The Null Device
2004/12/26
Could this be the worst album ever recorded? A Star Wars Christmas album from 1980, forever debunking any claims that the Star Wars franchise once had a pre-Jar-Jar Golden Age. This album has everything; C3PO and R2D2 singing duets, lots of jingling sleigh-bells and sugary strings interspersed with Star Wars sound effects, corny comedy routines from "droids" and wookies, inane dialogue, the obligatory extra-large helpings of schmaltz, and if that wasn't enough, a young Jon Bon Jovi leading a high-school choir. (via bOING bOING)
I'm listening to The Wake's Harmony and Singles (the LTM repackaging of the stuff they recorded for Factory/Factory Benelux in the early 1980s). They sound very much like New Order circa Movement, down to the drumming sounding identical in places, with similar digital reverb, the same keyboard sound, and angsty, ambiguous lyrics delivered with Caesar's Bernard-Sumner-imitating-Ian-Curtis-esque vocals. It's much in the way that early In The Nursery sounds like Joy Division, only more so.
It's funny to think that they're the same band who released Tidal Wave of Hype, an album of Blueboy/Field Mice-style jangle-pop with baggy and indie-dance influences and songs about provincial discos, obnoxious people, masturbation and John Major, on Sarah Records. Though, come to think about it, probably not much odder than New Order having done a football anthem and a Balearic acid album.
Anyway, if you're ever disappointed that New Order didn't record enough albums in the early 1980s, this CD is for you.
(Come to think of it, one could do a compilation of "songs/albums/artists that sound like New Order but aren't". I'll volunteer this CD, The Bodines' Heard It All and The Field Mice's Missing The Moon.)