More 80s music. Luckily I know a bit about Tears For Fears, and just glancing at the track listing gets the chorus for "Shout" terminally stuck in my head. I know the chorus mostly from those infomercials that sold collections of 80s music on CD back in the day. I don't know if I've ever heard the whole song, but the chorus could just loop for ever and probably still be acceptable as an 80s song.
Said song leads off the album, and I have to assume what I'm hearing are real people playing drums and bass because the wiki page told me this was a real band. It's so synthetic and digitized it might as well be a synthesizer playing the whole damn thing. Except for the lyrics, which for once have not been distorted and reverbed into nothingness (file under credit where due). "The Working Hour" starts off with a shrilly combination of an alto sax with a synth piano that sounds so wussy- I know that's not a substantive criticism, but saxophone and wussy music just don't go together. Sax is supposed to sound sultry and deep. If you're going to use it in such a week manner you might as well just use a melodica.
This album also contains the megahit "Everybody Wants To Rule The World" which contains some decent guitar work. "Mothers Talk" has an excellent rhythm backing, which I'm glad was sung over for the most part so no asshat hip-hop artist can steal it. The opening for "Broken" sounded like it could make for a relatively decent rocker track, with it's driving bass line and solid guitar work. Then the synths came in and made it sound like a cheap arcade game.
That's sort of the problem with the whole album. It's solid for 80s music in that you can hear a real band playing and understand the lyrics. Sure there's a ton of echo and softness but it's not too overdone (faint praise, much?). But the synthesizer sounds are so dated and cheesy. If I had to pick an 80s music album to listen to of the ones I've heard so far it would probably be this one, but that speaks more to the quality of its competition than to the greatness of Songs From The Big Chair.
The album closes with "Listen" which starts off with a whispy synth line that has the same cadence as that old "Wait 'til we get our Haynes on you!" commercial. So all I can think about during this breathy ballad is underwear. The song ends with something I feel is often present in 80s music- a generic African music influence. It seems kinda weird that so much 80s music artists wind up using an African influence when 80s music is so quintessentially white, but it happens a lot and I wish I had written about it the other times I've heard it. Oh well.
Anyhoo, I didn't not like Songs From The Big Chair and want to lean towards kinda liking it because it was so much better than Psychocandy. But eh, I don't really feel like I liked it. So 2 stars.
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