Septenary

Steel Train - Steel Train - 2010 (Buy it)


Arcade Fire has the number one record in the United States this week. Sure, that doesn't mean the same thing it did 30 years ago when it was Thriller. Or 20 years ago when we were talking about Nirvana. Or even 10 years ago when it was all about...um...*NSync.
It's still pretty extraordinary. Knocking off a label driven powerhouse like Eminem is no mean feat. It was done by a band that has really no business being (gasp) popular. What it means for the record business I won't get in to here. You know the drill, the labels will try to emulate the Indie phenomenon of a band that never catered to anyone else's tastes and did it all by developing a fan base and embracing things like good musicianship, the internet, etc. I can't wait to see how UMG tries to manufacture that.
Actually, I can wait.
But, while I'm waiting I want to bask in that success not because I like The Arcade Fire. i don't, in fact. I don't get it. I think "Keep The Car Running" is less a nod to Springsteen as I keep reading and more a retread of John Cafferty and the Beaver Brown band who, themselves WERE ripping off Bruce. I just wanted to applaud the Arcade Fire and allow that independent spirit to segue to a band whose record I can't stop spinning: Steel Train.
The road that took me to this band is actually interesting (to me, natch!)
I love the band, fun. I was turned on to them because of a blog called PopDose. I had done some spec writing for them when they were the estimable JefitoBlog a few years back. I got some heat for my Guides to Queen and Adam Ant. It was great and it got my reviewing rocks off a little bit. Jeff and his crew reviewed this band called 'fun' and I took a chance. For the better part of last year "Aim & Ignite", the debut record has been on heavy rotation in my house. My three year old daughter can sing the chorus to their song, "All the Pretty Girls" and you've been hearing "Walking the Dog" in Expedia commercials the last few months.
My wife, knowing how much I loved that record and also that in our new house we would have room to highlight our turntable, dust off the old lps and fill the house with pops and cackles, bought me the album on Vinyl. A gorgeous gatefold edition, three sides, heavy plastic. The record came with a CD as well, as if I needed one. But still. It is fantastic.
As a dedicated music lover, it's never enough to just bask in a band's one record, if you really love them you need to go back into their past and dredge, find the hidden nuggets, you know? The lead singer, Nate Reuss, came from an Arizona band called The Format. A power pop group that I would say is a cross between Jimmy Eat World and Queen. Their album Dog Problems is superb.
Nate left The Format and helped form fun.
And I started following them on Facebook and Twitter. It was on Twitter that one of the members of fun was going on and on about how great Steel Train's record was. Little did I know that the leader of Steel Train is 1/3 of fun. But, I figured, eff it, I love fun.'s record. And if THEY can't stop talking about this new record I'm gonna try it.
Now, I have a new philosophy when it comes to buying music. If a band puts their record out on the standard issue CD or iTunes, i'm really not all that interested in paying full price. I won't steal it. But I will either wait for it to be offered as an iTunes deal for $4 or I'll get a music industry friend to give it to me.
But. If a band goes that extra mile. Puts out the record on vinyl AND includes a digital download I will happily pay double the going iTunes rate for that experience.
That's what I did with the new Albums from The Gaslight Anthem, Against Me!, The Hold Steady and the forthcoming Jukebox the Ghost's Everything Under the Sun. Grace Potter and her friends at Disney can suck it with the 1 day only $3.99 download through Amazon. And, even at that price I've barely given the record a cursory listen. Why bother? It's ephemera. It's just files. The music is secondary to how much music you have. How big the collection on your device and how easy it is to access. Blah to digital downloads.
Steel Train has a lot of options. But I just needed one. The LP, which came with the requisite digital version AND a (highly mediocre but intriguing) reworking of the entire record with all female artists such as Nellie McKay, Amanda Palmer, Scarlett Johannsen, Tegan and Sara, etc. The bonus record is called Terrible Thrills Vol. 1. The label for Steel Train is Terrible Thrills.
But there's nothing terrible about this record (see what I did there?).
There are lots of flavors on Steel Train. Big, anthemic sounds, soaring choruses, production and arrangements that tip their hats to the best of lush 80s sound but with an immediacy and confidence that is ginormous helpings of ear candy.
I know, reviewers are supposed to traffic in simile. (It's Midnight Oil meets T. Rex on a Coldplay soundscape!...sometimes it kind of is though....) But I don't think that's fair.
Steel Train is an album by a band that loves McCartney as much as they do Lennon. It's as powerful a record as I've heard in a while, frantic at times, pulsating with urgency challenging you not to join in. As in the opening track "Bullet" which calls to mind Big Country (in a good way) and REQUIRES the listener to point to the last row in a stadium of fist pumpers and shout "Like a bullet! A bullet! A bullet into the night!". Ot the schizo, Indie power rock of "Turnpike Ghost". Or the nod to early 00s electro pop bands like Ima Robot with the song, "Touch Me Bad".
The record never lets up. Even when it slows down on "Fall Asleep", a song that so blatantly rips Pachelbel's progression (no song since Blues Traveler's Hook has done so with such abandon) but it doesn't matter because it's so sweet that, by the time you get there, you're so in love with Jack Antonoff and his crew that you will find yourself starting the whole record all over again.

Steel Train. A

The Listening Posts for Meat Loaf are done. Well done, I might add.
And Madonna is underway!
Like always, the can now be found here.
Go!

The entire Reflecting Pool series is now up and viewable at my personal blog.
Like I said, for the time being, this place is being moved.
The downside to my blog is that I am having trouble making comments work. iWeb is not cooperative unless you are a MobileMe subscriber.
I know there are a lot of Ant fans out there so that's what made doing this Reflecting Pool so exciting.
All of his albums are there. Dirk, Kings, Prince, Friend, Strip, Vive, Manners & Wonderful. PLUS Persuasion! PLUS the remastered bonus tracks, PLUS the Redux, PLUS the album of B-Sides.

That's just a few links. Go to the "archive" button to find all the reviews.
I will eventually be moving all the Listening Posts and Reflecting Pools to that site.
The bad news is the comments ( and that there's no "earlier post" link) but the good news is that I can host songs for as long as I am able.
In some cases, especially the Ant stuff, for a limited time, you can get stuff that would be really difficult, like Persuasion, or "Who's a Goofy Bunny, Then?".
So, I ask that, if you enjoyed The Listening Posts that you come to my blog and enter it in you RSS reader of choice. (I like Google Reader. And my email client.

Hope to see you there soon. (There are some comments places, so leave one.

Ta!

The Elvis Costello series has begun and it can be found along with an Adam Ant Reflecting pool HERE.
Thanks for stopping by. Right now there are no comments but they will be coming soon, I hope.

So, if you go to www.allenlulu.com and look up at the top right you will see a page called Listening Post. You can subscribe to that RSS feed however you like.
I've begun porting over the entire Kissening Post Series. And I will do the same for the Gary Numan as well as other. And that will be the place where the new Listening Posts will all be found.
Thanks.

Hi.
I don't know if there's anybody out there. I don't get a lot of comments. I may only have two readers. I don't know.
But, that's not what I do the blog for anyway. Let's face it. We do it for the cash.
I've decided to be a little more proactive with my "brand". As an actor I've often shied away from self-promotion but I gotta face it, it comes with the job.
I've always had a website. www.allenlulu.com but I barely maintained it and, truthfully, barely even remembered that I had it.
I've redesigned it and decided to take it more seriously. If you go there you will see plenty of links. Twitter. Resumes. Demos. Stuff.
There's also a new feature. Podcasting. Yes. Beth and I finally took the podcast plunge. Since we decided to do IVF (In Vitro Fertilization) we thought it might be interesting to podcast about the experience, much in the same way that we blogged about Zoe's birth.
The first episode is up on the site under Podcast and it's also available on iTunes. You can subscribe and stuff and we think it might actually end up being pretty interesting.
There's also an area for blogging. And I've decided to move the blog there. I don't love blogger. It's annoying in many ways. And I really don't want to learn Wordpress. Or any others. I flirted with the idea of doing a Listening Post Only blog, porting all the reviews over and then printing them as a book.
Then I realized that what I love about the internet is the duality of it. It's ephemeral but lasts forever. That's just neat.
I don't have the ability to add comments to entries yet. I'll figure that out. But I never got many comments to begin with.
So, if you are an avid reader of Septenary, please come over to allenlulu.com and subscribe with whatever doo-hickey you use. I use Google Reader. Lots of people use RSS. I dunno how you do it. But I would love it if you came along for the ride.
Thanks.
See you over there.

Gary Numan - Pure - 2000

Numan wasted little time building on the success of Exile. Okay, three years. But what a nice three years those must have been.
Numan excoriated many of his fans' beliefs on Exile, attacking God and had his biggest success in a while. So, after touring and rebuilding on that success he went back in the studio and came out with.....
A Nine Inch nails record.
Angry. Industrial. All of what we love about Trent and Marilyn and you know what? Why the fuck not? After all, Corgan, manson, Reznor all count Numan as a major major influence. If he's going to be relevant he might as well emulate and learn from those who learned from him. It would be stupid and mean to expect him to be as forward a thinking innovator as he was 30 years ago. I mean, come on, the guy practically invented electro-New Wave. Howzabout he just apply what those who learned from him to his own style and see what he can come up with?
"Rip" sounds like "Closer" part two. And, guess what? It was a hit. Yep. Gary was back on the (UK) charts with this NIN rip. But, as NIN rips go, it's pretty awesome.
There are no suprises on Pure and it's hard for me to fully recommend because it's pretty damned repetitive. I was listening to "Rip" and it seemed to go on FOREVER. After it was over I realized that I had two copies of the song on the iPod and it played them back to back and I never noticed that one song ended and other began.
That's not great. But, it's still progress, Pure is. From Sacrifice to Exile to this.
The album really gets going toward the end. "Listen to my Voice" is a lovely melody sung in that nasal Numan tone we loved so long ago.
"Prayer for the Unborn" and "Little In Vitro" are songs that deal in some way with what Gary and his wife, Gemma, were going through, with miscarriages and IVF as they attempted to have children. They have been successful. And so are the songs.
You won't be surprised by Pure. You might not even like it. You might think Numan is doing himself and us a disservice in his slavish adoration of Reznor and Manson.
I say it's pretty damned good. All things considered, suffering through the likes of Warriors and Machine + Soul to get here was well worth it.




Grade B-
ASide: Pure, Rip
BlindSide: Listen to My Voice, Little In Vitro
DownSide:

Gary Numan - Exile - 1997

Exile opens with the industrial return-of-Jesus-Christ song "Dominion Day". It's angry and ominous, almost confessional, bleak and harkens back to the previous album, Sacrifice, as a template for Gary's revitalized direction. In other words, the funk is dead, bring on the dire.
Once again Numan is in control of almost all the instruments, save a guitar here or keyboard there. This abject control, in addition to his singular theme, that God and the Devil operate on the same playing field (and questions what we think of each, namely God's "goodness"), succeeds in creating one of the darkest and most satisfying records of Gary's career, or at least of the previous 10 years.
The textures and rhythms on some of Exile could be interpreted as almost middle eastern. At least that's what I hear in the drum programming. An earthy, dusty, ethereal and sexual pounding. Again I am listening to the extended versions of all these tracks so each song is about 1/3 longer than the original release. I don't know if that matters. There's a hypnotic quality to all of Numan's late 90s material and it makes for a relatively easy but terrifying listen.
Numan excoriates himself in interviews about albums like Machine + Soul as well he should. He was pandering to what he thought would work for sales and the result was way below par.
This is him, on the other hand, talking about Exile:
""Exile" to me is one big horror story. Personally. I don't believe in God at all, but if I'm wrong and there is a God, what kind of god would it be who would give us the world we live in? It certainly cannot be a good deity. At best God would have to be cruel, selfish, and he would have to have a huge ego. "Thou shalt not worship any other gods before me." That is just one huge ego trip."
Certainly he is focused.
Exile is a drum-loop heavy record and you might even recognize the track "Dark" from various movie trailers of the decade as well as "Dark City" and some video games.
I like Exile in theory a little more than in practice but that's a paltry dismissal because I'm not a big fan of industrial rock. As that sort of stuff goes, it's very satisfying.
It also sounds like a good album to _____ to. After all, it's about God n' shit.
Right?






Grade: B+
ASide: Dominion Day, Absolution
BlindSide: Dark, The Angel Wars
DownSide:

Gary Numan - Random & Random 2 - 1997 & 1998

I've never covered "tribute" or cover albums before. In 1997 I was in a now defunct record store on la Cienega Blvd in LA. I don't even know how I ended up in a conversation with the girl working the floor. She was a hard looking, fatigue wearing lesbian (don't ask how I know that) who recommended this album to me. How she knew I would be interested in Gary Numan or anything Numan-esque is beyond me.
The record is hard to find and I had no idea that there was a sequel, the link to which I've included here.
Some of the stuff is terrific. Earl Brutus' version of "M.E." with it's Queen breakdown in the middle for one and An Pier's sweet "Are 'Friends' Electric?" for another. Some of it isn't. But it's worth grabbing if for the only reason that it makes Numan seem totally relevant again.
Many of the songs on the first volume repeat themselves, the classics like "Me! I disconnect from you" and "We are So Fragile" (The Jesus Jones version being one of my favorites.) and some are downright nearly unrecognizable from the original, like The Orb's 9 minute techno opus version of "Jo the Waiter".
Amanda Ghost's version of "Absolution" from that year's Exile is lovely followed by a crunchy and great second version of "We are So Fragile" by Bis.
Other versions like Dave Clarke's "Cars" is basically nothing more than a remix of the original. But Deadsy's version of "Replicas" builds on the paranoia of the original and mines it for some truly end-of-century persecution psychosis (Deadsy is Gregg Allman's son Elijah Blue's band)
Jimi Tenor's Merry Go Round Calliope of terror version of Down in the Park is inspired, it should be pointed out.


Random Two is a bunch of remixes. I hate remixes.

Gary Numan - Sacrifice - 1994

This is not your father's Gary Numan Record. Forget all that you know or knew of the former Mr. Webb. The saxophoniness? Gone. The futuro-electro-funk? Swept away.
Gary's got inspiration and it's from God and that dark sludge we call the 90s.
What I am actually listening to is not the release that you can hear on Lala (see below). I've got the extended Numa release. Every song is longer and none of them suffer for it.
We haven't heard Gary's spoken word despair since, well, Are 'Friends' Electric? and here they are on "Deadliner" mining the same aural tapestry that Marilyn Manson and Trent Reznor would be making popular just around the corner. Was Gary forward thinking (again?) or was he following the trend of the day? No matter. He's not interested in selling to the masses. Been there, done that. He's got bigger fish to fry. God, for one. From what I understand, Numan's atheism will take a much larger presence on fothcoming releases but here it's only touched on with songs like, "Pray" and "A Question of Faith". The nuclear winter industrial backdrop is really a perfect setting for Gary's paranoid vision and worldview.
The industrial rhythms and cold, depressed vitriol really drives this record. Sure, I can hear how Gary would have fucked these songs up a few years back with Saxophones and overly sexualized R&B; backup singers, but without them to drag the proceedings into some weirdo gotta-get-on-the-radio belief system they stand starkly and remind me why Numan was so successful in the first place. His asperger's which rendered him open to interpretation as arrogant or diffident only serves by the music. In fact, I wonder if he could have made this record, or the Machine Trilogy or even New Anger without it. And when he tried to reach out and incorporate soul music to his repertoire he could only fail since connection is probably the hardest thing for him.
"This is not love, this is not even worth a point of view" Numan once sang on "I Die, You Die". He was right. Because what he was really singing about is that "Love" is really just perspective and if you can't connect, for whatever reason but especially if you aren't wired that way, then "love" truly is just a point of view.
Sad? No. Because that's perspective as well.
I'm just glad to have Gary Numan back.
There is actually a love song on this album. "You Walk in My Soul" was written for Gemma, who started off as a fan and later became his wife. It's as pretty as anything Numan's done; he does seem to have a knack for those sweeping electro-ballads, if it is a little rote.
Sacrifice is overblown, overdone and very self-conscious but for me it works on every level and is a connector back to the original Numan style and worldview and the very reason he is looked at as an innovator rather than a relic.
I notice that Gary plays all the instruments himself on Sacrifice (save a guitar or bass on a couple tracks) and I think that serves him well. Again, I'm not sure he's the best collaborator. When he's in total control (or working with drug addicts like Paul Gardiner) he's able to get to his core. And he can rock again, like on "Love and Napalm", he isn't afraid of it anymore. The marriage of machine/soul never worked. The marriage of metal/machine has always worked. It's a welcome rediscover, even if it does run out steam by the end.



Grade: B
ASide: Love & Napalm, You Walk in My Soul
BlindSide: Pray, Deadliner, Desire
DownSide:

Gary Numan - Machine + Soul - 1992

Dammit, dammit, dammit.
I'm gonna listen to this all the way through because that's the task I have presented myself. But...well, let's just let Gary speak for the record:
"I convinced myself [that Machine and Soul] was all right, that it was a 'clever' mix of funk, pop, rock and electronics. I almost convinced myself that I liked it. Not long after it was released though, I had to admit, only to myself for a while, that it was not what I'd hoped. There was nothing wrong with it as such, it just doesn't have much of me on it - not playing-wise, but emotionally. It is the most 'non-Numan' Numan album I've ever made, for my style, sound and character are completely missing. Whatever people think about my music, it's always been very personal. So, at a time when I was experiencing extreme lows in my career and private life, the last thing I felt like making was a shiny, polished pop record. But that's what I'd done."

He went on: "Nothing was right...That music, those clothes, that haircut. Imagine falling off a ship in the ocean, knowing if you stop swimming you're finished. That's what I was doing then. I was trying not to die."

There ya have it. Rendered anonymous on his own record. By himself! It's your own fucking label, Gary Numan!
Crap.
Wanna be funk. Soulless soul music. What is this guy thinking?
But you haven't really experienced bad music until you've heard Gary Numan try to RAP on "Poison". Seriously.
And, you gotta believe me when I say, he does a cover of Prince's "U Got the Look". And it's bad.

And just look at that cover. Gary looks so...sad. Like he's trying to tell you not to buy this record. "Look, I'm trapped in here but you don't have to be. You can save your money. See all that negative space on this cover? That's what the inside of the record feels like. Save yourself. Buy a Nine Inch Nails record. Seriously. Those guys are good. I'm...I'm just gonna sit her and stare at my...ooh, shiny buttons!"

Gary just spent so much energy on trying to create a mutant hybrid of Machine music and soul music. (Hence the title) After so many years, here's hoping he got the hint and gave it up.




Grade: D
ASide: Machine and Soul
BlindSide:
DownSide: Generator, The Skin Game, Poison, Emotion...let's face it. This record is bad.

Gary Numan - Outland - 1991

First off let me say that there is nothing inherently "wrong" with Outland. Some songs, like "Soul Protection" are actually just fine. They are cold, industrial piffle, but they don't out and out suck.
It's the most Sci-Fi of Gary's Groove-Metal albums. But it's not very good. Allmusic guide gives it 3 stars but no actual review. And that's sort of a telltale sign of the music industry just giving up on him in general. Outland doesn't stay with you, doesn't mean anything and, were it not for the abundance of sci-fi movie samples, it would be of little interest at all.
Which saddens me because I really liked New Anger. But, like I said, it doesn't SUCK it's just not very memorable. Some tracks, "Dream Killer" & "Dark Sunday" might actually have had some resonance had Gary not been spending the past decade mining the same sound and rewriting the same song over and over.
It's really a shame because Numan could have mounted something of a comeback if he built on the sounds and songs from Metal Rhythm.
"Heart" is a pretty ballad, the kind we've come to expect now. They aren't surprising and therefore I find them useless. But that's a really harsh word to describe an album that isn't awful.
If you enjoy Numan's soundscaping and over-production then you will like this record. But you don't ever need to hear it. I don't think Gary needs to hear it. I don't think he listened to it while he was making it.
Even though he's grabbing snippets of sci-fi flicks like Blade Runner and Terminator, Aliens and Predator, there's no real cohesive focus on the record. And something like "Devotion" is just downright awful. An exasperating and desperate plea for relevance in the funk world from someone who has no busy trying to play there.



Grade D
ASide: Soul Protection
BlindSide: Heart
DownSide: From Russia Infected

Gary Numan - Metal Rhythm - 1988

Once again I joined the Columbia House Record Club. Or maybe it was another one. Back in the summer of '88. The promise of 8 or 12 free cds was too enticing. Never mind the high cost of subsequent CDs. or that if I didn't send the mailer back in by the allotted time I was stuck with some horrible featured title. This was how I was purchasing music in the late 80s.
One of the freebies I grabbed was "New Anger" by Gary Numan. I don't know if I was trying to recapture my youth (I hadn't bought a New Numan record since I, Assassin in 1982) or if I was just amazed that there was a NEW Numan record (In the states he was almost unheard from) or both, but I got it.
And it was good.
Great? No. But good enough. And now, listening to it 22 years later within the context of Gary's catalog I realize just how good it was.
By 1988 Numan had by far abandoned the sound that made him famous. The synth laden, electronic, post-apocalyptic, science fiction sounds of Replicas, The Pleasure Principle & Telekon were now 8 years gone. Even the bridging record, Dance, sort of harkened back to the Gary of old while embracing the jazzier sounds that Numan was so interested in and would throw himself into. Those records, I, Assassin, Warriors, Berserker (to a lesser extent), The Fury & Strange Charm, while keeping one toe in the dystopian wasteland, were now more funk and jazz focused and fans would have to accept that this was what Gary Numan was about, what he wanted to do and what he wanted his sound to be.
And they rejected him.
For good reason. If you go back and you read the reviews of those records they aren't good. None of them, actually. Not in total at least.
So, what did Numan do? He dumped his own label, Numa, signed with IRS and put out "Metal Rhythm" which in the states would be tinged with blue hue and called "New Anger".
Riddled with scratchy, metallic guitars and sounding very very much like it was influenced by Robert Palmer's "Heavy Nova", the new CD actually fills me with hope that Gary has found his footing.
The metal funk of "This is Emotion" coupled with the sprawling soundscape of "Hunger" open the record with promise. Even that damned sax doesn't bug me.
But it's the Palmer-ripping "New Anger" that sets the record off for me. It's the most metal and rocking Gary has sounded since Tubeway Army. It's hooky and catchy and it just works. Probably should have opened the record with it's cold Eurythmics sound and it's "Welcome to New Anger" screed. "Devious" is the closest thing Gary has come to a truly grooving song (It's still very Dave Stewart/Robert Palmer sounding but it avails itself of that fairly well).
It's also the most uptempo record gary's put out in years. If ever. It so closely resembles the "Machine Trilogy" that it almost sounds like a true return to form. "Respect" actually deserves a live rendition and the album closer "Don't Call My Name" is as haunting a piece of work as he's ever committed to vinyl.
I really like this album more than I did 22 years ago and even more writing about now than I did when I first relistened last night.



Grade: B+
ASide: New Anger, America
BlindSide: This is Emotion, Devious, Voix, Respect, Young Heart,
DownSide: Nothing really, this is a solid outing.

Gary Numan - Strange Charm - 1986

I had no idea, in 1986, that Gary Numan was still recording and releasing full length records. I am willing to bet that most people in the US felt the same way that I did. And yet, here he is, pumping out another one, his TENTH studio album since 1978. 10 albums in 8 years. Not even thirty. It's quite a catalog. At this point I wonder if Gary might have been better suited to putting out instrumental records like Jean-Michel Jarre. They certainly were working in the same idiom. He didn't, obviously. More interested Gary is in pushing Tessa Niles' and Linda Taylor's backing vocals further up in the mix and bringing in that violin which hadn't really been prevalent since Telekon. (The damned Sax is back as well, though.
The opening track "My Breathing" is as haunting as any of Gary's mid-80s output. The sax is, in this song, relegated to ethereal backing sounds and flows nicely in the mix of this decidedly mid-east influenced track.
I almost fell for it on "Unknown and Hostile". I almost believed that the first track was a lie and we were about to hear Gary Numan re-indulge his I, Assassin self when the guitars (!!!) crank in and the crowded Peter Gabriel sound fight each other through the tapestry and, I can hardly believe I'm saying this, make me want to hear the live version of this.
Then there is "The Sleeproom". A song so haunting and alternately sparse and gigantic that it could be placed next to "Child with a Ghost" or at least reign as a valid B side to that gem. And "New Thing From London Town" is one of the more energetic and positively danceable trance track ever to come out Mr. Numan's machines.
As Strange Charm plods along, with it's non-existent variations on the electro-funk theme one thing is very certain: Gary Numan has run out of ideas and if he doesn't do something to veer off this track I might have to abandon this Listening Post. From the repetitive droning of "I Can't Stop" to the blatant attempt at pop relevancy of "Need", I am finding my patience with Mr. Numan wearing oh so very thin. The album which started off so promising just devolves into run of the mill Numan.

Thing is, a lot of my reaction to this could be that I just plodded through The Fury and ANYTHING halfway decent could be read as inspiring. Dunno. Maybe.


Grade: C-
ASide:My Breathing, The Sleeproom
BlindSide: Unknown and Hostile
DownSide: I Can't Stop

Gary Numan - The Fury - 1985

Another year, another Gary Numan record. Time to LiveBlog.

1. The Fury - Maybe the ugliest and least interesting songs I've ever heard. Filled with samples from, what else, "Blade Runner". Funny, Gary was a harbinger of that movie, calling his skin jobs "Replicas" years before Ridley Scott named them "Replicants" and now he's so obsessed with the movie that he's sampling it on his records. And it's bad. The use of the term "New Anger" would rear it's head a few years later, though. Not horrible in the end, just kind of plodding.
2. "This Disease" Sounding a lot like something off Berserker mashed up with Peter Gabriel's "Sledgehammer". Not a good combination. As the lyrics say, "This is a bad decision".

It's nice to know that even Gary thinks the cover of the record is awful and probably put people off from buying it. I know it did me. He now says it makes him look like "he man who lost it all at Monte Carlo". I agree. It's awful. Gary, you're not Bryan Ferry.

3. Your Fascination By 1985 everyone and their brother had a synthesizer and fancied themselves the next Thomas Dolby or Howard Jones. Numan sounds like them with the flu.
4. Miracles - a dirge dressed up in Manheim Steamroller clothing. I dunno, this just reminds me of a Christmas song gone bad.
5. The Pleasure Skin The drum machine is programmed. The chorale font on the moog is fired up. The echo chamber doubling on Gary's voice is primed. And the result is...a song by definition only. Redundant at best. Gary sounds more like Adam Ant than ever.

This album is really trying my patience. I know that Allmusic rates it slightly higher than Berserker but at least Berserker sounded alive and had that "Child with a Ghost" song. So far this is, at best, a retread of mediocre material. If he was retreading his heyday or whipped out a guitar or something I might have more patience.

6. Creatures - Sounds like "One Vision" by Queen before it devolves into a cast off from Dance. Like "Boys Like Me" but nowhere near as good. And for a song to be nowhere near as good as something as mediocre as that is really something. I have to wonder how much Gary wishes he could have gotten Joan Armatrading to sing with him. But, really, Gary, she's never gonna do it.

A lot of this record sounds like "Simply Irresistible" and other songs by Robert Palmer. I don't know which came first but I know that one was better than the other. Guess which.

7. Tricks Hey! The sax is back! And it's better than ever! (Psst, no it's not but I've been drinking for the last three songs...) I think Gary Numan fancies himself the leader of some progressive jazz-electro fusion jam band. He's not, you know. Points for trying? Okay. But I get no money for listening. So it's a wash. And this song is bad.
8. God Only Knows Not the Beach Boys song but easily the most listenable on the record. The disembodied longing in Numan's voice works here and works well. With the first track, the best offering on the record.
9. I Still Remember And that sax is back. What is Gary Numan's obsession with this instrument? Oh, wait. It's 1985. Quarterflash. Romeo Void. Huey Lewis. It was the 2nd coming of the saxophone in rock. Only when it started it was almost ironic how these new wave artists were appropriating one of the defining instruments of early rock and roll and using it to forward their minimalist (read:edgy) soundscapes. Maybe this sounded fresh 25 years ago. It doesn't now. Superfluous sax solos always, to me, feel directionless and ambient, like a lead guitarist noodling through the pentatonic scale and not really writing anything for the audience's ears to grab a hold of. Any good solo is like a verse hook or a chorus. You should WANT to hear it, to get to it. But in these instances they just come across as improvisation.

Gary's overstaying his welcome with me.....



Grade: D+
ASide: Call Out the Dogs, God Only Knows,
BlindSide:
DownSide: This Disease, Your Fascination, Miracles