I am still writing about records I have rescued from the pile of vinyl I have in my parents' house. This compilation of singles, b-sides, and so on comes from all the way back in 1988.
The Blue Aeroplanes were somewhat unusual for an indie band. One odd was just how many of them there were – their line-up seems so big that they were almost like an indie Earth, Wind and Fire, with built-in redundancy meaning that every possible instrument had several players in the band (for example, the sleevenotes list seven different guitarists). They also boasted a dancer at a time when it was neither profitable nor popular, with Wojtek Dmochowski serving up an engagingly amateurish brand of interpretative dance. The actual music is rather appealing too.
Most of the tracks seem to be written or co-written by lead vocalist Gerard Langley, whose singing style has a certain clipped beat poet delivery, with the musical accompaniment having the kind of broader sound you would get on a record featuring nineteen named contributors playing twenty different instruments (but not everyone and not every instrument is featured on every track). It makes for an intriguing stew and I am in some ways sorry that there are no longer bands like this. I suppose in some ways this Blue Aeroplanes album is a relic of a time before indie music went in one of either two wrong directions – the money chasing vacuousness of Britpop or the facile self-defeating loser music of people inspired
by the C-86 sadcore axis.
An inuit panda production
No comments:
Post a Comment