★★★★★
It's not band breakdown (Duncan Kilburn's sax replaced, John Ashton's guitar gone) nor pop sellout (Todd Rundgren in for Steve Lillywhite at the board) nor tired songcraft (hookier than the junk-punk debut if more ornate than the powerhouse follow-up) that makes this quite entertaining album less than credible. It's the half-life of cynicism as a public stance...
- www.robertchristgau.com
2009-07-17
★★★★★
No text for this review; see http://robertchristgau.com/xg/bk-cg90/grades-90s.php.
- www.robertchristgau.com
2009-07-17
★★★★★
As his pose proves ever more profitable and baroque--dig that silken-haired punk déshabille--Richard Butler reminds me more and more of Glenn Miller, who in his time also provided a lush, enthralling, perfectly intelligent alternative to the real thing. Butler's snarl is a croon, his harsh guitar sound a grand echo, his selfish rage a soothing reminder that some things never change.
- www.robertchristgau.com
2009-07-10
★★★★★
Don't let Richard Butler's heartfelt snarl and Vine Ely's pounding pulse stun you into thinking that this merely recapitulates a great formula. It's richer melodically, texturally, and emotionally: Butler's '70s-'60s mind games have evolved into the bitter double nostalgia of a reluctant romantic who half-believed in 1967 and then half-believed again in 1976. And if commitment gives him problems, at least he's passionate about sex...
- www.robertchristgau.com
2009-07-10
★★★★★
Punk engenders postpunk, which incorporates--these guys are English, after all--its essential prepunk Bowie-Ferry axis, but bypasses its equally essential pub, garage, and roots axes. All operative imperatives are purely aesthetic, powered by vagaries of taste, quiddities of form, and oddities of talent; however inevitable the resulting music may have sounded, it was obviously all pose, and just as it had no cultural significance then, it has no historical significance now...
- www.robertchristgau.com
2009-07-10
★★★★★
Because this was unmistakably the P-Furs and unmistakably a stone bore, I figured we must have overrated this band. No one ever accused them of having the funk, after all. Comparison with Talk Talk Talk and even Forever Now soon set me straight, however. Before slipping into chronic depression, Richard Butler intoned amid chaos--the dissonant drones that here parade by in formation detonate all over the earlier records, which makes most of the difference...
- www.robertchristgau.com
2009-07-10
★★★★★
This best-of sounded tired last summer, but when I returned it to the turntable around Election Day, "President Gas" presented itself as prophecy and Richard Butler's existential fatigue as the decade's great romantic stance...
- www.robertchristgau.com
2009-07-10
★★★★★
They're a posthippie band who satirize hippie fatuousness as well as a punk-era band who send up anti-hippie orthodoxy, but I love them for simpler reasons: they're great junk and they sound like the Sex Pistols...
- www.robertchristgau.com
2009-07-10
★★★★★
Tired of the sardonic fake Pistolese, Richard Butler turns his heartfelt dispassion to an approach that bears the same relation to Bowieism as the earlier Furs did to punk. His seducerama is in the manner of an aging matinee idol who isn't quite as famous as he thinks he is; he sings as if he's known you for years even though you're both perfectly aware that so far your relationship goes no further than his offer of a lift back to your place...
- www.robertchristgau.com
2009-07-10
Loading...
