Here we are at the 500th album! Sadly, this isn’t halfway yet as don’t forget this is the collated list of all editions of 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die, so it’s more like 1089 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die. So there are still another 44 albums to go before we get over halfway. (Plus all of my "Bonus" ones as well...)
Still. 500 Albums. It doesn’t feel all that
long ago when I put Frank Sinatra’s Wee Small Hours on, and yet it also feels like a lifetime ago.
I don’t remember hearing of The Associates
before, but the track Party Fears Two seemed familiar. While they have some
elements of the Eighties synth-pop sound to them, they go beyond, recalling the
likes of Sparks, Eno, and Bowie. With that kind of pedigree it’s shame that
they didn’t seem to do better, but perhaps tastes had moved on from experimentalism
for a bit, and the public wanted safer music to soothe them.
Vocalist Billy Mackenzie has a great range,
and he quite often uses all of it in the space of a song, or even a line. On
Gloomy Sunday he sounds not unlike Bowie’s version of Wild Is The Wind, but
more often he follows Russ Mael of Sparks into the improbably falsetto, notably
on Party Fears Two.
Along with guitarist and “other
instruments” Alan Rankine, Mackenzie tried out Eno levels of experimentation
on getting sounds from instruments – not all of it apparent to the casual ear,
it has to be said, but it means that although a track like Country Club starts
out sounding like a fairly conventional white-funk Eighties synth-pop piece, it
turns into something completely novel by the end. Nude Spoons, as well, is a
delicious slice of delirium.
I liked this, it’s a shame that not only
did they never achieve great success, but also that Mackenzie took his own life
(suffering depression) not long after the band attempted a comeback in the
Nineties – I think they would have fitted in better then, or perhaps a few
years earlier. Some bands end up in the right place and catch the zeitgeist,
these feel like The Soft Boys – good, but too out of their time to really catch on.
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