I recall the The (as Matt Johnson styles it) from Infected, quite a dark album. This, its predecessor, is an altogether more poppy and upbeat album although the lyrics are no less dense and bleak - “You're floating down a tunnel in a little wooden box. You're cold and you're lonely and enveloped in fog. You've been pried open and left here to die. You should have trusted your instincts 'cause they don't tell lies” from the title track, for example, a piece with a chilled yet sinister groove.
There are shades of Orange Juice to the soundscape of this album, which is no surprise since OJ’s drummer Zeke Manyika features on several tracks, especially effective on the track Giant that leads into an extended drum break with chanting over the top.
The The are basically singer and multi-instrumentalist Matt Johnson plus guests, but as well as Manyika he has a few notable session musicians, particularly Jools Holland on Uncertain Smile. Holland closes the tracks with a great lengthy piano solo which was originally meant as two solos –one for the middle eight and one for close – but Johnson spliced them into one.
There are traces of the more tuneful end of Echo and the Bunnymen as well, along with the surrealist and darkly strange lyrics of Genesis-era Peter Gabriel, but the music is much lighter than either of those, giving a different perspective again on “New Wave” music – a genre that is surely now being stretched to breaking point. I remember quite liking some of Infected, but not all, and I’ll be interested when that crops up on the list (which, spoiler alert, it does). I think I liked this one more, being overall more tuneful, but it was a very long time ago that I last heard Infected.
Comments
Post a Comment