![]() ![]() Then comes in the full band, rocking with synths. " Private Lives" begins with a pleasant little piano intro, perhaps in direct opposition to the preceding track. I find it odd that "New Europeans" wasn't a single, considering that I like the song better than a few of the other four tracks picked as singles. But it is confusing how this relates to the old man. The clash of Old World culture with the "synthesizer's song" seems so fitting for Ultravox, a band that combines classical string instruments with rock instrumentation and synthesizers. He's a European legacy, a culture for today". he puts his headphones on / His modern world revolves around the synthesizer's song /. It feels so European, though – and suddenly the third verse (the one with a synthesizer instead of a guitar as primary rhythm) declares ". The lyrics of the song are very interesting – the title is also the chorus, but the verses tell a story of an elderly man, quietly and passively sitting and reminiscing. The song even has what is essentially a guitar solo (backed by synthesizers), which is of course followed by a synth-dominated third verse, complete with vocals that sound processed to sound distant or through a telephone. That actually happens a lot, where it's hard to tell how "real" or synthetic a track is. Through the second verse, there is what sounds either like an e-bow or a good old synth line. Bass, drums, and vocals enter, and it isn't until the chorus that weird synth washes enter the mix. " New Europeans", in fact, opens with a crunchy guitar. These guys loved to experiment and find new sounds – but they weren't as concerned as other bands were about being wholly synthetic. And there's the drummer, too, credited with "Drums, Electronic Percussion, Vocals". Like the Human League, three of the four members of the band are credited as performing synthesizers, but each also plays a "regular" instrument, too, be it bass, guitar, or Billy Currie, who performs piano, viola, and violin. It is a seven-minute instrumental, full of pitch-bent synthesizers and a full sound. " Astradyne" is the opener I had begun describing above. The way the standard sequencing works makes things flow so well. I think the original US vinyl messed things up – it just doesn't work as well. I should note that there are two versions of the tracklisting, but my German vinyl copy and the reissued CD version I've seen online use the version I gave above. it has such a big sound, which is why playing it on vinyl seems to only help. Then a bass drum kicks, the drums start, more keyboards fill in, and a melody begins. It starts with a tinking synthetic drum beat, and slowly various synth lines come in. When I got home and finally played the record on my dad's turntable, I was blown away.ġ1. Upon learning that, I quickly found a theater downtown that plays the movie weekly and attended a screening. I later learned the song was written in reaction to the film The Third Man (1948), which itself is set in Vienna. I fell in love with the album and listened to it, and the title track in particular, all the time. Don't cast your eyes down too far – I do own the album, after all, fair and square. I bought the album on vinyl, and I didn't have a record player, so I took the technically-cheating route of downloading mp3s of the album. (A couple of weeks before I left I started finding the others.) While at that first store, the only record I bought was Ultravox's Vienna. I'd looked up a dozen or so stores, but we spent so much time at the first one that we didn't bother going to any others. While I was there, I always wanted to go record shopping but never did until Meredith came and visited me halfway through my time there. I'd listened through my dad's The Collection (a collection of the singles from their fourth through seventh albums) on vinyl, but it wasn't until about a year ago that I bought Quartet (1982) on cassette. Both are fairly good tracks, but it didn't immediately inspire me to buy an album. It started when my sister Meredith bought me a 7" of "The Thin Wall" b/w "I Never Wanted to Begin". Like the Human League, they've been on the fringe of my awareness for years but I've only recently begun really listening to them. Ultravox is a relatively new favorite of mine. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |