The Music Spectrum 2004 Year-End Lists: English Pop & English Dance RockThe CDs That Didn’t Get Reviewed This Year

You can find the best-of year-end lists in most music publications. Rather than rehashing what was already reviewed and discussed this year, Music Spectrum is going deep into the stacks of CDs received this year to take a look at some of the ones that got missed.

English Pop
I reserve the English Pop and American Pop sections of the Spectrum for two kinds of music: 1) CDs that are less substantive, straightforward pop (this is a little bit of an admission that the album isn’t earth-shatteringly important), and 2) CDs that take the pop/pop rock sound and play with it (shape it, tease it, fold it back onto itself, leaving you with pop music that knows it’s pop music trying to make it an art pop commentary). Roxy Music falls into the second class. Roxy Music—Bryan Ferry, Andy McKay, Phil Manzanera, and Paul Tompson—wrote the design for English Pop music, taking the best forms of pop rock, playing them back through another level of artistic dimension, and giving us pop that is a stage show, a vaudeville throwback, musical theater, and jazz/symphonic interpretations of rock ‘n’ roll. All of this they give again on Live, a 2003 double-disc release from Eagle Records, that captured the reunion 2001 World Tour. Keyboards, strings, backup singers, and percussion flesh out the core of Roxy Music to present these huge production, over the top, fully-fledged, fully-realized pop songs. I hear elements of classic pop rock, 70’s Progressive Rock, and New Wave. While there’s a trend of symphonic orchestras doing Classic Rock covers, this is like taking that one more step: from pop song to orchestral interpretation back to orchestral pop song. As a live album, it has the feel of what the Simple Minds were trying to achieve with their double-album, Live in the City of Lights. Especially for those who might have missed the Roxy Music era, this live album is an aural scrapbook, except you suddenly you realize you’ve seen those pictures all around you, heard all of those sounds in the music of those who followed in their footsteps.

English Dance Rock
2002’s We Are Your Friends by Simian was in a package of discs from faithful Music Spectrum supporter Katie at Astralwerks. The album takes you back to 1993’s self-titled release from Duran Duran, a combination of electronic club mix-like sounds executed from a rock band structure. Simian’s songs like “Never Be Alone” with the album title chorus, “Because we are your friends/You’ll never be alone again/Oh, come on!” has that blend of voices achieved on Duran Duran’s album, using voices like keyboards, layered, controlled, and almost sounding disembodied. However, just to remind us that you’ve got a rock band behind those keyboards and keyboard-like sounds, that “Come on!” on the chorus could be pulled right off something from the early Kinks. There’s very much a sense that you’ve got a lot of Kinks influence in Simian run through Brian Eno’s Electronica filter (he’s credited with help on the album). Like Duran Duran’s album, there’s hits and misses. That disembodied vocal sound becomes somewhat overdone, but tracks like “The Swarm” break it up with a much jazzier, less clubbed up vocal.

Featured Year-End List Title

Yes, Radio 4 is from New York, represents the underground dance rock scene of New York City, and presents an album in 2004, Stealing of a Nation, that is overwhelmingly a comment on American politics. However, in the intricacies of Hip Hop/Dance rhythms entwined with rock and punk, there’s just so much of a European street/underground presence. The name, Radio 4, goes a long way to suggest the English Dance Rock category as well, seeming to point towards a pirate station competing with BBC Radio 1. I hear Pop Will Eat Itself in Radio 4’s mix of samples and guitar crunch. Done to a much more satisfying end, there’s also some Jesus Jones sounds in tracks like “Fra Type I & II), with Simian and Duran Duran lingering around. If that makes Radio 4 sound too mainstream, pop, pulp for you, don’t let that comment stop you. Radio 4 takes those pop-club dance sounds of bands like Jesus Jones and brings them back to the underground grit. Perhaps Placebo would be a better comparison, in that Placebo’s got that darker undertone to those guitars. What keeps the whole thing going, though, is dance beat drumming of Greg Collins, seamlessly transitioning like a club DJ from “Fra Type I & II” to “The Death of American Radio.” Conspiracy theories abound on this album made to shake your hips. In the days leading up to the beginning of George W. Bush’s second term, with world politics increasingly dividing the United States from many other countries, Stealing of a Nation doesn’t necessarily provide in-depth analysis. I saw one review that seemed to want Radio 4’s political commentary to be more academically aware, but this is a dance-punk album. Radio 4 brings attention to the ills and downfalls of politics as they see them, using their dance-punk like a rallying cry. “Nation” has a subdued, almost Jamaican groove like the Clash’s “Straight to Hell.” In that groove, Radio 4 doesn’t lay out a whole treatise, but they do sound the warning guitar, singing, “I have grave expectations/For this strange situation/I signed my letter of resignation/For the stealing of a nation.” Take heed, America! Rock, dance, and be politically aware. Stealing of a Nation is released by Astralwerks.

Thanks to all of the labels for the review copies.