If you only know the B52's from Love Shack, you've probably got the wrong idea. Heck, Rock Lobster's right on this album and it still might give you the wrong idea: the extra two minutes on the album version somehow make it an order of magnitude crazier than the single / video versions, from the extended jam to the menagerie sampler platter to the pickup buzz solo. It's a masterpiece.
The B52's are way more punk and way more brilliant than you're likely to give them credit for. They're campy, that lowest form of style outside bare irony, but the aesthetic runs deeper than that, aggressively rejecting the now in a glorious smashup of new wave deadpan and psychobilly rollick. Retro organs spike post-punk guitar stabs, near-nonsense is keened and shouted in one of the great vocal performances of the age, direct and absurd and tinged with madness and prickling menace.
And they're fun! Not Love Shack fun. Fun like thrilling, fun like one of the girls might whip a knife out of her bouffant and stab a guy in Tarantino technicolor and in retrospect you'd feel like you should have seen it coming. Inventive, taught, exciting stuff, far better than you might be expecting 4.5/5
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment