ChristgauBot

No Age too brutalist for you? Here's a heedlessly beautiful alternative. Read the misspelled lyrics and you might take these young Angelenos for lost post-collegians or just figure they're children in search of a magic place. But since you can't understand a word they sing, in the end you'll go with a sound that subsumes those vocals in an exalted high-speed weave. It's what might have happened if Steve Reich and Philip Glass had started a no wave band instead of ... read more

If Debbie Gibson already has platinum imitators, there's more to the world than is dreamt of in Madonna's philosophy. This unthreateningly dusky disco-dolly-next-door plays the field romantic-metaphorwise, with a weakness for can't-help-myself. She's less imitator than imitation, short on tokens of self-creation--her only writing credit is also the only time she threatens to play around.

For two whole albums in the early '80s, nearly 18 months, Martin Fry poised on the dizzying edge of parody without cramping up. Then he nosedived. When he came to, he'd turned into the disco dandy he'd pretended he was so much smarter than, doomed to envy Neil Tennant till the end of his alienated days. If you want to honor Fry's artistic integrity, The Lexicon of Love can be had cheap. Poetically, this cheapo looks cheap while making Fry seem more pop-savvy than he actually ... read more

A career downhill--hear Martin Fry turn into the disco whore he begins by parodying so lovingly ("The Look of Love," "S.O.S.")