Here's another request, off an album I have neglected, its an album that apparently is a bit of a blip in some people's heads, but I like the brutalist nature of it, really clunking and bleak for the most part.
Song: U.S 80's-90's
Album: Bend Sinister
Year: 1986
Now the drums on this song almost sound like a machine to me, I don't know whether they used one of those electronic kits to record this one, but the production is so digitised it's almost inhuman. It may just be that fashion they seemed to have in production circles in the 80's for a 'big' drum sound, plenty of effects applied to the snare and clipped cymbal cracks to make it sound a bit stadium, it works for some bands (The The, Joy Division etc) but here this song sounds like a public service announcement to me, Mark's vocals sound like a pre-recorded message booming out of an old public address system on a loop. That loop has become corrupted over time and lines are delivered over and on top of each other. The music reflects this, the bass sounds amazing, but has the sound of a dot matrix printer endlessly reaming out page after page of barely-legible computer code, on that green, punched paper you used to get.
It's all very dystopian, you can imagine this being played very loud over a post-apocalyptic wasteland a la Terminator 2, trash cans on fire here and there and machines stomping around, all very much of its time, this was 1986, sci-fi was a pretty big deal at the time, this could easily be on a soundtrack to a film, it's so bloody bleak. I like the fact the lyrics seems to be about airport security banality, the lists of things banned on board for example and the lines about being rapper, needing to get off the crapper, amazing.
This gives me visions of MES writing this while waiting for a flight in the middle of the night in a US airport, no idea why and just being exhausted, taking in his surroundings and reading those terrible magazines you only seem to see in public areas like airports and office receptions. Quite an abstract one this, the production makes me feel a little uncomfortable.
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