BUGGLES: ADVENTURES IN MODERN RECORDING (1981)
1) Adventures In Modern
Recording; 2) Beatnik; 3) Vermillion Sands; 4) I Am A Camera; 5) On TV; 6)
Inner City; 7) Lenny; 8) Rainbow Warrior; 9) Adventures In Modern Recording
(reprise).
This one's okay, but it ain't Age Of Plastic.
Yes, those nasty boys of prog rock, blew up The Buggles before they had a real
chance to conquer the world, and sucked them inside the band to replace Jon
Anderson — like I already said, if you listen to Age Of Plastic long
enough, you will begin to see that this wasn't the most random-decided decision
on earth, but fact of the matter is, Horn and Downes were no longer The
Buggles, but hired gunmen to guide a bunch of old out-of-touch proggers into
the new realities of a rapidly changing world (including hairstyles). And once
it didn't work out... well, the biorhythms were broken, and they just couldn't
really go back to being The Buggles like nothing happened. A broken family is a
broken family.
In the end, Geoff Downes
just defected away to Asia — trading the coolness, the irony, and the
snarkiness of a Buggle for the stiffness, seriousness, and pomposity of an
«Asian» — before the sessions for the new album had even started properly,
leaving behind only some of his keyboard playing on some of the demos. So
Trevor Horn cursed him all the way to adult contemporary hell and beyond, and
set out to complete the record on his own, with a little help from such friends
as Simon Darlow (keyboards), John Sinclair (drum programming and co-producing),
and even a keyboard part from Anne Dudley on ʽBeatnikʼ (who then joined Horn for
many of his projects, including The Art Of Noise).
The resulting album is
understandably much more morose and depressed than Age Of Plastic, and
this decreases its value — as long as the Buggles were happy, snappy, and
punchy, the magic worked, but in this noticeably more pensive, melancholic,
«downer» mood, quite a few songs tend to drag, if not suck. Case in point:
ʽLennyʼ. It may or it may not refer to Lenny Bruce, and there's nothing wrong
with either possibility — but its melody progresses from somewhat moronic to
simply boring, just lots of poorly expressive synthesizers and a semi-decent
vocal track which still has Horn in his «I am Jon Anderson» mode, trying to
make us believe he is trying to make some sort of important point, but really
just wasting three minutes of our time. And this is not the only misfire on
this record.
Thankfully, some of that
old snarkiness is still in action on about half of the record. ʽBeatnikʼ is a
hilarious reinvention of the rockabilly genre for the technopop era — and
graced with more Yes-style harmonies and lyrics ("all will be revealed before
the next move!") on top of it all. The title track, in prime Buggles
fashion, pokes fun at whatever the Buggles themselves are doing: "they're
not playing, they're just having adventures in modern recording!", and it
is light, sprightly, self-ironic, tends to change keys and tempos — basically,
the kind of stuff that 10cc might have been doing in 1981, had they survived up
to 1981 in a less crappy format than they did. And even the lengthy romantic
epic ʽVermilion Sandsʼ ends in a bit of «Vegas» fun, also rearranged for the
electronic age, proving that humor has not been abandoned.
Elsewhere, Horn tends to
get too serious — apparently, even one year with Yes can rearrange your liver
to such solid mental grace that the next thing you know, you're writing sci-fi
mythological ballads with references to rainbow warriors or allusions to J. G.
Ballard. Actually, both ʽVermilion Sandsʼ and ʽRainbow Warriorʼ seem like
decent compositions, but this whole «art-synth-pop» business... I just don't
know. Too simple and silly to really compete with the proggers — too complex
and artistically pretentious to be plain kinky fun. There's no denying some
creativity and intelligence here, but ʽJohnny On The Monorailʼ has all this
stuff beat in a jiffy — that one just had plain old hooks, these ones seem to
demand from you to acknowledge their depth, and I am not sure if they have any.
There's also a remake of
ʽI Am A Cameraʼ (formerly ʽInto The Lensʼ) here, done Buggles-style rather than
Yes-style, but I've never been a big fan of that song in the first place, so
let's not get any ideas. Actually, one point is clear — both Downes and Horn
underwent a «maturation» process while they were in Yes, so that Downes
eventually got serious enough for Asia (!) and Horn got serious enough for
turning Buggles into BuggYes. If this latter idea intrigues and fascinates you,
go for this album at once — if you are a big fan of Drama, it is
impossible that you will not find something here to please your synth-prog
lover's heart. If, however, it sounds unattractive in theory, I do not believe
you will find it any different in practice. Nevertheless, I do appreciate the
«quirky» songs and I respect the craft of the «serious» songs, so the overall
rating is still a thumbs up — them
Buggles don't have more than two albums out anyway, so they might just as well
get an extra pointer for that (including an advance for not releasing a
Buggles album anywhere near 1986, which would probably have been fatal). Also,
Trevor Horn is just a good guy with a strong artistic vision, and even some of
his relative failures are still interesting.
Downes may have gone adult-contemporary, but at least he's not the one with TATU's Western debut on his conscience.
ReplyDeleteYou should get the remaster of this album and the first one. They contain enough bonus tracks for a third buggles album. They range from b sides to tracks that got reworked in yes' 2011 album fly from here
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