Review:

on 2011-06-07 CharlesMartel Said:

There comes a point in a person's life where, in retrospect, you have to wonder why continue? That is not a question about the meaning of existence, but a much deeper and more important question - why do I continue buying and listening to music? When I look back, that point was reached sometime in the mid- to late- eighties when I bought this album. It comes as no surprise that around this time I ceased to be such an avid chaser of music, new and old, as I had been up until then.

I am not going to claim that this album was single-handedly responsible for that change for it wasn't. But it did lay the ground upon which my musical hiatus was based. This album did more than anything else to convince me that the sort of music I wanted to listen to was not being made in any significant quantity or with any significant competence any more. If this was to be the path that popular music was about to walk, then it could walk that path without me. So why then would I go and buy this?

Well, at the time I was living in Hong Kong and the predominant musical style was the awful, saccharine-sweet Canto-pop. Finding contemporary English-language music was a real struggle as there were no radio stations which played it and, because the potential market was so small, no one would import it. Anything you wanted had to be pretty much ordered from the UK at a premium. (That at least is another major reason why I came to the conclusion I did). Therefore, any snippet of musical information which emerged, or was sent out by friends from the UK was eagerly snapped up. One guy was sent a mix tape which contained a wide variety of music.

The tape had been copied and recopied so some of the tracks were a bit fuzzy but there was enough of interest there to spark my curiosity. The styles and the artists were widely different, but the whole thing seemed to hang together well, and I found it an enjoyable listen overall. Gradually, I started buying up the albums behind the individual tracks. Not all of them I could find (and I would still love to track down that cover of "Little Red Rooster" by Bougie Wougie). Among the albums I could get my hands on, Lloyd Cole and the Commotions' "Rattlesnakes" was an excellent choice; the Redskins' "Neither Washington Nor Moscow" less so. And then there was "Backwater". A quirky pop track with some pretty clever, amusing lyrics based on assonance rather than plain rhyme. I tracked down the album, "Before and after Science", and bought it.

That decision turned out to be a major mistake. "Backwater" was easily the best thing on the album. Indeed, it was the only thing on the album worth listening to. The first side of the album seems to consist largely of what may be called Brian Eno's individual take on pop. And that individual take is, shall we say, idiosyncratic to say the least and not at all to my liking. And as I never liked ambient music, the other side is plain boring. Had this album come out today, I would have one download and never bothered with the rest of it. Ah, technology. Restored my faith in music buying. Instead, I have an album which I never listen to except for one very good track which I can easily single out and play from my iPod.
Rating: 4/10