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Review: 'Moore, Anthony'
'Flying Doesn't Help'   

-  Label: 'Drag City Records'
-  Genre: 'Seventies' -  Release Date: '10.6.22.'-  Catalogue No: 'DC840'

Our Rating:
This was the first Anthony Moore solo album to be released back in 1979 after the end of Slapp Happy. He had recorded Out in 1976, but it didn't get officially released until 1997 when a poorly mastered version was put out, the properly mastered version only came out on Drag City and P-Vine in 2020. Of course Flying Don't Help is as out there as you like, but with plenty of poppy new wave touches and lots of loops and tape based song production and in many ways you can hear ideas that then informed the new romantics and many 80's pop tunes.

This opens with Judy Get Down a semi sweet love song for whoever Judy was, it has Anthony's wry lyrics and an Acnalbasac noom goes funky type backing, with the guitars switching speakers and all sorts of effects moving across the speakers, as he worries about meeting her mother.

Ready Ready seems to have lots in common musically with Fashions Steady Eddie Steady that was from a similar period, although this has sly lyrics about needing more pesetas and all sorts of other concerns as there memory is in trouble, like they have taken far too many drugs or are going senile with all sorts of whooshing synth noises and a great cheap keyboard solo that goes all scratchy.

Lucia starts off with what sounds like a sitar pop love song for Lucia that wouldn't be out of place on an XTC album, as Anthony gazes lovingly at her and tries to make her his with some fuzzy guitar and chiming keyboards, this is askew but then takes a lyrical twist as we find out that this is in fact a tribute to a friend who died a mere 35 years old.

Caught Being In Love has what sound like samples at the beginning, with some crashing sounds and Anthony's vocals, about what it's like to be totally in love, as the new wave guitars and a Blancmange style keyboard accent the tale.

Time Less Strange is a very Kevin Ayers Stranger In Blue Suede Shoes style avant pop song, with a harp sound that in places goes all ABC, but set against new wave funky guitar and far dryer vocals.

Girl It's Your Time is a ? & The Mysterions meets Joe Jackson garage weirdness song of encouragement that has an almost Morse code ending.

War brings the noise and distortion and total nastiness to make you certain it's a very bad thing indeed, with squiggles of keyboard among the noises as a Bass drum beat starts repeating like a big gun going off, yet has a familiar techno feel to it, like you could turn this into a techno dancefloor smash as the guitars go all A Certain Ratio and the lyrics take us into the darkness, this is apocalyptic arch pop noise madness.

Just Us opens with squalls of noise and a driving drumbeat giving away to the pop song at it's heart, that's like the very poppiest end of This Heat, this also feels like it has a lot in common with Chairs Missing era Wire, in being experimental and far from straight ahead yet kind of feels straight forward in all its madness.

The album closes with Twilight (Uxbridge Road) a tune that's very ahead of the game, as it sounds like Uxbridge road in the last fifteen years, like the sounds coming out of Shepherds Bush Market, or a muezzin's call from the masjid it really evokes that eastern end of the road beautifully.

Find out Moore at https://www.dragcity.com/products/flying-doesnt-help https://ffm.to/flyingdoesnthelp


  author: simonovitch

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