Flipped through my records and found this and it went on leading to a grand start to a Sunday morning. This LP, from 1981, just as the political changes instigated by the arrival of naked, market economics in the US and the UK were setting in, ironised the whole materialistic early eighties Yuppie instinct surely better than any other record before or since.
A sleek, smart, beautiful album. Of course its modernist, but slightly cheap synth sound mires it very much in its time all these years later. Its messages though, seems as pertinent as ever. The themes of globalised capitalism, of the veneer of modern existence, the shallowness of what we all have to do to survive if anything hold more true now than when they made the record. It talks about things that albums based around electric guitars just don't and arguably can't.The stark callow coldness of the nine to five reality.
The whole point of the album is surface. What it's saying and what it sounds like are two sides of the message. In some ways it's quite a resigned record because its political consciousness is so advanced that it realises that all resistance to the consuming machine is pretty much futile. Not bad for guys in their early twenties. The suits, hair, ponytails and high rise blocks of the album cover are masterful. That's the way we all live. Half the people who bought this record at the time were probably too young to know what it actually all meant in terms of human cost, the painful side to what on the surface sounds an upbeat album. They do now!
The group's next record The Luxury Gap was the one where they hit commercial payload in the UK at least. They'd refined and polished their sound and message for the pop machine and it paid off for them in terms of bank accounts. Apart from Let Me Go though, a quite wonderful song, it doesn't work as well as Penthouse & Pavement for me as a statement as well as a product. In many ways, in terms of the story it chooses to tell, this album has very few peers. It's a great, modernist, artistic statement about life.
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