Innovate never imitate - Music I Want in 2009, Part 7

In a year that electro-pop is back in favour in a big way here is a timely reminder of one of the most consistent and hard-working bands that has been tirelessly trying to raise the status of such music for six years now. They DJ in the UK and abroad, they run club nights, even their own club, and if that were not enough Command is their fourth album as a band and I have already mentioned their third album, Heartland, when it was released in 2007.

The defining streaks are command and control: almost military anonymity [band members are still officially Clients A, B & E] and the musical integrity remains untouched. If the agents at Station X had run riot, in the spare time that they didn't have, and used the machines to make music it would probably have sounded like this far earlier than it did.
I've got to get this - hence the post - as Heartland was in My Charts of 2007 and I can't understand why they are not better known already. It is of course released on the label Out of Line, which is their own, and also this...

Maybe they could run the country too.

Heartland

One good thing about buying albums completely unheard is the anticipation of listening for the first time. When you get something by an artist or band that you have never even heard before, and it exceeds all expectations, that is the best discovery of all.

The stupid thing is that I dithered about buying this album for over a month; the reviews I had read were very mixed and, aside from a few totally negative reviews that I ignored completely, one reviewer's favourite tracks seemed to be the least favourite of another! In the end I just bought it anyway. I first listened to it at home one evening because the postman had left it after I went to work and that is just as well as had I been listening to it in the car I would probably have driven into almost every stationary object en route.
If Heartland is not in my top ten albums of 2007 then it is going to be one hell of a year!
The reason for the disparate reviews may, I think, not be too hard to find. If you measure electro-pop in the terms of Goldfrapp and other 21st century albums, including the even more recently released album Trip The Light Fantastic by Sophie Ellis Bextor (I have this too; it is good and I might well review it later), Heartland will come as rather a surprise.
It is in a rather icy style and the music is much more stripped down to basics. It is a modern take on electro-pop as it was in the period 1979 - 1984 but with one important difference... Client is an all female band.
As for the music, you either get it or you don't and although they have borrowed much more in style, rather than substance, from that era there is one exception; track 5 is a cover version of Zerox that was released in July 1979 by the original line up of Adam and The Ants before they released their first album Dirk Wears White Sox, on 'Do It Records', later that year. It was released again as a single in January 1981, reaching #45 in the UK charts. It did not appear on an Adam and the Ants CD until 2004, when Dirk Wears White Sox was finally released with the earlier singles as bonus tracks.
Be that as it may this cover version is absolutely spot on (the "misspelling" on both albums is probably deliberate - Xerox® is a registered trademark) and it sounds as good as almost any cover version I have heard this year - and it is proving a vintage year for those already!

Stand-out tracks for me are:

• The opener Heartland, which is given a short reprise at the end, a trick that works well on this album.
• The irreproachable Lights Go Out. It may be derivative, according to some, but I simply don't care - just turn up the bass and volume and enjoy it for what it is! It is track 3.
• Someone To Hurt - track 6 - a rather slower one but none the worse for that.
• Köln - this is track 9 and if you like it but can't see where it is coming from I suggest the album Vienna by Ultravox (1980) to see how Germanic electro-inventiveness moved into UK chart music.

To be honest there is nothing even remotely mediocre on this album - the whole album is pretty much pitch perfect.

There Is A Light That Never Goes Out...

The 1980s haven't generally been held in particularly high musical regard for the last fifteen years or so, but it would be very wrong indeed to deny their existence.
For one thing the decade had its indubitable highlights - even if they were sometimes accompanied by miserablist lyrics, such as those of the track of the title of this post - taken from The Smiths 1986 album "The Queen Is Dead". Although I never much cared for their music at the time, sure as hell it was to prove an incredibly influential combination that released four albums of which this was the third. Stephen Patrick Morrissey wrote the lyrics for the most part while Johnny Marr kept the whole show from drowning itself in melancholy by dint of his inspired, and actually amazingly (before such things were really recognised as such) pop-hooked guitar parts. In fact their influence has if anything increased exponentially with the passage of time.

Another thing that makes the 1980s interesting again is that it is the last decade that current teenagers can't actually remember at all - and that in itself means that it is worth a retrospective if only so those of us who can are able to say "I told you so." with a meaningful degree of authority! Perhaps even more interesting still is that some of the bands spearheading the revival are also too young to remember it first time around, so they are able to take a fresh look at what it had to offer and just how best to interpret it twenty years later. Like all decades the 1980s didn't begin or end with the simple turning of calendar pages, but took influences from the preceding one and then ceded its own to the next.

If Debbie Harry were thirty-something years younger and happened to have black hair, which would however have admittedly missed the point of the 'Blondie' image, she [and the band for that matter] might now have looked like this...

For those of us old enough to remember, or even perhaps own, Blondie vinyl releases, or young and dedicated enough to still have the energy to search them out in flea-ridden second-hand record stores, the evidence in the artwork only becomes more compelling.

Written, with Georgio Moroder, for the film American Gigolo this was a huge hit in 1980.

Thinking along "Parallel Lines" the image below, adapted from the artwork of the US release, is the proof in black and white.

The band is Stefy and the four-piece hail from Orange County, CA (the real life OC but the fourth track on the album seamlessly blends the real thing with its small-screen alter ego) and is signed to US independent Wind-up Records, whose byline is the almost too-cheesy-to-be-true 'developing career artists' and their début The Orange Album was released in the US in late 2006.
Their first single Chelsea, a light-hearted and very catchy blast through early 1980s electro synth-pop territory, is out now in the UK and The Orange Album will be released here a fortnight tomorrow (23rd April - and distributed by Sony BMG) .
It is a timely reminder that the 1980s were also great fun musically and I for one can't wait...

...luckily I don't have to!

It might not be genre changing - and perhaps that is actually why it is so appealing - but if you hanker after more "new 1980s reminiscent pop electronica" then I suggest the following:

Client and their new album Heartland; it is gloriously unreconstructed but, very unusually, sung and played by an all female threesome 'Client A' , 'Client B' and 'Client E'. They are something like The Pipettes, and the circumstances of their formation are not so dissimilar, but they play and sing rather than sing and dance. Their influences are also quite firmly rooted in the music of twenty years later!
Dragonette (also www.dragonette.com) is an equally valid contender and the first single "I Get Around" is lead vocalist Martina's utterly wanton, yet also quite inadvertent, electro-pop riposte to Nelly Furtado/Timbaland's multi-million selling 2006 US #1 single "Promiscuous".
They aren't doing too badly for a Toronto couple that met randomly just over a year ago at a gig in their home city. They married four months later and, in the meantime, decided that London might just serve their joint musical ambition better! They soon recruited the other two band members once they arrived in the UK and it seems to have worked out quite well. For most of April they are on tour as the main supporting act for Sugababes - the biggest selling UK female act of the 21st century.