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Pop Rock Nation

Tag: synth-pop

  • Paul’s Song Journal 3/10/11: OMD’s “History of Modern Part 1”

    Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily contemplating the end of, like, everything.

    ”History of Modern (Part 1)”
    Here’s the recently reunited British synth-pop pioneers Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark with the third single and title track from their latest album History of Modern, their first full-length studio record since 1996. While the band is best remembered for “If You Leave”, their contribution, via the soundtrack of Pretty in Pink, to the mid-80s John Hughes hit parade, it’s worth remembering that such lovely, lush, and lovelorn ballads (see also “Secret”, “So In Love”, “Forever Live and Die”) were the exception more than the rule in a catalog full of songs about technology, communications, science and religion.

    This is a band that named one of their albums Architecture & Morality (and boy, did they mean it!), and who turned the bombing of Hiroshima into one of the most chipper, urgently effervescent pop singles of the 80s (and that at the dawn of the Reagan Administration, when World War III seemed like a real possibility to this nine-year-old kid in Paddock Lake, Wisconsin, when the President could make a joke about outlawing Russia and letting the bombing commence immediately.)

    It’s that tradition of setting historical and/or philosophical and/or scientific inquiry to catchy, electronically-enhanced three minute pop ditties that OMD plays to on their latest. “History of Modern Part 1” is, more than anything, an adorable piece of insistent melodic candy in a shiny, shiny wrapper. But its lyrics tap into what might otherwise be a terrifying contemplation. Not just the inevitability of physical death, but something even greater and even more unfathomable. And they do it in a way that not only doesn’t sound doomy-gloomy, but actually conveys a feeling of – yeah! – liberation, man!

    This song finds me at a strange moment, what with all the rotten things afoot in the State of Wisconsin. For the last six or eight weeks, each morning and evening local news broadcast has offered up a increasingly overstocked buffet of fresh outrages; and it’s been surreal to see those homegrown outrages – it’s all happening just ten miles down the road – amplified in the broadcasts and web-pages of national and international news media. There are few times – no times, in fact – I can remember being as consumed with anger over abstractions like “rights” and “democracy” as I have been these last few weeks, and at one point, I had to make a conscious decision to step back and remember to – y’know – be a person.

    Inside the Wisconsin State Capitol, February 19, 2011
    “History of Modern” is more than just a healthy step back though. It’s an astronomical-scale zoom-out. While I might be keeping a running tally of “Likes” on the “Recall Alberta Darling (R-River Hills)” facebook page (it topped 4000 today) to compare with my running tally of “Likes” on the “Recall Mark Miller (D-Monona)” page (150 so far), this is a song about the recall efforts currently being mounted by the cosmos against, in OMD’s words, “all that went before and all that follows this.”

    Earlier this week, I was feeling a little bummed out watching the news and seeing all the signs taken down from the Capitol, whose marble walls, for weeks, had turned into a spontaneous, ever expanding, interactive mosaic of citizen outrage – one of the coolest works of collective outsider art I’ve ever witnessed. Mixed media with blue painters tape. And then there it all was on the news, all laid out in piles for people to reclaim if they so desired. Each sign has been photographed for posterity; some, it’s been said, are even Smithsonian-bound. Eventually, the signs would all have to come down sometime. Everyone knew that. But it was still sad when it actually happened.

    And then there’s OMD singing to me from my iPod: “All will be erased, and replaced.”

    A strangely hopeful reminder of the Almighty Whatever’s pending Repeal and Replace legislation which will certainly pass at some point, no matter how many people take to the streets in protest.

  • First Look (and Free Download!) Yeasayer’s “I Remember” Video and EP

    The fourth single from ”Odd Blood”
    For Valentine’s Day this year, the indie-popsters Yeasayer delivered a heart-shaped (or rather head-of-an-aging-biker-shaped) box of nostalgic synth-pop candy in the form of the fourth single from their 2010 sophomore album Odd Blood. The song’s called “I Remember” and in addition to delivering a typically strange/gross/cheesy/beautiful video (not quite as distractingly icky as their last), the band has made a three-track EP of the song available for free download. Awwwwww. How sweet, right?

    The EP contains the original album version of the song along with two remixes. The first, by Painted Palms (who posted their own free EP a couple months ago), is a small-but-lovable psychedelic trifle. At just under three-and-a-half minutes, it doesn’t go much of anywhere, but it sounds cool enough. But the second remix, by the Belgian house dj duo Villa is an eight-minute widescreen epic of digital-age longing – a sonic Doctor Zhivago for the Facebook set – built around the song’s original structure and vibe (no thumping club beats here!) but heightening its atmosphere and drama with patterns of glitches and loops to make the whole thing feel like a night spent alone in a city apartment, watching the nightlife below as it happens without you, and wishing upon a falling drunk that the phone would ring.

  • Old Friends When We Meet: Hubert Kah’s “C’est La Vie” (1996)

    If, like me, you happened to be working for Shopko in the late 1990s, you would have, by default, spent a lot of time with the satellite radio station they have piped into their stores. Lucky for me, the station was, in fact, a lot more interesting than we normally think piped-in retail music would be. It was while auditing the signage for the weekly ads on Sunday mornings that I was first introduced to Beth Orton and songs from Air’s Moon Safari album. And this radio station was just as repetitive as any normal Top 40 station, so, for awhile there, songs like World Party’s “She’s the One” and Del Amitri’s “Not Where It’s At” were as familiar to me as TLC and Britney Spears would have been. The sad thing was that there was no one announcing the songs and no ready way to know really what they were or who was singing them.

    Hubert Kah’s 1996 single ”C’est La Vie”
    Sometimes, I was already familiar with the song – I had that World Party album, for instance – but I was just stunned to be hearing it broadcast in a public place. Sometimes, I would find out what songs were by accident. Like, I’d been admiring Collective Soul’s song “Run” for months without knowing what it was – and then it turned up at the end of Varsity Blues! Huzzah! Other times, I had a guess – that “Oh, How the Days Go By” song certainly sounded like Vanessa Williams – that I could confirm on cdnow. (Remember cdnow?) In some extreme cases, I would try to memorize a few distinctive couplets – for instance “so gather around, see what the day brings, see what makes you laugh, see what makes you sing” – and plug it into whatever pre-Google search engine I happened to be using to discover that, hey, that’s the band Brad, the song’s called “The Day Brings”, and it’s on the album Interiors, which, holy wow, Shopko carries!

    But there was one song that got away. I never figured it out. And I loved it. Urrrrgh. The problem was that it sounded nothing like anybody I knew. Which was not to say that it sounded especially distinctive – in fact, it sounded like it could have been just about anybody. Challenging me further, the verses, at least from the sales floor of a discount retail store during business hours, were indecipherable to me, sung as they were in an accented croon that sounded a little like Bryan Ferry. Moreover, the chorus was mostly sung in French, and the only words I recognized were “C’est la Vie”. Approaching that pre-Google search engine with only a potential title and the sure knowledge that I was not looking for a Robbie Nevil song, I came back empty-handed.

    I stopped by Shopko recently while killing a little time over a lunch hour only to hear the song still being piped in over their speakers. The frustration came crashing back to me. How could it be that I’ve still not figured this song out? I probably looked a little silly as I tried to isolate myself in one of the less trafficked areas of the store to try to listen closely to what was being sung. I did catch the second line of the chorus – something like “rely on the heart” – but I wasn’t sure if was just mis-hearing a French lyric and “translating” it phonetically. But it was something. And as it turns out, it was enough. Typing it into Google, I came back with dozens of results identifying the lyric as an excerpt from the song “C’est la Vie” by the German synth-pop group Hubert Kah. Switching over to YouTube, I found a video for it too! And watching it, it was like meeting a long-time internet buddy in person for the first time: an old friend whose name I was just now learning.

    Hubert Kah “C’est La Vie” (1996)

    Digging a little further, I found that Hubert Kah actually scored their biggest successes with an edgy new wave, New Romantic sound in the early 80s with songs like “Rosemarie” and “Sternenhimmel”. Later in the decade, the group started releasing English language singles and even managed to chart four of them on the U.S. dance charts between 1987 and 1990. Meanwhile, lead singer Hubert Kemmler developed songwriting and producing associations with the likes of Michael Cretu, Camouflage and Peter Schilling before he was sidelined by a struggle with depression. “C’est la Vie”, featuring the vocals of Susanne Kemmler, was the group’s comeback single following a five year hiatus. How the hell the song ever found its way into the aisles of the Monroe, Wisconsin Shopko store remains a sweet, sweet mystery.