r/newwave

Right. Ha! Ha! Ha!.

This, apparently, is an album. Not a cry for help. Not the sound of a synthesiser being thrown down a staircase. No an album. By Ultravox! Not Ultravox.
And I'll be honest... it sounds like they recorded it in a collapsing laboratory while someone in the corner was being mildly electrocuted.

You see, by 1977 most bands were doing one of two things:
pretending to be angry about the system
or pretending to be Roxy Music
Ultravox, however, decided to do something far more ambitious...
They tried to be both. At the same time. While setting fire to the rulebook.

Frontman John Foxx doesn't so much sing as deliver messages from a dystopian future where emotion has been outlawed and everyone communicates via fax machine. It's cold. It's detached. It's like being told off by a robot.
And the band behind him?
Absolute chaos.

Guitars slash about like they've got a personal vendetta, the rhythm section lurches forward like a shopping trolley with a broken wheel, and the whole thing feels permanently on the brink of collapse.
Which, to be fair.... might be the point.
But then and this is where it gets interesting, right at the end, they drop Hiroshima Mon Amour.
And suddenly...
Everything clicks.

The noise becomes atmosphere.
The chaos becomes intent.
The madness becomes... vision.
It's as if someone briefly switched the lights on and you realised:
"Oh. This isn't incompetence. This is the blueprint."
The problem is, to get there, you've had to wade through a barrage of tracks that sound like a band arguing with itself in real time.

It's jagged. It's awkward. It's frequently irritating.
But it is never not for a single second boring.
So what you've got here is not a great album.
It's something much stranger than that.
It's a band halfway between being a car crash... and inventing the future.
And frankly, in a world full of safe, beige nonsense, l'a take this glorious, dysfunctional mess every single time.
Even if it does occasionally sound like it's laughing at you.

Ha! Ha! Ha! indeed.

(Credit: Steve Austin via Facebook)

https://youtu.be/es6dLjDn668?si=n5B816FSQNGDpnb4

Peter Himmelman is a Minnesota musician whose tunes often hit alternative charts who began his career in the 80s. From 1986..Eleventh Confession