ISMISM [AKA: SNACK ATTACK]

About eighty nine percent of this album is bad enough to be embarrassing, which is to say out of nine songs we have one keeper. Why is so much 80s music so bad you might ask. Well, the reason why is that people were so caught up in distancing themselves from the supposedly so passe 70s that they forgot to have good taste and discernment and instead replaced all that with this undying urge to sound 'modern', which meant over reliance on 80s gimmicks like drum machines, synthetic horns and shallow adoptions of ethnic rhythms and trends.

Most of this album is sort of watered down takes on early techno, rai (the 80s trendy replacement for reggae from Egypt, had a feature run in Cosmo magazine) early hip-hop and African pop that sounds twice removed from the Talking Heads already somewhat watered down take on the genre. To make matters worse most of the lyrics are delivered in this 80s pseudo rap that really isn't rap and gets real annoying really fast. These guys are so obsessed with their neo-beatnik wordplay that they just don't know when to shut-up which would have been approximately a couple lines into the first song, a rousing treatise on snack food when want we really are hungry for is something a little more substantial like maybe a rip on the fast food industry's disastrous effect on world climate and hunger. Oh no, we get a silly album cover with garish funny hamburgers (nerd alert - US album cover and title differs from the UK version) ha ha ha, who cares.

Anyway, enough about the bad stuff because we have one really killer artsy pop song on here that easily made the album worth the fifty cents I put down at the local thrift store. I mean a really really good dramatic artsy pop song ala David Bowie or Stevie Wonder, but in a very 80s sounding format that sounds great for a change. Under Your Thumb is the mysterious story of one woman's solution to an abusive relationship that grows into a universal cry in which the woman becomes a part of us all. This melancholy tale is driven by a pulsing synthetic minimalist/gamelan keyboard sound and very original spiraling chord progressions that raise her story to the beyondest. For some weird reason this is the only song on the whole album that has really good vocals that actually sing abeit in that real pure 80s soaring Aha kind of way.

A totally forgetable trendy 80s record that somehow comes up with one song that probably rates in my personal top twenty of artsy pop songs of all-time, go figure.