BARCLAY JAMES HARVEST: FACE TO FACE (1987)
1) Prisoner Of Your Love; 2)
He Said Love; 3) Alone In The Night; 4) Turn The Key; 5) You Need Love; 6)
Kiev; 7) African; 8) Followed Me; 9) All My Life; 10) Panic; 11) Guitar Blues;
12) On The Wings Of Love.
All through 1985 and 1986, some of the worst
years in commercial pop music history, thankfully little was heard of Barclay
James Harvest — in fact, this was the first time ever in the band's history that they decided to take such a long
break, and the musical press must have finally breathed a sign of relief. But
not to worry: refreshed and remobilized, John «Jesus Loves Africa» Lees and Les
«Boy Loves Girl» Holroyd are back, and now they have the opportunity to make
full use of the CD format: the full CD version of Face To Face contains twelve songs and stretches out for a grand
sixty minutes. Turns out that the years weren't simply wasted, after all. But
maybe this is exactly what all the German fans were waiting for — that new,
improved TV dinner from your favourite band, now 20% more nutritious.
The best I can say about Face To Face is that every time I listened to it while doing
something else at the same time, I had no impression / memory / faint
reminiscence of what I just heard ten seconds after I'd heard it. And this was
the good news, because when I finally
got angry with myself, dropped everything, and started focusing in on the
music... well, the most awful thing about this whole late-period BJH trajectory
is that there really was no single-moment werewolf transformation: it was more
like a portrait-of-Dorian-Gray kind of a thing, with each subsequent album adding
another streak to the general degradation. But by this time, Barclay James
Harvest can no longer even be called «poor man's Moody Blues» — this late
Eighties stuff sounds like a parody
on late Seventies BJH, which itself sounded like... oh well.
Without going into serious details (this album
certainly ain't worth it), I will just briefly mention some of its more
appalling elements. Number one: how many song titles with the word ʽloveʼ in them does one really need? we
got the message twenty years back, thank you very much. Number two: didn't John
Lees already set The New Testament
for Kids to music with ʽHymnʼ, a decade ago? so why did he feel the urge to do
that again, in an even more thorough, and even more trivial, manner? Number
three: didn't John Lees already come
up with his best anti-oppression / anti-war song more than a decade ago with
ʽChild Of The Universeʼ? Who needs this particular ʽAfricanʼ, with its plastic
synth-rock arrangement? Number four: excuse me, but the combined evil of the
melody, the arrangement, and the lyrics makes ʽPanicʼ a fine candidate for
worst BJH song ever written by Lees
on any occasion — tough as the actual competition might be. The "yeah yeah
yeah rock'n'roll" bit simply shows that the man must have not been in his
right mind at the time: no normal human being could have agreed to release this crap on a commercial basis.
You might think that Les Holroyd is finally
doing better, but no dice: his ʽTurn The Keyʼ is horrendous Phil Collins-type
adult contemporary, his ʽPrisoner Of Your Loveʼ is bland synth-pop, and,
although his ʽKievʼ may have been
driven by pure generous empathy with the victims of Chernobyl, in the context
of his past karma it just feels like a continuous quest to write a sugary love
song to every bisyllabic European city: for some reason, we never got around to
hearing his ʽBelgradeʼ or ʽMadridʼ, and I am still personally and impatiently waiting for my own ʽMoscowʼ. And,
for that matter, do Barclay James Harvest fans exist in India? China? Central
African Republic? They may want their own personal tribute to their capital
cities, too.
All right, enough sarcasm. Truth be told, under
normal conditions Face To Face
provokes neither laughter nor anger — even when the band are at their most
appalling, they cloak it so well with slick, inoffensive production and soft,
inobtrusive singing that all the senses just go plain numb. I do feel like
giving the album a thumbs down this time, though, seeing as how
it has no redeeming qualities whatsoever, and even the band's trademark
«melodicity» is reduced to rehashing, recycling, and regurgitating chords and
leads that weren't on anybody's hot list in the first place.
Oof, that cover! I can smell the synthesizers...
ReplyDeleteUgh, not as bad as the cover of Victims of Indecent Taste.
Delete