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Artist: The Mary Onettes
Album: The Mary Onettes
Released: May 1, 2007
Label: Labrador
Online Track to Try:
Under the Guillotine
Verdict: ’80s Fans Rejoice
The buzz on this one is quite amusing,
really. Four guys from Sweden doing their unabashed best to
sound exactly like Echo & The Bunnymen, and succeeding
brilliantly — to the point of utter superfluousness. The
postmodern beats, the flowing synths, lead singer Philip
Ekstrom’s operatic croon: So hackneyed, so derivative is the
Mary Onettes’ mimetic approach that no respectable indie fan or
reviewer could ever see clear to pardoning the band for such
egregiously ham-handed larceny, much less actually praising it.
Right?
Well, a
funny thing happened on the way to the band’s universal
vilification. Try as they might, the indie cognoscenti just
can’t seem to pan The Mary Onettes in good conscience —
and neither can I. Every year dozens of acts take a stab at
cloning that “classic” ’80s British sound, à la Echo, the
Cure, the Smiths, and Modern English, the preponderance of whom
fail miserably. But the Mary Onettes’ sound is so classic
and their songwriting (with a few exceptions) so unexpectedly
solid, that this debut turns out to embody a swaggering, offhand
mini-masterpiece, especially for those poor alt-’80s mavens
still stuck listening to “Fred” on XM satellite radio all day!
Aside from lone clunker “The Laughter,” Mary Onettes is
an unmitigated romp through that decade, with “Lost,” “Slow” and
“Under the Guillotine” leading the Thatcher-era charge to
grudging respectability. “Guillotine” in particular is a
must-listen, guaranteed to make “Lips Like Sugar” fans do a
double-take. And as for those haughty, pessimistic souls who
might prefer the unvarnished Ian McCulloch Ocean Rain-era
originals, I feel obliged to point out that Echo & Co. haven’t
released anything near this jaunty or compelling in nearly two
decades.
Artist: Starcastle
Album: Fountains Of Light
Released: January 1977
Label: Epic
Online Track to Try:
A Fall
of Diamonds
Verdict: Starcastle Copying
Yes Copying Starcastle
While we’re on the subject of brazenly
unoriginal doppelgangers, for prog-rock fans the glaring Yes-Starcastle
dichotomy ranks near the top. Yes came first by six years or so
(in 1969), leaving Starcastle’s 1975 stateside debut to sound
like a tinny undernourished younger brother, replete with feisty
moogs, faux-epic synths and a high-pitched vocalist (Terry
Luttrell) whose treble-heavy harmonies and inflection sounded
enough like Jon Anderson to fool many a first-time listener. Yet
even futuristic space-rock has its sub-genres, and on their
second record, 1977’s Fountains of Light, the band broke
fresh ground over which Yes was, for whatever reason, soon fated
to follow. And it was the poor, oft-maligned Starcastle who got
there first.
Yes
altered its sound dramatically between 1975 and 1978, from the
bloated yet inspired Tales From Topographic Oceans to the
thinner, more rhythmically oriented Tormato, and this
shift would persist even unto their 1983 crossover megahit,
90125. The shorter tunes, the tighter song structures, the
thin timbre of the synthesizers — Fountains of Light
presaged it all, on soaring tracks such as “Silver Winds,”
“Dawning of the Day” and the magnificent “A Fall of Diamonds,”
whose opening harmonics are so transporting as to require a time
machine to return to 2007. Now perhaps such is what passes for
“natural progression” in the art-rock world, and Yes would have
followed the same course anyway, all the way to ’80s New Wave
nirvana. But did Yes’ elder statesmen give Fountains a
listen beforehand, and like what they heard? If sonic etymology
is your thing, and you enjoy a good mystery, download the record
and decide for yourself. |
