Author: Michael

Posted in Album Reviews

Thompson Twins – Into The Gap (40th Anniversary Edition) (2024)

Posted on by Michael

The Thompson Twins trio scored a worldwide hit in late 1983/early 1984 with the synth pop sound of “Hold Me Now”.  40 years later the band released the 40th anniversary of the album it’s from, The Gap.  Two extra discs of rarities, B-sides, and alternate mixes of the record’s five singles fill up the rest of this deluxe edition of the album that went to #1 in the UK and top 10 in the US.

Charting higher than the first single in the UK were “Doctor! Doctor!” with it’s easily remembered chorus and the faintly ridiculous Southern US influenced but no less catchy “You Take Me Up” with it’s line, “I know what it means to work hard on machines”. Whether singer Tom Bailey is referring to the factory or synthesizers is anyone’s guess. The album is loaded with slightly eastern influenced synth pop including the title track, one of the album’s highlights.  Other songs like “Sister of Mercy” touch on domestic abuse and “Storm On The Sea” hits the more melancholy side of the band with the lyric, “This party is over/and we, we are alone”.

Listeners should be prepared to listen to the album’s five singles in several variations on this triple disc collection. There are plenty of tracks to like including “Down the Tools”, an extended take on “You Take Me Up” that has the xylophone playing of Allanah Currie and Joe Leeway’s backing vocals on “Hold Me Now (Phil Thornalley Extended Mix)” that is one of the better variations on the track.  The instrumentals and backing tracks of several of the singles provides a different and enjoyable perspective on the songs while B-side “Leopard Ray” adds more guitar crunch to their sound.

Into The Gap – 9/10

Extras – 7.5/10

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Dean Wareham – That’s The Price Of Loving Me (2025)

Posted on by Michael

To quote Stephen Merritt from the classic first album under The 6ths moniker, “Dean Wareham is the guy from Luna who used to be the guy from Galaxie 500”.  Now that we are caught up to speed, That’s The Price Of Loving Me is Wareham’s fourth solo album.  It’s an atmospheric record that mixes in some cosmic country, Californian singer-songwriter sounds, and dreamy indie pop. Several songs like “Bourgeois Manque” take on a hypnotic quality along with it’s excellent musical bed.

“New Word Julie” is one another fine track with subtly great chorus. The album is bookended by two highlights – “You Were The Ones I Had To Betray” talks of togetherness but with the underlying message of betrayal and “The Cloud Is Coming” where Wareham sings that “There’s no difference between the blue and the red/The cloud is coming for us all”.  A haunting but true thought. A quieter release amongst the noise of the world – this is an excellent album.

9/10

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Oasis – Time Flies… 1994-2009 (2010/2025)

Posted on by Michael

Originally released in 2010, Oasis re-released their singles collection Time Flies… 1994-2009 in time for their much hyped reunion tour.  Bringing together all 27 UK singles in non chronological order, for the first half of the two disc album, it barely takes a breath as it spits out hit after hit, anthem after anthem. While the current tour concentrates on the band’s mid 90s heyday, the singles collection spreads it’s wings to include the singles taken from each of the band’s five albums.

Appropriately, the albums starts with their first single “Supersonic”. The track that announced the band to a legion of indie rock fans is still one of their best. Peaking at #31, it was there next singles that kept climbing the charts before finally hitting #1 in the UK with the last song to feature first drummer Tony McCarroll, “Some Might Say”. 

For the first 2/3rds of Time Flies…,  later singles rub shoulders with early classics.  Songs like “Stop Crying Your Heart Out” and “The Hindu Times”, not to mention “Lyla” and “Go Let It Out” are nearly as anthemic as anything in the band’s lengthy cannon.  The Liam Gallagher penned “Songbird” stands out as a simple laid-back tune. Two non-album singles also appear:  Released in late 1994, “Whatever” was the first track the band released after their debut and making it’s first album appearance, “Lord Don’t Slow Me Down”.

One of the things that made the band beloved by their fans was that the B-sides were as good as the A-sides. Because of that, several of their most popular songs do not appear like “Acquiesce” and “The Masterplan”. The inclusion of these would make for a better album, instead listeners get to re-discover the nearly 10 minutes of “All Around The World”. Several later singles appear at the end, like the compiler gave up trying to mix the eras together and because of that, the foot gets slightly taken off the gas. By just sticking to just the singles, Time Flies… 1994-2009 offers several selections other than the usual batch of tracks that would otherwise have made appearances.

8/10

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Pet Shop Boys – Bilingual/Further Listening 1995-1997 (2018)

Posted on by Michael

Released in 1996, Bilingual was the first Pet Shop Boys album released while much of the UK was enthralled with the Britpop sounds of blur and Oasis, the former having tapped PSB to remix their hit single “Girls and Boys” a few years earlier. The album still saw the synth duo enter the Top 5 in the UK album charts and have 3 of its singles reach the UK Top 10. PSB worked with several producers on the album including DJ Danny Tenaglia on first single, the house sounding “Before”.

With a slightly slower beat, the Latin sounds of “Se A Vida e (That’s The Way Life Is)” are as joyous as they are catchy.  “A Red Letter Day” is an immediately upbeat pop dance tune but with a dash of the duo’s melancholy.  The drums from first track “Discoteca” then carry “Single-Bilingual” that has an elegant strut about a businessman moving throughout the continent.  Mixing their dance pop with some Latin touches, Bilingual is a good album with plenty of tracks to carry the day.

The extra disc on this Essential Listening version contains the usual mix of B-sides, rarities, and extended sounds including two versions of “Discoteca” and the expanded single version of “A Red Letter Day”. The duo reaches behind for the throbbing beat of “Paninaro ’95”, originally released as a single for their Alternative B-side album released the year before.  Several terrific songs from the period appear including the fun of “The Truck-Driver and His Mate”, the instrumental version of the hi-energy “In the Night (1995)”, the simplicity of “The Calm before the Storm” and the grand sounds of “Delusion of Grandeur”. The second disc is frequently very good and at times outperforms the main album for memorable tracks.

Bilingual – 7.5/10

Further Listening – 8/10

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Wet Leg – moisturizer (2025)

Posted on by Michael

The Wet Leg duo from the Isle of Wight return with their sophomore album, moisturizer, this time members of their touring band officially join as band members and songwriters. This includes the excellent rhythm section of bassist Ellis Durand and Henry Holmes on drums. They add a low end groove to tracks like single “Davina McCall” named after the popular English TV presenter.

Lyrically, Wet Leg are all about love, a theme that appears again and again.  Singer Rhian Teasdale sings it implicitly on second single “CPR” – “I’m in love and you’re to blame”. That appears again on the upbeat “liquidize” on the very first line, “love struck me down”.  Moving away from that theme, “Catch Fists” instead threatens males who try to come into the woman’s space when out with her friends. Guitarist Hester Chambers takes over vocals on two of the tracks, it sees her vocals buried slightly in the mix on “Don’t Speak” that also adds some My Bloody Valentine like guitars.

moisuturizer sees the Teasdale/Hester duo move a bit away from their quirky debut that gained them much notoriety and shot to #1 on the UK charts. Many of the songs here are just solid indie rock songs that are played with a bit of style and lots of attitude thrown in. “Jennifer’s Body” is a straight-ahead rocker that compares love to riding on the second level of the double deck bus. It’s a solid album from the band that saw them take the #1 album slot in the UK while the rest of the country was at the Oasis gigs.

8/10