★★★★★
Today's punk rock has been broken into sub-sub-sub-genres like blackened grindcore, post-emo skramz and reverse-anarcho-alt-garage-neo-cowpunk. Each of these obscure genres place walls between themselves and everyone else. However, there was a brief moment in time (mostly) in the UK in the early '80s, where non-pop music was simply non-pop music...
- www.punknews.org
2013-04-01
★★★★★
If you think I enjoy enjoying this epitome of new-wave commercialism, this pap beloved of no one but MTV-addled suburbanites (not even NME, ever!)--well, you're right. I'm not just being campy, either, except insofar as camp means the luxury of surrender to stupidity--in this case to sheer, sensationalistic aural pleasure, whooshes and zooms and sustains and computerized ostinatos and English boys whining about their spaced-out, financially secure lot, all held aloft on tunes Mr...
- www.robertchristgau.com
2009-07-17
★★★★★
(1) Doesn't pretend they "advanced" from their debut. (2) Includes bonus photos of their haircuts. (3) So much better than Duran Duran. [Recyclables]
- www.robertchristgau.com
2009-07-10
★★★★★
This is very silly, and I know why earnest new-wavers resent it. But I think it's a hoot--so transparently, guilelessly expedient that it actually provides the hook-chocked fun most current pop bands only advertise. The human drummer and all-too-human guitarist provide reassuring links with a past these boys have no more intention of giving up than you, me, or Rod Stewart...
- www.robertchristgau.com
2009-02-27
★★★★★
If they were never as sublime as "Chewy Chewy," they were never as icky as "1, 2, 3, Red Light," and unlike the Ohio Express or the 1910 Fruitgum Co., they-wrote-all-the-songs-themselves. I might even claim that this was where the idiots took over the studio if I hadn't noticed that their weakest cut by far--1985's terminal "Who's That Girl (She's Got It)," designed to convince us that they're human beings--is the-one-they-produced-themselves.
- www.robertchristgau.com
2009-02-26
★★★★★
The fortunes of A Flock of Seagulls, which had diminished when Listen, the follow-up to the self-titled debut album, had failed to match its success, fell further with this third album. The group's beat-happy synthesized sound remained in place, as it had since the Top Ten success of "I Ran (So Far Away)...
- music.aol.com
2008-08-28
★★★★★
A Flock of Seagulls stuck around longer than many critics figured, but by 1986 things looked bad for the group who had become synonymous with the term "haircut band." Synth pop from the U.K. was out, guitars were back in, and Flock of Seagulls' stalwart six-stringer, Paul Reynolds, had quit. Undaunted, the remaining trio relocated to Philadelphia and attempted a more poppier, soulful, and American sound for their fourth album...
- music.aol.com
2008-08-28
Loading...
