"Too Much, Enough" by Nation of Language

The last time I posted about Nation of Language, here, I enthusiastically compared them to beloved 80s synth bands like Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark, The Human League, and even a bit of New Order. And their new song, "Too Much, Enough" carries on the synth sound I dearly love.

I pretend it’s fine - really alright
But I hear the sighing
Bleeding into the room
Prone to selfish revision
The details may be light
Destination’s known
It comes as no surprise
The collision
I can brace myself for the alarm
The decision
I debate myself, break myself
All for what?

So predictable
Too much, enough
A talk show that cannot help but hurt
Swimming in sweat
Television set
Too much, enough
Too much, enough
Too much, enough

Experts standing by
Ten at a time
Kindly remind me
To take some time
I’d like to breathe and consider
A gentler redesign
Expectations low
But that’s not what I like
It’s just

So predictable
Too much, enough
A talk show that cannot help but hurt
Swimming in sweat
Television set
Too much, enough
Too much, enough
Too much, enough

Neverending ride
Open my eyes
If I need reminding

https://www.nationoflanguage.com/

Happy Birthday, Iva Davies of Icehouse!

A very happy birthday to Mr. Iva Davies, founder, lead singer, multi-instrumentalist, and immensely talented songwriter of the Australian band Icehouse.

I am feeling great love and nostalgia for this 1980 song from their debut album. Not only is Icehouse the name of the group, having changed it from their original name Flowers, but the song itself is also titled "Icehouse." Although Icehouse was never truly seen as a New Romantic band (yet they were tagged with the catch-all New Wave title by some), I sure felt they belonged with other fantastic New Romantic groups like Ultravox. The "Icehouse" song and their debut album (as well as their sophomore album "Primitive Man") was an atmospheric, synth-heavy affair with a marvelous use of texture. The accompanying video resembles New Romantic classics like Ultravox's "The Thin Wall" and "The Voice," and even Kim Carnes' "Bette Davis Eyes" and "Draw Of The Cards," all directed by Australian film director Russell Mulcahy. Follow this haunting, touching narrative that beautifully supports the chilling, profound lyrics and aching, moving melody.

It's always cold inside the icehouse
Though the rivers never freeze
There's a girl outside the icehouse
I can see her clearly though the trees

Now she's dreaming of a new love
And she hopes he'll be there soon
She's got so long to wait for him
Because he needs another year to get there

She'll wait another lifetime out there

There's no love inside the icehouse

The devil lives inside the icehouse
At least that's what the old ones say
They say He came along time ago
He came here in the winter snow
Now it's colder every day

But she's still dreaming through the summer
And she's hoping through the spring
She says she's got no time for winter nights
She doesn't notice as the days grow darker
She can't remember getting any older

There's no love inside the icehouse

 
Now she's dreaming of a new love
And she hopes he'll be there soon
She says she's got no time for winter nights
She doesn't notice as the days grow darker
She can't remember getting any older

There's no love inside the icehouse
There's no love inside the icehouse
The icehouse

Happy Birthday, Iva! Thanks for sharing decades of your music with us.

https://icehouse-ivadavies.com/

R.I.P. Florian Schneider

I am saddened to hear of the death of Florian Schneider, founding member of the pioneering electronic German group Kraftwerk. He died after a short illness, aged 73. I am lucky to have seen Kraftwerk perform in the late 1990s.

Here is a marvelous article by BBC music reporter Marc Savage about the reach and influence of Kraftwerk.

How Florian Schneider and Kraftwerk influenced five decades of music

The US and the UK are often considered the twin crucibles of pop music but, thanks to Kraftwerk's visionary synth music, Dusseldorf has at least an equal claim on the title.

In the mid-1970s, the band's allegiance to what they called "robot pop" set the sonic template for everything from hip-hop to dance music.

In some quarters, they were called "the electronic Beatles", and it's hard to disagree.

Electronic music had existed before - from the musitron solo on Del Shannon's Runaway to the mind-expanding Doctor Who theme, recorded by the BBC Radiophonic Workshop in 1963.

But Kraftwerk developed a new musical vocabulary, sculpting hypnotic, low-frequency sounds that celebrated Europe's romantic past and looked forward to its shimmering future.

'Circuitry and soul'
On albums like Trans-Europe Express and Man Machine, the quartet connected "the coldness of circuitry and the warmth of the soul", wrote music critic Garry Mulholland, "reminding us that machines are, after all, the product of the dreams of humans".

Among those who took notice were David Bowie, who borrowed their industrial atmospherics on Low; and Afrika Bambaataa, who lifted the icy riff from Trans-Europe Express to power one of rap's earliest anthems, Planet Rock.

In turn, those records spawned the New Romantic, synth pop and hip-hop movements of the 80s, which later bled into trance, house and EDM.

"They started it all," said Pet Shop Boy Chris Lowe in 1990.

Kraftwerk emerged from the same German experimental music community of the late '60s that spawned Can and Tangerine Dream.

Founders Florian Schneider and Ralf Hütter met as students at Dusseldorf Conservatory, but rebelled against the constraints of classical music.

"We don't want to end up playing Mozart and Beethoven at our local concert hall," Hütter said. "The question is, 'What does Germany sound like today?' That's where we started."

They adopted the name Kraftwerk, meaning "power plant", and described themselves as "klangchemiker" - or sound chemists - immersing themselves in the possibilities of emerging new technology.

Schneider even invented some instruments of his own, including an electronic flute and a vocoder-style synthesizer called the Robovox.

Kraftwerk's first three albums were free-form improvisations, largely played on traditional instruments, and are not considered by the band to be part of their "official" discography.

In 1974, they settled on their definitive sound with Autobahn, a 22-minute synth symphony intended to evoke the feeling of a long journey on Germany's motorways.

Edited down to three minutes, it earned the band a top 40 hit on both sides of the Atlantic - and they later appeared on BBC technology programme Tomorrow's World to demonstrate their "machinemusik".

But not everyone was impressed. In the era of Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd, the music press treated the pioneers with a sneering suspicion.

"For God's sake, keep the robots out of music," wrote Melody Maker's Keith Ging.

"They sound so detached," complained the NME. "The kind of guys who could blow up the planet just to hear the noise it made."

Their cold, sleek image only fuelled the fire, but critics often missed the sly humour at work in the band's music.

Take, for example, Showroom Dummies from 1977's Trans-Europe Express album - a deadpan riposte to their portrayal as emotionless machines. They took the joke to its logical conclusion on 1978's The Robots.

In 1982, they scored their biggest hit, reaching number one in the UK with The Model - a searing takedown of the fashion industry. But by that point, their sound had become mainstream.

Gary Numan scored a number one hit in 1979 with the synth-heavy Are 'Friends' Electric, paving the way for bands like OMD, Depeche Mode and The Human League, who took Kraftwerk's sounds and transposed them to the industrial cities of England.

Bowie was also a fan, describing their sound as the "folk music of the factories", and paying homage on his classic Berlin album Heroes with the track V-2 Schneider. Kraftwerk returned the favour by namechecking him and Iggy Pop on Trans-Europe Express.

As their output slowed in the 1980s, the band's sound became the bedrock of early hip-hop. In subsequent years, their music has been sampled by everyone from Dr Dre and The Chemical Brothers to Justin Timberlake and The KLF.

Even Coldplay lifted elements of the band's song Computer Love as the central motif to their 2005 song Talk.

Three years later, Schneider left the band - but by that point their legacy as the forefathers of electronic music was assured.

"They are in the psyche of modern pop, whether there is an awareness of it or not," Underworld's Karl Hyde told The Telegraph in 2013.

Martin Gore of Depeche Mode added: "For anyone of our generation involved in electronic music, Kraftwerk were the godfathers."

http://www.kraftwerk.com/

R.I.P. Pete Shelley

Punk rock and bisexual icon Pete Shelley has died at the too-young age of 63. After the success of his punk band Buzzcocks (contemporaries of The Sex Pistols), he went solo and in 1981, he recorded a genre-defying song that mixed both acoustic guitar and synthesizers (which were being heavily explored in music at this time) in a propulsive, effervescent gay anthem called "Homosapien." The mix of acoustic and electronic instruments sounds amazingly fresh and sparkling even today. I used to hear this song played while waiting to see bands like Frankie Goes to Hollywood and Ultravox at The Kabuki Nightclub in San Francisco in the early 80s!

I'm the shy boy, you're the coy boy
And you know we're Homosapien too
I'm the cruiser, you're the loser
Me and you sir, Homosapien too

Homosuperior in my interior
But from the skin out
I'm Homosapien too
And you're Homosapien too
And I'm Homosapien like you
And we're Homosapien too

And I think of your eyes in the dark
And I see the star
And I look to the light
And I might wonder right where you are
All the Gods in the sky, way up high
See the earth spinning 'round
But the sun and the moon
And the stars are so far from the ground

I'm the shy boy, you're the coy boy
And you know we're Homosapien too
I'm the cruiser, you're the loser
Me and you sir, Homosapien too

Homosuperior in my interior
But from the skin out
I'm Homosapien too
And you're Homosapien too
And I'm Homosapien like you
And we're Homosapien too

And the world's built of age are a stage
Where we act out our lives
And the words in the script seem to fit
'Cept we have some surprise
I just want this to last
Or my future is past and all gone
And if this is the case
Then I'll lose in life's race from now on

Homosuperior in my interior
But from the skin out
I'm Homosapien too
And you're Homosapien too
And I'm Homosapien like you
And we're Homosapien too

And I just hope and pray
That the day of our love is at hand
You and I, me and you
We will be one from two, understand?
And the world is so wrong
That I hope that we'll be strong enough
For we are on our own
And the only thing known is our love

I don't wanna classify you
Like an animal in the zoo
But it seems good to me to know
That you're Homosapien too
I'm the shy boy, you're the coy boy
I don't wanna classify you
Like an animal in the zoo
But it seems good to me to know
That you're Homosapien too
I don't wanna classify you
Like an animal in the zoo
But it seems good to me to know
That you're Homosapien too
I don't wanna classify you
Like an animal in the zoo
But it seems good to me to know
That you're Homosapien too

R.I.P. Pete and thanks for the music.