We'll Be Together by Sandra

I've said many times that we had an unusual lack of exposure to some European megahits in the US, and the career of German-French artist Sandra is clear evidence of that.  Billed as the European Madonna, Sandra had an impressive string of hits, including nearly two dozen charting singles, and half a dozen charting albums.  However, US success eluded her (or she never pursued it, I'm not sure) and her only brush with fame here is when her husband and producer, Michael Cretu, had her on vocals for the massively successful Enigma single "Sadeness (Part I)"--the Gregorian/techno dreamy single that refers to the Marquis de Sade in Latin and French lyrics.

However, for American audiences looking for some pretty smart electronic 80s pop songs that they missed in the 80s, Sandra's discography is loaded with material to be mined.  From 1985's "(I'll Never Be) Maria Magdalena" to 1992's "Johnny Wanna Live" when Sandra took a hiatus to raise her twin boys (a move from which her career never recovered, despite several attempted come-backs) there's plenty of great songs to discover.  My favorite, though, is "We'll Be Together"--one of the few in which Sandra herself shares co-writing credit.  Here, check it out:

Guardian Angel by Alphaville

I only have one Alphaville song on this blog, and the video I linked is now gone.  So, you can't listen to any Alphaville!  That's not right.

The prior post I made was for "Forever Young", their major claim to fame.  Perhaps a too easy choice.  I've actually got quite a bit of Alphaville material, and I think a lot of it is really good.  Some of it is, in fact, quite a bit better than "Forever Young" which suffers a bit from over-exposure.

Alphaville is one of those bands that continued on after the "synthpop crash" of the early 90s.  Although they were never big hitsters to begin with, their incarnation during the 90s was marked by being even further underground.  I bought a German import in about 1997 of Salvation.  It was, about three or four years later, released domestically for less money and with bonus tracks.  Grr.

Anyway, an interesting thing about Alphaville, or at least that album, is that the more "old fashioned" songs, including especially "Guardian Angel" and "Control" are quite a bit better than the more "modern" sounding ones, like "Monkey in the Moon" or "Wishful Thinking" work, but not as well.  In general, Salvation is considered a back to roots album, but relative to what, exactly, I wonder (since I never picked up Breathtaking Blue or Prostitute; the albums that came out between Afternoons in Utopia and Salvation.  To me, most of the album feels more then-current techno/club focused rather than back-to-roots synthpop.)

Perfect Girl by the Ultrasonics

I just discovered this group not long ago, and downloaded their debut album from Amazon. It only has 10 songs, and the average song length is less than 3 minutes, meaning that the entire album is just under half an hour. This is a remix of what I believe to be the best song on the album. Parralox, who I blogged about last time, remixed it also, and quite nicely. This one is a more "friendly" length, though.

Don't know much about the Ultrasonics themselves--their website and facebook and myspace pages are all pretty slight on personal information. I'm not even entirely sure who's in the group other than the lead singer, naturally.

Isn't It Strange by Parralox

Well, I just discovered Parralox and I have to share the love.

I didn't literally just discover them, of course. Heck, I bought the mp3 of "Sharper Than a Knife" way back almost exactly two years ago (and even then it wasn't exactly brand new either; it'd been out for the better part of a year.) But for whatever reason, even though I absolutely love that song, I didn't further explore Parralox until just recently, when I acquired their first three albums, Electricity, State of Decay and Metropolis. There's actually a fourth album that came out last February, but it's only about half new and the other half is remixes, so I'm not sure that it really counts.

Parralox is a new band; their debut stuff only came out in 2008, but it's really good stuff. There's a fair bit of retro-80s feel to some of their stuff, mixed with some very advanced and sophisticated newer electronic music influences. They've got a great vocalist. Heck; I told my wife the other day that Parralox, in very general terms at least, is sorta like what Lady Gaga would be like if Lady Gaga concentrated more on developing her talent instead of trying to shock us all the time to get us to pay attention to her. Maybe that's not actually true, but it's close enough. Parralox have also, apparently, gotten into the remixing business, which is interesting, because that's something that you're usually only invited to do if you're musicality as instrument players and producers has really impressed the biz.

My favorite Parralox song is... still... probably "Sharper Than A Knife" but I've got a lot more that are working their way up through the ranks as I get to know them better. "I Heart U" is a great one too that I would have included on this update if I could have found a youtube or dailymotion video of it, but I couldn't and I didn't want to whip one up myself. I included "Isn't It Strange" from their State of Decay CD. Lots of others were contenders, though--as I discover more and more of how deep their work is (surprisingly quite a lot considering their recent vintage; these guys are pretty productive).

The O Medley by Bobby Orlando and Felix da Housecat

Hi-NRG was an outgrowth of Italo-disco; it's clubby, very mid to late 1980s. Bobby Orlando was one of the biggest names in this business, although in many ways, he was a name behind the scenes. Not famous for mainstream success under his own name, his pet project, The Flirts, which featured him along with a rotating cast of female musicians, put out the hits "Passion" and "Don't Put Another Dime in the Jukebox." But his influence in production, and in the underground club scene during the 80s, was remarkable.

An interesting personality: to quote another blog's characterization of him, "He's a hyper-macho, incredibly cocky, rampantly homophobic ex-boxer who made gay disco. He once backed out of a lease because he found out the previous tenant was gay, yet he produced legendary drag queen Divine, and discovered the Pet Shop Boys. Most of his songs are brazen odes to sex and partying, and yet he's a fundamentalist Christian." Many of the cliches of dance music from the 80s and into the 90s were actually Bobby O-isms; although Bobby O himself remains a somewhat shadowy figure to mainstream audiences.

Later, Felix da Housecat sampled some Bobby O when he made "Silver Screen Shower Scene" and even later, European mix artists 2 Many DJs mashed that song with the intro to a Bobby Orlando medley to give us this little gem of a song. Then, at the height of his influence and popularity, Bobby O apparently retired from the industry.

They're Coming to Take Me Away, Ha-Hah! by Neuroticfish

One of the post-80s fads of the electronic music world was the musical style called "futurepop". Futurepop's roots as a distinct subgenre in electronic music have to go back to before the 80s, actually. Ralf Hütter of Kraftwerk coined the phrase Electronic Body Music (EBM) to describe the music on The Man-Machine, their 1978 offering which was fairly danceable and accessible relative to some of the other Kraftwerk releases to that point (I should do a post for "The Model" or "The Robots" or even "Neon Lights" one of these days.) The term didn't really gain any traction until Front 242 re-coined it again to describe their 1984 release No Comment. EBM fell into this niche somewhere between early Industrial pioneers like Throbbing Gristle, Kraftwerk, Cabaret Voltaire and DAF mixed with a more commercialized sound. I once flippantly called it "angry synthpop" and that seems to still be more or less accurate. I also, back before I was aware of all the subgenre labels and exactly what they all meant, called it the fusion of synthpop and industrial.

Prominent early artists of this variety include Front 242, A Split Second, Frontline Assembly, Nitzer Ebb and Die Krupps. I was a big fan of some of this stuff in the late 80s, particularly Front 242's classic album Front by Front, which also has the most commercially successful industrial song ever recorded, "Headhunter." As the 80s became the 90s, though, and music continued to evolve, at least one branch of EBM started trending even more towards synthpop, although still with some clear EBM roots in terms of samples, extremely heavy rhythms, vocal delivery, etc. By this point, the music had lost mainstream appeal, at least in North America, and most of the folks who were putting it out were European. VNV Nation, Covenant, Apoptygma Berzerk, and Fictional or Ravenous (side projects of Gerritt Thomas of Funker Vogt, which is a more classic electronic industrial group. Ravenous and Fictional head into EBM and even synthpop.) By this time electronic music online luminaries like Al Crawford (anyone else remember his seminal review archive website? Huge in the synthpop scene in the mid 90s.) were calling VNV Nation, Apoptygma Berzerk and Covenant EBM/synthpop hybrids, and Ronan Harris of VNV Nation coined the term futurepop to describe this music. In the late 90s, they had their commercial breakthrough of sorts, and albums like Praise the Fallen and Empires got some significant attention, as did comparable albums by APB and Covenant at the time.

A number of other bands popped up in this same space, including Neuroticfish, Assemblage 23, Icon of Coil, Colony 5 and more. Curiously as the decade advanced, almost all of these outfits either migrated even further away from their EBM roots, or quit altogether. Neuroticfish even made some waves mid-decade by including a sampled vocal "Electronic Body Music is dead" prominantly on a few of their songs.

Anyway, I was a huge fan of the futurepop movement, and while I also like the more synthpoppish offerings of former futurepoppers and even EBMers, I also really appreciated the harder, angrier sound of some of these guys when they were more in that vein. One review I saw of Neuroticfish called it "Depeche Mode with teeth". What can I say; sometimes that's really what I'm in the mood for! For an unusual sample of what this kind of music was like, I've got Neuroticfish's remake of a goofy novelty song from 1966, Napolean XIV's "They're Coming to Take Me Away, Ha-Hah!" which Neuroticfish has managed to turn into something quite sinister and creepy. This is from Neuroticfish's 2005 album Gelb, which ended up being the last one (of three) that the band (really just one guy) put out before "closing" the Neuroticfish project for good.

Tenderness by General Public

Although I either missed it (or forgot about it, more likely, since it is in the soundtrack for the classic teenage hijinx movie Weird Science, "Tenderness" by General Public has shown up over and over again in 80s compilations and retrospectives. It's ironically one of the 80s songs that I've heard most since the 80s... but not that often in the 80s.

It's perhaps somewhat questionable to include it on a synthpop retrospective, but to me that's one of the interesting things about "Tenderness" (and lots of other songs from the 80s)--it's mainstream pop, and it's very heavily draped in synthlines and synthesizers. Synthpop was very mainstream during much of the 80s ("Tenderness" was released in 1984). General Public's background were, in fact, as 2 Tone ska/punk/reggae hybrid, when singers David Wakeling and Ranking Roger left the breaking group The Beat and formed General Public instead. But in the mid-80s, everyone was integrating elements of synthpop into their music. This has actually continued through to today. Even when grunge rock and other genres surged in popularity, the synthpop influence never completely went away, and hits by Madonna and Cher in the early 90s are straight-up synthpop tracks. In recent years, artists like LIGHTS, Mike Posner, Owl City and others are also arguably classified as synthpop. A string of bands for years now, including Franz Ferdinand, Blur, The Killers and more are also clearly heavily influenced by synthpop, even if they might not qualify as straight up synthpop directly.