Some more post-punk/new-wave music fronted by Howard Devoto formerly of Buzzcocks, and whose other members have links to other post-punk and new wave bands –guitarist John McGeoch for example will later join Siouxsie And The Banshees, while keyboardist Dave Formula will join Visage.
The essence of Eno is strong within the music (although he has nothing to do personally with this album). Over addictive pounding beats, the band play motifs that are both dissonant and deeply catchy at the same time, sounding both like early Roxy Music, like some of the coming bands in the early Eighties (for some reason I kept thinking Teardrop Explodes), and also further into the Nineties. Jarvis Cocker cites Magazine as an inspiration behind Pulp.
I thought of “Magazine” as referring to the publication, but with song titles like Recoil, Burst, and Shot By Both Sides (which really sounds like it was an inspiration for Kaiser Chiefs) I wonder if it doesn’t refer to the magazine of a gun. With a track titled Motorcade it almost feels like the album is a concept based around the Kennedy assassination, but the lyrics are so abstruse that the songs could be about anything. The vague sense of death and mortality are also visited in The Great Beautician In The Sky (a kind of mad circus march clanking along beneath the track) and The Light Pours Out Of Me.
All the way through, I found myself thinking of all of the other bands that Magazine sound a little bit like, from the quirkiness of Talking Heads and Eno through to more “traditional” hard punk of Buzzcocks and The Clash, this album really feels like it’s a bridging piece between the late Seventies and the early Eighties.
I really enjoyed it, the same way I enjoyed the first Roxy Music album – it does a lot of unexpected things that really shouldn’t work, but the songs beneath all have a powerful hook, making a refreshing combination.
Comments
Post a Comment