What many fans didn't know about Cruise at the time is that her singing voice as heard on Floating Into The Night is only a shadow of a much wider range she has at her command. Effortlessly belting out upbeat punk-pop songs alongside Kate Pierson, Cruise managed to keep the B-52's on the road during perhaps the most uphill battle of their career.


Following the Good Stuff trek, Cruise re-teamed with Lynch and Badalamenti and released The Voice Of Love at the end of 1993. This time, however, Cruise found the odds stacked against her. While David Lynch may have been the Golden Boy of Hollywood in 1990, the bloom had come off the rose since that time, and the overwhelming critical and popular backlash following Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me pretty much ensured an icy reception for The Voice Of Love. Despite (or perhaps because of) a similar feel of creepy suspended-animation to that of Floating Through The Night, Cruise's second album sank without a trace. This also marked her Cruise's last collaboration to date with Badalamenti and Lynch.

In the years since 1993, Cruise has maintained a relatively low profile. Following an appearance on the Scream soundtrack in 1996, she slowly began to re-emerge through guest vocal work with electronic artist Khan's 1999 album 1-900-Get-Khan and as the featured vocalist on Hybrid's international dance hit "If I Survive" in 2001. Attempting to build on her re-acquired visibility, Cruise released a third solo album in 2002 through Varese. Perhaps predicatably, The Art Of Being Of A Girl is a very different kind of record than either of it's predecessors, incorporating many elements of modern electronica into the production and featuring the full range of her singing voice on record at last. Sadly, it met the same fate as The Voice Of Love.

Sunday Synthpop Brunch: Waterlillies

Ever been in a store and picked out a record to buy simply because something about it (the cover art, the titles, the producer, the label, whatever) looked kinda interesting? Tempted was one of those records for me.

Released in early August 1994, Tempted wasn't one of those records that occupied my CD changer months at a time, but instead a work that I found myself returning to on a few different occasions over the following months. Nearly 11 years later, Tempted still sits on my shelf, and a recent rediscovery of it's swirly treasures yielded this week's post.

For a brief time towards the end of 1994, it looked like Waterlillies would break out from the New York dance underground and make a serious play for the pop audience, as Sire Records released a couple of singles from Tempted and worked hard to break them at the radio level. Made up of producer Ray Carroll and vocalist Sandra Jill Alikas, Waterlillies had formed in the late 1980s and had released a similarly pretty debut album called Envoluptuousity to virtually no reaction at all in 1991. Perhaps best summed up by the somehow insistent swoon of “I Wanna Be There," Waterlillies specialized in music that was dance-floor friendly, yet incredibly soothing with Alikas' breathy, yearning vocals layered over a thick, pillowy bed of electronics.

Almost immediately upon release, Tempted represented a swift change of fortunes for the duo. While failing to make any inroads on the Billboard Hot 100, remixed versions of the disco-leaning title cut and the blissfully intoxicating “Never Get Enough” both generated considerable heat at danceclubs (the latter track even managed to top Billboard's Dance Chart). Encouraged by the warm reception, Waterlillies assembled a touring band and played an extensive array of shows in an effort to reach that much-talked-about "next level" of success. Apparently, such a break was just not in the cards.

Since very little biographical information exists on Waterlillies, it's impossible at this point to know exactly why Caroll and Alikas split the band up in 1995 (Dropped by the label? Artistic differences? Personal reasons?). Regardless, It is rather surprising and sad that the duo called it a day so quickly after this frustrating near-miss. Who knows? The third time could have been the charm...

A Half-Hour Of Reality Blah Blah

Enjoying a beautiful Saturday off of work today, since Brian and I switched days off this weekend. So, while I have a half hour to kill before possibly heading over to Cold Stone Creamery for a sinfully delicious ice cream concoction, I figured I'd write another "life" post.

In matters of work, Brian has a new full-time job he starts on Monday which is great news for him yet potentially rotten news for me, at least as far as free/vacation time is concerned. While this development won't be fundamentally altering my current work schedule at all, it does pretty much zap my ability to take days off in the hope that he can cover me as he did when I was sick for a few days a month ago.

In an ironic twist, Brian has also switched sporting engagements. This news would normally have me tapdancing across the floor in glee, but in the current circumstances it actually complicates things more than they were before. The last three summers have seen me using up my allotted vacation time taking Saturdays off in lieu of shorter Sundays while Brian played in a baseball league from May through July. The idea was we'd simply switch weekend days (like we did today) for a three-month span. Sundays are shorter days, hourwise, and I found that I greatly enjoyed having Saturdays off and was more able to go out and do things with friends than I normally can't do on Sundays due to our differing schedules. The drag with this switching off was that being on a salary figured at x hours per week, the only way I could keep from falling "behind" in work hours would be to use a few vacation hours every week to "fill up" my work time ... and by the time Brian's baseball "season" was over, my vacation time was totally used up. Thus, when I heard that he had switched to playing golf in a Friday league instead, I was immediately thrilled that I would actually have some vacation time to burn for a change...until the "new job" news screwed that all up. Now I actually have vacation time to burn and no easy way to burn it. Wunderbar.

Another thing Brian's new Friday commitment torpedoed was next weekend's Zombi concert. A difficult decision ensued: theoretically, I could pull strings somehow and get this to work, yet I also realize that I'm going to have to pick my day-off battles for the time being since my rescheduling resources are pretty damn limited. Thus, the Zombi show got the axe. Sorry, Karl. :(

In the much better news department, I am slowly but surely edging back towards financial daylight at last after barely getting by the last two months and change. Helping matters along here was an unannounced raise at work -- nothing spectacular, but an additional 7-8% of take-home pay definitely can't do any harm to my situation -- and a much-smaller-than-expected insurance bill this month. By my calculations, my horribly emaciated bank account should finally start gaining some weight by the middle of June. Hooray.

There is another matter slowly appearing on the horizon that will require some deep thought reflection, and posting space, as well as more fun financial worrying, but that can wait for another time (hint: it has to do with this condo). Right now, I think we're off to get some ice cream (a celebration treat for myself for the above financial news) and then, later this evening, Sarah and I are heading out to meet up with some of the "old gang" down in Twinsburg. Saturdays off truly rawk.

The Sith Hits The Fan

WARNING: For anyone reading this, buried in these incoherent ramblings somewhere are some thoughts on Revenge Of The Sith. These thoughts are laced with what many call "spoilers," so if you haven't seen the movie yet, you might want to wait until you have before reading this.

It's a bit hard to remember now being nearly thirty years ago, but I think I saw Star Wars somewhere around a month after it was released. I'm pretty sure I was out of school at the time on those glorious summer vacations that seemed to last an eternity when you're eight years old, so we'll say June 1977 and leave it at that. My parents had gone out the night before and seen the movie with their friends. The next day, my mother and my "Aunt Marilyn" (her best friend at the time) took my brother and I and Marilyn's son Paul to see it: which I suppose indicated that they were pretty into it (or at least felt that it might keep us out of trouble for an afternoon). I remember very little about the experience, save for a couple of key iconic parts and telling my dad later that evening to his amusement that I really dug the Empire (which at that time meant Darth Vader).

To this day, I think we only saw Star Wars once in the theater, though it wouldn't surprise me to discover it was more than that, since theatrical movies back then played for months instead of weeks at a time. The movie certainly had a profound influence on my interests as a kid, since from that point onwards, just about any movie or T.V. show that had anything to do with space adventure was on my "must see" list, whether it was network shows like Battlestar Galactica and Buck Rogers In The 25th Century, or movies like The Black Hole and Battle Beyond The Stars.

When The Empire Strikes Back was released in 1980, my best friend at the time (Rob VanNortwick) and his father took me to see the Saturday matinee showing on Day 2. As with Star Wars, I am unsure if we saw this more than once at the cinema, though I'm a little more sure that we did not. Not that it mattered, really, since it was this movie that officially made a full-blown Star Wars geek out of me. The expansion of the scale involved in the movie probably had the most to do with it, with new characters and planets and a much longer view of the battle between good and evil (suddenly Darth Vader was not The Bad Guy, but a cog in The True Bad Guy's machine, et cetera). Sure, I had a lot of the toys and had read some of the rather silly Marvel comic books by then, but I think I was still too young before 1980 to really achieve that slobbering degree of loyalty that separates the geeks from the casual fans. After Empire came out, I found myself suddenly compelled to spend stupid amounts of allowance money at Gray Drug across 12 Mile Road every week collecting all of the trading cards, novelizations, magazines, and making-of/behind the scenes books I could lay my hands on.

It goes without saying that by the time Return Of The Jedi came out in 1983, I had to be one of the first to see it (nevermind that I'd already swallowed the novelization and comic book adaptations whole by the time it was released). Jedi, incidentally, also started up the "opening day" tradition of seeing Star Wars movies for me, which has lasted to this day. By now, I had fallen in with a cadre of fellow Lucas geeks in my junior high school years, and we made a group event out of opening day by somehow wrangling all of our parents to let us catch a show right smack in the middle of a school week.

May 25, 1983. Ah, this was a day to be remembered: about a half-dozen of us made our way to the Americana Theater (we had to have been dropped off and picked up again by somebody's parents...though I cannot at this time recall whose) after being let out of a particularly endless day at Alice J. Birney middle school. This was the pre-multiplex days, and the Americana had two screens housed in a building as large as most of the modern facilities in use today. Even considering how freaking huge the auditorium was, the line outside the theater was the longest I had ever seen for a film up to that point, and peppered with other kids from my school. After what felt like an eternity, we got inside and watched that fucker in 70mm Dolby Stereo as part of a joyously racuous audience (lots of lusty cheers and boos as the main characters appeared on screen) and had a whale of a time. Nevermind that dozens of chattering Ewoks and a handful of goofball monsters in Jabba's court made Jedi at times feel like something out of The Muppet Show, this was the capper event of my pre-adolescent life.

Save for multiple repeat viewings of the trilogy throughout high school after moving to Ohio and falling in with a smaller (though no less devoted) group of fellow superfans, that was pretty much the end of Star Wars being an active part of my life. Save for the VHS releases (which took years to happen back then), Star Wars was largely "a Michigan thing" as I had outgrown the toys and trading cards end of the whole enterprise by the end of 1983 and was finally starting to move on to other special interests. For about thirteen years after that, life went on, and while I would occasionally watch or riff on the "Holy Trilogy" with friends when the occasion warranted (and pick up the remastered widescreen versions like a good fanbitch), the thought of ever seeing Parts 1-3 or 7-9 actually happen never really crossed my mind.

Ah, but then George Lucas decided to test the waters for a new trilogy at long last by releasing the original films in theaters once again in early 1997. While the chance to see these movies on a big screen for the first time since I was a kid certainly would have sold me on that point alone, Lucas sweetened the deal by adding all kinds of enhanced visuals using modern computer animation effects to flesh out and spiff up scenes that were out of adequate technological reach at the time of the original productions. A few friends and I took in each re-release on opening night, dutifully keeping with tradition, and while some of the new CG work left me a bit cold (and frankly distracted at times), it was certainly an interesting experience, and it raised our expectations over what to expect in the future...at least in a visual sense.

By the time The Phantom Menace (the first of 3 prequels to the original series and set some four decades before the events of the original Star Wars film) finally appeared to incredible anticipation (and expectations) in 1999, I had made the fatal mistake of expecting to be as blown away as I was when I first saw the original films as a kid. But something was different about this film...I wasn't anywhere near as engaged as I was beforehand. Even though I did wind up seeing Phantom two or three times at the theater, it was an empty experience that multiple viewings couldn't improve. It felt like this movie was aimed squarely at kids my niece's age, which made me wonder for the first time if the original films weren't. Was this what watching the original Star Wars felt like to a thirty year old in 1977? The younger generation sure seemed to eat it up, but I was having real problems accepting what I was seeing, no matter how amazingly snazzy some of it looked.

Over the years, I've come to think of The Phantom Menace as being in the same league as Indiana Jones And The Temple Of Doom in that during both films the first half is fucking excruciating to sit through, while the second half has enough extraneous activity onscreen to keep you interested...yet both ultimately fail to wipe away that agony incurred during the first hour.

Attack Of The Clones followed to my far-diminished expectations in 2002, and (if nothing else) has stood up better over time than The Phantom Menace, though it was occasionally just as arduous to sit through. At least in this case the pain was spread out equally over the running time instead of during the opening hour. Jesus, I'm not trying to imply here that the original trilogy was on par with Masterpiece Theater, but the acting in these films seems so incredibly wooden it's staggering (which I'm quite certain is a by-product of acting to green screens and doing first-takes whenever possible). At least the "good parts" of Clones packed enough thrills to make the godawful "romance" scenes bearable, and the CGI Yoda actually looked like Yoda (and not like a doddering, post-chemo Cookie Monster like in Episode 1).

So now, at long last, we come to Revenge Of The Sith, ostensibly the very last of the Star Wars movies (though I believe that about as much as I believe in the Easter Bunny), and the one that ties together the prequels with the original classic trilogy. Sith takes a pretty tall order on the latter behalf, and I guess in that department it came off as good as can be expected: with this movie, it's not so much the surprises (though there were a couple) as the way things come together in the end that are meant to provide entertainment to longtime fans.

Like good little geeks, Sarah and I went over to the fuckin' mobbed local Regal multiplex for the midnight showing of Sith last night. Despite the scary amount of people present for this thing (five showings on five screens - all sold out) the crowd was thankfully pretty well-behaved during the film. The only real jerk in our vicinity was The Expert, as I refer to him. The Expert is that guy who knows everything about the film going into it and makes a show of explaining every cameo, spaceship and plot development to his group of buddies seated around him. Of course, The Expert wound up sitting just behind my right shoulder, but luckily for me he was drowned out most of the time by the sound system. Hooray.

O.K., let's talk movie.

Holding Sith up to the rather less-than-amazing standards of the last two movies, I'd say it was easily the best of the three, though it's certainly not without it's share of problems, many of which are the same issues discussed above minus the overtly kiddie angle (this is pretty violent going at times, particularly when Anakin starts to sizzle like an overcooked burger). Even dependable Chancellor Palpatine starts to grate on the nerves a bit after his unveiling as Darth Sidious (oh please, like you really didn't know). Immediately after this unveiling, Palpatine switches over to high camp mode -- a near-comical slide into Scooby-Doo-style overacting which worked in 1983 when you didn't know The Emperor from Adam but feels very "off " when you're used to how silky smooth evil Palpatine was without lots of latex makeup and contact lenses on. The movie's other big meanie, General Grievous, is by name alone the single lamest villain idea we've seen from Lucas yet. Watching him during the course of the movie, Greivous is hard to take seriously as a threat of any kind -- he spends most of his time castigating droid underlings in the manner of an asthmatic Montgomery Burns while stalking around looking like some kind of biomechanical toothpaste dispenser.

In the "plus" department, though, I have to admit I found a lot of the "droid soldier" humor to be a scream ... but then I am a sucker for throwaway background jokes like these. There were lightsaber fights galore throughout, with Mace Windu vs Darth Sidious a real highlight as well as The Mother Of All Lightsaber Battles in the final third of the movie. During said clash, Obi-Wan Kenobi's anguish before and during the matchup was pretty convincingly portrayed (Ewan MacGregor has long been one of the bright points in the prequels, acting-wise). Perhaps the most satisfying plot surprise in the film for me was the truly diabolical "Order 66," which definitely belongs on Palpatine's Greatest Hits collection of anticipatory chess moves.

Even more remarkable about Revenge Of The Sith is that I actually liked the character of Anakin Skywalker. For the first time in this new trilogy, the central character in all of this silly geekery comes off believably as a person and makes for a fittingly noble Jedi Knight...well, at least for the first half of the movie, anyway. After a certain plot point is reached, poor Anakin reverts back to vintage Clones form as the petulant, bratty sulking teenager you want to smack upside the head after throwing his Linkin Park records in the trashbin. And, I'm sorry, but Anakin/Vader's "evil" glare -- tilting his head down while glowering at the camera like Alex in A Clockwork Orange -- is just not very convincing.

So, that's that. We have come full circle at last. The credits roll after the storylines merge -- Luke and Leia are shuttled away to live in seclusion on separate worlds, Yoda huffles off to Shuffalo, Jar Jar Binks walks by the camera without saying a single word (woo!), and the familiar black armored figure of Darth Vader watches from the bridge of a two-headed proto-Star Destroyer as the framework for the Death Star is being set up (wow, these took longer to build than I thought) while the Emperor and a young Grand Moff Tarkin hover around nearby.



I guess in a sick way I am grateful for the existence of these prequels, though I certainly think to myself after seeing the last of them that sometimes it's better for a story to simply say "This is The Bad Guy. Why? Because, that's why!" and leave it at that. If there is one single problematic thread running throughout the entire new trilogy, it's having to accept supreme intergalactic badass Darth Vader as a precociously cute ten-year old kid running around yelling "yippie!" and then seeimg him as a terminally annoying and bitchy teenager ... not to mention unbelievably, incredibly, and galactically stupid (not to mention gullible) when it counted the most. It's very difficult to reconcile this backstory with the calculating and precise Vader we came to know during the orginal trilogy: a figure that frequently force-choked incompetent officers to death, tortured and froze Han Solo alive just for the hell of it and abetted in the annihilation of an entire planet for crissakes. Realizing that all of this came on because Vader really misses mom (and/or wanted to make his secret wife happy and secure) just sounds so damn silly...

NP Star Wars Episode III - Revenge Of The Sith Soundtrack (surprise surprise)

Sunday Synthpop Brunch: Performance

After spending the last couple of months talking exclusively about electropop acts from the 1980s, I think it's time for the Synthpop Sunday Brunch to try a change of venue ... at least in a temporal sense.

Everything is cyclical in the music biz, and with the high profile re-emergence of danceably melodic post-punk rock (Interpol, Franz Ferdinand, Stellastarr, Hot Hot Heat) over the last couple of years, it would seem to follow that it must only be a matter of time before synthpop (post-punk's pretty-boy younger brother, if you will) reclaims the spotlight once centered on the likes of The Human League, Soft Cell, Thomas Dolby and Berlin. Should another moment of mass-appeal glory for the genre come around again, the English foursome Performance is definitely the band most suited to be standing at the front of the stage.

Cursed with a band name that twists the simple act of Google searching into a bloody nightmare, Performance owes their existence to a happy accident. Longtime friends Joe Cross (electronic percussion) and Joe Stretch (lead vox) would show up and perform their own compositions in front of Manchester's Café Pop. Apparently, the owners of the establishment had finally had enough of the duo and were throwing them off the premises just as Billie Marsden (synths) and her sister Laura (guitars/backing vox) came walking by. Following this fortuitous meeting (and the subsequent purchase of a sequencer), Performance was born and their debut single, the braying electro-punk missive "Dotted Line," was issued at the end of 2003.

Now the current toast of the Manchester electropop scene, Performance inhabits the middle ground between ultramodern and anachronism. By utilizing some classic punk attitude, the invasive analog synth textures of modern electroclash, melodic old-school synthpop arrangements (think Japanese Whispers-era Cure or early New Order), and Stretch's occasionally glam-foppish delivery/stage presence, Performance raise the genre above its fey, withdrawn anti-image of recent years and restore some of its fashionable swagger and sass. Luckily, they also pack some killer tunes, the best of which became their second single.

A sublime exercise in criminally addictive electropop, "Love Life" is one of the catchiest damn singles I've heard in a very long time. Ever since I first stumbled across this track a couple of months ago**, "Love Life" became one of those songs that became a bit of an obsession for me, occupying my head for hours at a time whenever I'd think of it (this pleasantly persistent brain itch that was only scratched by landing a physical copy from here this past week).

For those who enjoyed the above track, several other songs by Performance - in complete and demo form - are available for streaming on their website. At last check, an full-length album is currently in the works and should be released in the UK this summer on Polydor. Woohoo!


** I first came across this song when a friend pointed me to a site hosting its promotional video, which apparently ran on British MTV around the time of the single's release at the end of November 2004. This rather strikingly iconic clip (the band calls it "a three minute meditation on the escalating levels of militancy in the generation below us") is available for viewing here.

Sunday Synthpop Brunch: Propaganda

Things started happening quickly for the Dusseldorf-based art-synth collective Propaganda following a relocation to England in 1983. At the time of the move, the year-old group was made up of keyboardist Ralf Dörper, programmer Andreas Thin, percussionist Michael Mertens and vocalists Suzanne Freytag and Claudia Brücken.

Signed to producer Trevor Horn's Zang Tumb Tuum (ZTT) Records (the home of such similarly, wonderfully bloody-minded "pop-art" projects as Frankie Goes To Hollywood, and The Art of Noise), it seemed that Propaganda had found an ideal home as their somewhat theatrical and very-European sounding mix of icy synthpop sensibilites and stone-faced classical pretense was a perfect fit with Horn's detailed, expansive production style and ZTT's provacative, sometimes-obtuse image marketing department.

The band's debut ZTT single, 1984's "Dr. Mabuse," did a workmanlike job of priming the pump for future success: cracking the U.K. Top 30 and generating quite a bit of demand for the band's first album. However, this level of anticipation would be severely tested as Propaganda were forced to wait nearly a full year to release their follow-up single ("Duel"), and had their album kept on ice as well, the reason being that ZTT had their hands full promoting Frankie Goes To Hollywood's debut album Welcome To The Pleasuredome on a worldwide scale.

By the time Propaganda's debut album (A Secret Wish) was released in June of 1985, Thein had already departed the lineup, fed up with ZTT's timetable. From the looks of the album credits, it doesn't looks like he was missed too much as the list of guest contributors to the record is almost a news story in itself: Steve Howe (!?), David Sylvian, Ian Mosley, Glenn Gregory and Stewart Copeland are listed, along with extensive production guidance from Horn (and featuring typically bleak photography by longtime U2 confidante Anton Corbijn).

While the chart singles from the album were striking on their own right, it was the remarkably cinematic piece that opened A Secret Wish that had me from hello. A reflective masterpiece, “Dream Within A Dream" is a nine-minute classical/pop hybrid that layers the words of Edgar Allan Poe over a sprawling, hypnotic musical bed that owes more in structure to opera than anything troubling the UK Top 40 in mid-1985. With Freytag providing a Nico-esque reading of the lyric, the music around her steadily builds up from a lone trumpet to a stormy, chaotic midsection and then leaves us floating off in a calm, gorgeous reverie ... a synthpop take on Pink Floyd's "Echoes," if you will.

Capitalizing on the album's momentum, Propaganda briefly toured the UK in the fall of 1985, but after that, everything went pear-shaped in a hurry. Perhaps the most catastrophic development was the departure of Brücken for an eventual solo career. As the outspoken, moody central figure in the group's interviews and videos, Brücken's loss was possibly a mortal blow on its own, though group tensions with the record company concerning the release of a poor-selling (though highly-rated) remix album called Wishful Thinking may have been exacerbated by the singer being "married into" ZTT (specifically, art director Paul Morley).

It wasn't much later that Propaganda quietly disintegrated: the victims of an interminably-lengthy legal battle with ZTT's legal department (the usual "artistic/business differences" kind of story). Following the cessation of label hostilities in 1988, a new version of the band emerged with Mertens as the only original member. Joined by Derek Forbes and Brian McGee (both ex-Simple Minds and both originally employed for the band’s 1985 tour), and American vocalist Betsi Miller, the Mertens-led incarnation of Propaganda released 1234 through Virgin Records in 1990 to very muted response. Since that time, only a rarities compilation called Outside World has surfaced from the depths. A much awaited all-new followup release to 1234, originally slated to appear in 2000, has never materialized.