STRANGE ANGELS

Five years after her last studio release, Laurie Anderson is back. I remember the surprise and a little disappointment when I've listened to it for the first time. No more experimentalism, nothing challenging, just good pop. Honestly, had the same music been released by somebody else I would have found it very good...it's like eating Marmite thinking it's Nutella, it depends much on what one is expecting.

So what we have here? Ten good songs deeply sounding 80s even though we are at the end of that hateful decade. A very nice pop tune opens the album followed by an ethnic thing which may remind even to Miriam Makeba, a sort of Peter Gabriel's song of the 80s in terms of sounds and mood, an electronic song which could have been released by the Eurhytmics (note, this is a band that I think has done something very good sometimes, so I'm not putting Laurie Anderson down), then brasses in Phil Collins style open a song which you can imagine sung by Jon Anderson in his excursions in south and central America with a Calypso tempo.

In any case, the B side is more in line with Laurie's usual output, "The Day Of The Devil", at least not considering the poppy chorus, and "The Dream Before" are excellent songs and sound less 80s than the rest.

Another very radio-friendly song leads to the last album's song which is a great song on which Laurie shows that she can really sing other than speaking or using vocoders. The closer makes me think, for its mood, to the Roger Waters of Radio KAOS, I mean "The Tide Is Turning2, but also to the most melodic songs of the "White Zulu" Johhny Clegg.

So this album is musically like a summary of the few good things coming from the 80s and surely one of the best things of the decade, but very far from Laurie's best efforts. Good enough for three stars, a very pleasant listen, but not what one should expect from an artist like this.

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