New Wave

10 Album tour through New Wave

(for Radio Raheem - Milan, Italy)

by Simon Reynolds

 THE B-52’S – The B-52’s  (1979)

Especially after their international smash “Love Shack”, it can be hard to look past this Athens, Georgia band’s retro-kitsch image and hear how tough and stark their sound was at the start. The sinewy rhythms and unyielding riffs find the exact mid-point between Booker T & the MGs and Gang of Four. This monochrome minimalism is overlaid with the garish Americana of the lyrics and image, which inhabit the same ‘50s/60s world of B-movies and beehive hairdos as John Waters’s films. All this might still be just campy fun if not for the soul-power blast of Cindy Wilson and Kate Pierson, whose vocals reach a scary intensity on songs like “52 Girls,” “Lava,” and “Dance This Mess Around”.

 XTC - Drums and Wires (1979)

New Wave lyricists tended to approach social comment in a methodical manner, as if checking off issues and themes on a list. In the years after punk there was also a widely felt imperative to write songs about anything but love (see Talking Heads album title More Songs About Buildings and Food). Which perhaps explains how XTC came up with “Roads Girdle The Globe” and “Helicopter”. But the approach works wonderfully on “Making Plans For Nigel”, an unsettling song about parents who’ve mapped out their son’s entire future, wrapped in music that reinvents psychedelia rather than repeating it. Elsewhere XTC’s whooping vocals and herky-jerky rhythms resemble a clockwork toy wound-up too tight and  careening dementedly around the room.

 

CHRISMA – Chinese Restaurant (1977)

Because New Wave put further distance between rock and its American roots, it seemed to open up possibilities for European musicians, who quickly embraced the  blues-less unswinging sound and the primary-color, plastic-look aesthetic of the clothes and record design. On their debut, Milan’s Chrisma sound like their heads have been turned around by Bowie & Iggy’s own Euro moves of earlier in  ‘77.  “Black Silk Stocking” recalls the moody monotony of “Nightclubbing” off The Idiot, while the drooping synths of “Lycee” could fit nicely with the twilight instrumentals on Low’s side 2. But the killer tune here is “C-Rock”. Its controlled throb and silvery glisten induces a Neu!-like trance (and the German group get a namecheck in  closing number “Thank You”).

 

ELVIS COSTELLO AND THE ATTRACTIONS – This Year’s Model (1978)

Like Graham Parker and The Jam, Costello’s early sound is rooted in Sixties R&B and British beat groups, but cranked up on speed and spite and thus reflecting the tension and bleakness of a far less hopeful decade.  Where other New Wavers declared both their entanglement with history and their desire to start a new era by doing punked-up covers of classic rock songs, Costello attacks the past by sarcastic quoting of lyrics and recycling riffs in mangled or inverted form. It works as pop – hooks leap out, you can dance - even as the spirit is anti-pop, perhaps anti-everything. For the Attractions, playing this music must have felt as uptight and constricting as the skinny ties around their throats when posing for album cover shots.

 

THE STRANGLERS – Black and White (1978)

The Stranglers’s classic first three albums, all released within just over a year of each other,  work in the archetypal New Wave mode: antagonistic rewriting of the Sixties. In their case, though, there’s one specific ancestor: The Doors. Keyboardist Dave Greenfield froths over into extended solos of rippling arpeggiation just like Ray Manzarek. You can hear flickers of Robbie Krieger in Hugh Cornwell’s more lyrical guitar moments. And the overall vision is dark and brooding in the Jim Morrison style, especially on this third album with macabre tunes like “Death and Night and Blood”. They even go in for Doors-style jerky time-signatures, as with the waltz rhythm of the poignant and eerie “Outside Tokyo”.

 

THE WAITRESSES – Wasn’t Tomorrow Wonderful? (1981)

When they weren’t disguising and disfiguring their Sixties influences, New Wavers sometimes looked to contemporary club sounds, layering barbed or ironic lyrics over dance grooves. Hailing originally from Akron, Ohio --the industrial town that spawned Devo -  The Waitresses found a home in New York’s “mutant disco” scene around ZE Records. If Patty Donahue’s sardonic vocals suggest a gawky Blondie, the sax-powered funk and droll words recalls New Wave hitmakers Ian Dury & the Blockheads.  The lurching groove and taunting melody of “I Know What Boys Like” is the killer on Wasn’t Tomorrow Wonderful?. Later came bittersweet single “Christmas Wrapping” and the group’s theme for Square Pegs, a cult show about high-school misfits, i.e. New Wave’s demographic of geeks and freaks.

LENE LOVICH – Stateless (1978)

One New Wave staple was the oddball female singer with a piercingly shrill voice and a kooky image: see Nina Hagen and Dale Bozzio of Missing Persons. Of partly Serbian descent, Lovich’s operatic warble and Gothic silent-movie-star appearance coincided with the era’s demand for weirdos (see also Devo, whose “Be Stiff” she covers here). The shtick can get wearing, but on the wonderful “Lucky Number”, a huge 1979 hit, Lovich’s sing-song melody rides the mighty rhythmic chassis of a propulsive groove. Elsewhere, the almost Cossack-like “Sleeping Beauty” recalls Sparks, glam-era hitmakers whose ultra-white sound anticipated New Wave.

SKIDS -  Scared to Dance (1979)

Imagine if rock’n’roll hadn’t been born in America’s Deep South but in the Scottish highlands. That’s the sound of Skids -  cold and clear like winter wind coming off the moors. The band’s stomping rhythms, slashing guitar riffs and shouted choruses create a martial feel mirrored in song titles like “Into the Valley”, “Hope and Glory”, and “Melancholy Soldiers”.   Equally influenced by the clean but florid lead playing of Be Bop Deluxe’s Bill Nelson and the skirling drone of the bagpipe, guitarist Stuart Adamson took this rousing “adventures for boys” sound into his successor group Big Country, who sparred alongside Celtic cousins U2 and Simple Minds in the Eighties genre known as “Big Music”.

MARTHA AND THE MUFFINS – Metro Music (1980)

This Canadian art-school group should have been called Marthas and the Muffins, because they contained two:  Martha Johnson and Martha Ladly, both of whom sang and played keyboards. Like The Members with their New Wave anthem “The Sound of the Suburbs”, the Muffins pinpointed their spiritual habitat in “Suburban Dreams”. But the ennui and occasional ecstasy of life on the outskirts of the action was never captured better than on “Echo Beach”, the hit single off their debut Metro Music. Gliding keyboards and rasping saxophone frame Johnson’s suave croon as she plays the workaday drone (“my job is very boring I’m an office clerk”) who fantasies about escaping to an imaginary seaside idyll.

 SUBURBAN LAWNS – Suburban Lawns  (1981)

From Long Beach, California, Suburban Lawns had the ultimate New Wave name. Lyrically, their prime subject is the post-WW2 landscape of American banality, that same prefab plastic world satirized in films from The Graduate to Edward Scissorhands. In “Flying Saucer Attack” the citizens of the fast-food nation don’t mind being abducted by aliens so long as “we’re back for work on Monday”. “Mom and Dad and God” scorns the parents’ “mindless devotion to lack of emotion”. As with so much New Wave, you sense that these CalArts students can really play: it’s the friction of their ability against punk taboo’s on flashy musicianship that creates the music’s delicious nervous tension. “Janitor” is the jewel: Su Tissue sings not like a rock’n’roller but a librarian with a very peculiar imagination.