Some interesting oldies reappearing this month…
Marsheaux are, for me, fascinatingly enigmatic. They’re a Greek female duo, who I really know nothing about. Their debut E-bay Queen was released fifteen years ago this week, and it’s really hard to know what to make of it. It encourages you, somehow, to just close your eyes and enjoy it at face value – and that can only ever be a good thing.
It opens with M.A.R.S.H.E.A.U.X., the beautifully squawky band manifesto. Apart from the eponymous initials, it’s a thumping electro instrumental, with some great acid noises that appear halfway through. You would not, I think, buy an album just for this, and with that in mind, it’s confusing that anybody bought this in the first place, because there weren’t any singles either, but it’s definitely good.
It isn’t until Flash Lights that things really start to make sense. We know now, of course, that this isn’t Marsheaux‘s finest work, but it’s still enough to hook you in as a listener, and even if the “follow the tits” instruction in the lyrics is somewhat crass, there’s still plenty to enjoy here.
And it keeps getting better – for the first time, Shake Me is a track that quickly shows itself to be brilliant. With its catchy chorus and rippling synth lines, this nods sweetly to the past without actually being retro, and yet it isn’t exactly contemporary either. This is music for uncomfortable and awkward misfits, the world over. Which, by the way, is very definitely a good thing.
So wouldn’t it be really clever if Marsheaux threw something contemporary and familiar in at this point, just to subvert the pattern the have built already? Something like, say, the Lightning Seeds‘s lovely Pure? So that’s what we get – a great song, given new life with a female vocal and gloriously “pure and simple” synth lines, if you’ll pardon the pun. It’s a fantastic rendition of the song, and really deserved to be a huge hit by itself. If only it had ever been released as a single.
Play Boy keeps the run of great tracks going. It’s slower, and perhaps also a little darker, insofar as darkness ever really shows up on this album. It’s hard to define in a way – this is really a pure pop album, but it’s also slightly challenging, subversive pop – something that only comes as an import from Greece. Who knew that Greece had a strong music scene with its own synthpop artists? And with budgets to release items with packaging as beautiful as this, too?
Computer Love is, of course, a bit of a nod to the track of the same name that Kraftwerk debuted in 1981. While there’s little direct homage in the lyrics or sounds, and I’ve never seen them talk about it particularly openly, a lot of the sounds on this album seem to take inspiration from the Düsseldorf quartet – the focus is on tight, clear sounds, not broad pads or sweet, mellow atmospheres. Yet despite that, there’s a certain soft charm.
Tonight is one of my less favourite tracks on here: somehow the synth line is a bit too manic; the hand claps a little too heavily distributed; and for the first time it feels as though you’ve heard this all already. This is a consistent album, certainly, but that comes at a price of some tracks being a little too similar to one another at times. Then, of course, Marsheaux subvert their own form by covering the vocals with some crazy and unusual effects, and you start to wonder whether anything really makes sense any more.
The Game quickly picks things up again, though, with a brilliantly odd blip that doesn’t quite ever seem to be hitting its beat. It’s a lovely song, and possibly for the first time uses softer pad sounds to change the mood somewhat. They aren’t prominent, by any means, but this is a great song. Then comes Analyse, somewhat less subversive but every bit as much fun.
Ola Girizhoun is next, the only track to be sung in Greek. That’s a bit of a shame, really – they’re singing in English in order to make themselves seem more accessible to global audiences, and that absolutely works in their favour, but not without anonymising one of the things that makes them special – they aren’t native English speakers, and hearing them singing in their own language is a treat. Which makes it all the more interesting that this is actually a Chris & Cosey song, where Marsheaux have added their own lyrics. Work that one out.
Hands on Me is a lively piece with resonating synth sounds, but honestly a bit less actual melody than some of the earlier tracks. Then we’re onto the final track already – another cover, this time of the eternal instrumental Popcorn. This was, apparently, a huge radio hit in Greece at the time, and it’s a worthy cover, somehow just managing to stay on the right side of being extremely cheesy. It’s great, but at the same time hard to take very seriously. Maybe that’s a good thing, though – while lovely, and occasionally a little subversive, this seems to have been a pretty serious album up to now.
Five or six albums on, Marsheaux remain enigmatic, always taking unexpected steps. E-bay Queen, with its odd name and entirely unpredictable packaging, is a great debut. It has its weaker moments, but nothing that you could actually call a flaw – which is a very impressive way to kick off your career. But will we ever see them gracing the charts? It seems unlikely, somehow.
Your best option for hearing E-bay Queen is to find the mp3 download.
The final step we need to take with the NME Awards is to summarise all the winners in one single, easy-to-digest place. So, continuing with the part one of two-part NME Poll Winners 1952-1992, let’s do that!
Here are all the winners for specific singles, videos, albums, films, and books!
The group of media awards, for radio, TV, films, and venues.
Continuing the odd and eclectic categories from 1954-1992, the NME Awards still give slightly odd awards out to individuals.
Continuing some of the odder categories from the earlier NME Polls. For clarity, I’ve separated the “live” events from the other “musical” events, although I think the award category was sometimes the same.
Join us again next week, when we’ll finish this list off!
These are the top singles this week:
Here are the top singles this week!
If you were listening to pop music in the 1990s, you should probably have come across Dubstar. Their discography may not have turned out to be quite as extensive as it ought to have been, but there were plenty of good hits along the way.
The string of singles which started with Stars, Anywhere, and Not So Manic Now back in 1995-1996, and never really stopped until their split five years later.
Start with the 2004 compilation Stars – The Best of Dubstar, which gets you a whole load of highlights from all three albums plus a couple of acoustic versions and a demo.
All three albums are worth tracking down in their own way. Disgraceful (1995) is pure pop genius; Goodbye (1997) has too many tracks, but plenty of good ones among them; and finally Make it Better (2000) is darker, but still has things worth hearing.
Most of the remixes, apart from the Disgraceful bonus disc (1996).
There are heaps of singles with hidden goodies on them, such as the first disc of No More Talk, or the EP that was led by The Self Same Thing, which includes collaborations with Gary Numan and Ian Broudie of Lightning Seeds.
Well, way back at the start of 2014, we tried to predict what might be coming up this year. Let’s see how accurate those predictions were!
With a lot of care, we made our way into a brand new year by officially getting very excited about Awards season!
We went all out on investigating the history of the BRIT Awards, as well as covering the Grammys and – exclusively – our own Stowaway Awards!
Launching “exciting” new features in March seems to have become traditional on this blog, and sure enough, March 2014 saw the start of the hugely successful Beginner’s guide series. Which, incidentally, will be back very soon…
We celebrated the 30th anniversary of West End Girls, the 20th anniversary of Liberation, the 10th anniversary of Flamboyant, and the 5th anniversary of Yes, all in one action-packed Week of Pet Shop Boys.
In May, as every year, we celebrated the latest Eurovision Song Contest.
The middle month of the year saw us running the last series of reviews of early demos from Joy Division, New Order, Depeche Mode, and The Beloved.
In the height of summer (in the northern hemisphere), we celebrated our second anniversary, celebrated the addition of streaming to the UK chart, and looked at new releases from Sébastien Tellier and Andy Bell from Erasure.
In August, we ran a series of movie reviews, including Tomb Raider, The Beach, and Sparks‘ wonderfully obscure movie-to-be about Ingmar Bergman.
We held our second annual Week of oldies, with reviews of great and not-so-great albums from Lightning Seeds, Everything But The Girl, Yazoo, and others.
We posted our 808th post, and rolled back to see the finest singles of 2003 and 2004, as well as celebrating the 2014 Q Awards!
We celebrated the 40th anniversary of the release of Kraftwerk‘s Autobahn by reviewing a selection of their fantastic back catalogue.
… brings us to the end of 2014! Happy new year!
Two decades old this week is the Lightning Seeds album Jollification. You know, the one with all the hits on it! In an extended chart run it rumbled all over the place, eventually peaking at number 12, and showing itself to be a great example of the mid-nineties pop album.
Opening the album is what became the final single Perfect, one of three top twenty hits from this album. It perhaps isn’t the best song ever, but it’s got the sort of strong pop melody that you should probably associate with Ian Broudie.
That’s followed by the brilliant first single Lucky You, which you would be hard pushed not to remember. Listening to it now, two decades on, it’s difficult to put your finger on quite what’s so special about it. Perhaps it just captured a moment two decades ago, and has long since had its time. Or maybe this really is a great song? I suspect the Lightning Seeds‘ impact on pop music is now largely limited to Three Lions and Three Lions ’98, but this album does prove that they had other strings to their bow.
Open Goals is nothing special though, and so it isn’t until third single Change that we’re reminded what we’ve been missing for the last couple of decades. And it’s good, but it does sound very old now. I suppose you have to just try to enjoy it for what it is, and forget that it was twenty years ago already.
Side A closes with Why Why Why, which does have a chord change, but what it doesn’t have is any kind of memorable melody. There’s definitely some filler on this album, but fortunately there are enough hits to make up for the shortcomings of the other tracks.
Marvellous, starting the second half, is another hit, and although its swirly introduction is a little over the top, it does build its way up to become a great pop song, even though surprisingly it was the smallest hit from the album.
It’s downhill from there though. For Feeling Lazy we seemingly take a trip back to the 1960s, and My Best Day is a worthy attempt at a catchy song which somehow just doesn’t quite work. Punch and Judy is pretty poor, too. The final track Telling Tales does pick things up a bit, but by this stage it feels a bit like too little, too late.
So I think it’s fair to conclude that Jollification is a patchy album. But if nothing else, the aural journey back to 1994 is worthwhile, and when it’s good, it is very good.
You can find Jollification at Amazon and all major retailers.
After the relative success of last year‘s week of oldies, in which we took a week out to re-evaluate oldies from Depeche Mode (here), The Beloved (here), The Human League (here), The Presets (here) and Röyksopp (here), it’s time for its successor, which I’m imaginitively calling Week of oldies II.
I’ve already hinted at a couple of this year’s oldies. On Tuesday we’ll take a trip back to a slice of 1994 pop from the Lightning Seeds, which turns out not to be quite as good as we remembered. On Wednesday, we’ll listen to a defining piece of late 1990s house music as it celebrates its fifteenth anniversary. Thursday’s release is a best of from this week in 1999 for a much older act, and Friday and Saturday will provide even more surprises!
So stay tuned for the Week of oldies II!
There are just a few days left before we hit September, so it’s probably about time I warned you that things are going to change a little bit as we hit the start of Autumn…
Music for stowaways 