Skip to main content

Robert Palmer - Clues

Robert Palmer

I remember this album, or at least the two songs I most closely associated with the album: "Looking For Clues" and "Johnny and Mary." The first was quirky and the second was very new wave. I love the second, and was perplexed by the first. Over the years Robert Palmer would come to exude cool, but to me he would forever be the geeky guy holding up a magnifying glass who was looking for clues. Of course, that's not entirely accurate either.

When I found a copy of Clues I was pretty stoked to go back and hear what was going on back in 1980. The album opens with "Looking for Clues," and it's hard to imagine that it's been over four decades since the song came out. It's still so good. Chris Frantz from Talking Heads played bass drum on the track. The next song, "Sulky Girl," was a straight-ahead rock song in the same sort of vein as "Bad Case of Loving You," which sort of made sense, and I suspect this is what people were expecting. "Johnny and Mary" followed and was back in the new wave arena, and remains one of my favourite Robert Palmer tracks ever. There's just a swagger and groove to the song. The first side closes out with another new wave track, "What Do You Care," that must have felt like the future of pop music at the time. It's pretty cool, and this was cutting-edge stuff. Then just like that, the first side was over. Man, that went by fast, hardly fifteen minutes. Oh well, it was good.

Time to flip it over.

Side two opens with a droning keyboard and an unemotional vocal delivery. "I Dream of Wires" was written by Gary Numan, and featured him on keyboards as well. The song is really cool, and I have always loved this era of early techno as it was equal parts organic and synthetic. It's got a foot in each world, and for me this stuff never feels old. "Woke Up Laughing" is a strange song that is almost hypnotic as it just seems to stay in one mode and never seems to create any tension or resolve, but is strangely appealing nonetheless before abruptly being cut off as "Not a Second Time" just seems to be dropped in out of nowhere. This was an old Beatles track, and honestly, not to piss on the Beatles, but Palmer's version is really uninspired. It's the only song that felt like filler. The album closes out with "Found You Now," which was co-written with Gary Numan. However, unlike "I Dream of Wires," the song didn't seem to connect, and unlike the meandering quality of "Woke Up Laughing," there wasn't anything here that drew me in.

back cover
Then it was over. Eight songs and hardly half an hour. However, when it was good it was really good, but somehow, aside from a few highlights and a particularly good first side, the impression I'm left with is the whole thing is rather uninspired. With such a short album I guess the goal was to leave 'em wanting more. Sadly for me, I was just left wondering, "Is that it?"

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Styx - Paradise Theater

Styx was hands down one of my favourite bands as a kid. They were a strange band, even back then. They were a hard rock band, almost progressive at times, who had a penchant for sucky ballads. I know there's a tendency for people to zero in on "Babe" as the song that killed the band's credibility. The roots go way back to almost the beginning when Styx released "Lady" on their second album. It showed a side to the band that needed to be kept in check, and for the most part the band kept things on a pretty tight leash. The band had been setting a gruelling pace, releasing an album a year (two in 1972) and by the time they released Paradise Theater (if I end up writing theatre later it's because that's how we spell it here) in 1981 they'd dropped ten albums in less than a decade. I snapped this up as soon as I saw it, and it became a fixture on my turntable. Like the band had announced on "Borrowed Time" from 1979's Cornerstone , ...
Post a Comment
Read more

David Baerwald - Bedtime Stories

The little sticker on the shrinkwrap says, "You may remember David Baerwald from David & David's Boomtown ..." You bet, I remembered David Baerwald. Back in 1986 Boomtown was an album with moments of sheer brilliance. The whole album may not have been as top shelf as the first few tracks, but that didn't matter - it is an excellent album. I waited for a follow-up ... and waited, and then in 1990 it was a solo David, David Baerwald,  who dropped Bedtime Stories . I snapped it up. "All For You," the opening cut, is still my favourite song on the album. It was mesmerizing. I'm not sure if the song got any airplay, it may have, but that may have been wishful thinking on my part as it was on a lot of mix tapes at the time and I heard it a lot in the car. The CD had a great booklet with all of the musician credits and lyrics. Oddly, when I found a sealed copy of the record (a great score), it just had a plain paper insert - the picture of David walking wit...
Post a Comment
Read more

Gary Numan - The Pleasure Principle

"Cars" was really the only song I knew by Gary Numan. I knew the name of the album the song came from. Over the years bits and pieces of trivia are accumulated, but in terms of his music it was still distilled down to one song ... It would be too easy to write Mr. Numan off as a one hit wonder, and I suppose in terms of actual chart hits this was his defining moment as a solo artist. Of course this really means nothing, as Gary Numan would drop an album a year pretty much through to the end of the '80s. He'd then slow down a little but continued to make music. While The Pleasure Principle was Gary Numan's debut solo release in '79, he actually cut his teeth on a couple of albums in a band called Tubeway Army, first with the band's self-titled release in 1978, and then on Replicas that came out in April of '79. By the end of Tubeway Army's run most of the band would follow Gary into his solo career. Paul Gardiner, who had been with Gary from the b...
Post a Comment
Read more