A good article on the creation of the classic Ultravox track ‘Vienna’ from Musicradar.com
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)
"'I've watched your face for a long time...It's always the same.." But it's called love
And it belongs to us..
i make alternative music from brazil and my EP just dropped today — wanted to share this here
List of albums and release years below in order:
Voting for countries not participating is open already, for competing countries the voting will open during tonight’s Grand Final! You can vote 10x per country, and it would be great to mobilise for our Synth king Sam (LMNC) to try and stop THAT country from winning.
(It would also be nice to try and get more than 0 points from the public vote) 😅
Artists listed below in order:
A single page poster from West German magazine Bravo 7th December 1978.
Credit: Leonardo Gibo (via Facebook)
I’m making a playlist on youtube music for a road trip next weekend. Give me a couple of your favorite synth-pop songs or maybe something that you think is under appreciated. Any era is fine and obscure stuff is good too (hopefully I can find it on YT Music)
The song "Here Is The News" by the Electric Light Orchestra (ELO) is considered one of the most significant precursors of synth-pop and New Wave within the ELO catalog.
It was released in 1981 on the concept album *Time*, which swapped the band's classic orchestral sound almost entirely for synthesizers.
