I will die on the hill that Rock Lobster, from this album, is a vastly superior single to the horribly overplayed Love Shack (from 1989’s Cosmic Thing). Maybe that’s in part thanks to the presence of guitarist Ricky Wilson before his untimely death, I don’t know.
Although nominally a “New Wave” band, the B-52s are another group that show how flexible the boundaries of that genre can be. They borrow from elements of surf rock with the growly guitar licks (riffing on the Peter Gunn theme for the track Planet Claire). They borrow from Sixties girl groups with the combined singing of Kate Pierson and Cindy Wilson (not to mention their stage hairstyles), but then take that into the absurdist levels Talking Heads or Devo, with both Pierson and Wilson making the crazy sound effects for the sea creatures in Rock Lobster, or yips and squeaks reminiscent of Miranda Richardson’s Queenie from Blackadder II on tracks like Hero Worship or 6060-842.
Frontman Fred Schneider’s nasally sing-speak vocals carry the tracks sounding like a sarcastic doorman on a New York gay club, with lyrics that are David Byrne-worthy like “There’s a moon in the sky, called The Moon”. The B-52s are wilfully kitsch, with a kind of eclectic homespun feel to them, but the underlying tunes are damn good and deeply catchy, with quite a lot of complexity that keeps them interesting and not just jokey novelties. Having the mix of voices, the call and response between Schneider, Pierson, and Wilson really works to give them a distinctive sound.
There’s something infectious about them. You can imagine them performing their songs in front of a tiki bar, where the background is quite obviously a painting and they’re really somewhere in downtown New York, in solid bright colours compared to the everyday drab. The whole album makes a refreshing break from the end-of-decade malaise that (especially British) artists are producing at this time.
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