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.

Bizarre Love Triangle by New Order

"Bizarre Love Triangle" is one of my favorite songs of all time, as it happens. And although it certainly lives up to its title in terms of being bizarre, I can't tell that it has anything whatsoever to do with a love triangle. Indeed, like many New Order songs, it's a toss-up whether or not the lyrics are deep and full of some kind of artistic meaning, or merely inane and silly. (Frankly, I'm leaning towards the latter.) The track failed to chart very high when released as a single in both the UK and the US, but gradually climbed for literally years afterward, and even hit Billboard again in 1995; nearly ten years after it was first released.

Over time, it's become pretty emblematic of New Order; almost like their signature song, as it were. It's also been covered by a number of artists who were influenced by New Order, including Stabbing Westward, Apoptygma Berzerk and Frente! (I've included those three versions as well as the 1987 Substance remix) and is even part of The Killers live set in an acoustic piano version that's not unlike the APB cover below.

Pompeji by Camouflage

I mentioned earlier that Camouflage's "Pompeji" was almost a better example of their melancholy, ethereal take on the Depeche Mode sound, in spite of the fact that it was really just an instrumental b-side. I also mentioned that I couldn't find any versions of the longer 12" version that I had on my "The Great Commandment" 12" single. That is no longer true, so here it is.

I like that this fan-made video has a bunch of images of the Serengeti on it. Although Pompeji is the German spelling of Pompeii, and therefore presumably this has an ancient Roman type theme or something like that, it always reminded me sharply of the opening credits to the movie Hatari! by Henry Mancini. Just for fun, I attached a youtube clip of that, too.

It helps, perhaps, that Hatari! is one of my favorite movies.

I Love My Radio (Midnight Radio) by Taffy

Not all italo-disco was Italian, and in fact Taffy was from New York. While her impact in the US was essentially non-existant, "I Love My Radio" was a one-hit wonder in the UK and in other markets where it slotted nicely into the italo-disco countries and markets.

The video is notable, if you can call it that, for highlighting some of the worst 80s clothes I have ever had the misfortune of having seen. The cars are pretty cool, though.