Art of Noise, Below the Waste

From the inexplicable gatefold doubling as a speaker advertisement to the bizarre tracklist, this album just confuses me at every turn. AoN could be weird, and could be good at being weird, as long as they gave the long ones a beat and cut the rest when they'd overstayed their welcome. This explains the shorter tracks on Who's Afraid, for example, because they're only just enough to be interesting. But here they drag on ("Yebo!", "Back To Back"), trip over their own cleverness ("Dan Dare") and make you wonder what they're even doing on the disc ("Finale"). Their better tracks recall their earlier days: "James Bond Theme," no "Peter Gunn," is basically Monte Norman mugged by "Close (To The Edit)" but still has its spartan charms, and "Catwalk" takes a while to get going but gets there. Still, even the otherwise beguiling "Island" and "Robinson Crusoe" are practically remixes of each other, and with the partial exception of "Spit" guest vocalists Mahlathini and the Mahotella Queens don't add enough to their three tracks to make much difference. More proof that scum always floats to the top. (Content: no concerns.)

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The Art of Noise, The Seduction of Claude Debussy

I was a starving med student in a tiny studio apartment living off financial aid and contract work when this album came out in 1999, but I was too big of an AoN fan to miss their first release in literally a decade, and I scraped together my pennies to get in line for the deluxe 3-disc pre-order complete with (and this was quite a novel idea back then) a custom burned-to-order CD-R with unreleased tracks. By now the group had metastasized to Lol Creme (10cc) as well as Trevor Horn, Anne Dudley and Paul Morley, "playing themselves" in the liner notes, and incredibly a full narration by no less than actor John Hurt. A concept album for the 1990s, the album attempted to merge Debussy compositions (and I do like Debussy) with AoN's usual inscrutable synthopop hijinx, but the end product comes off overproduced and overwrought, and like all concepts that try to do too much the album ends up offering far too little. The quality isn't at issue: with Trevor Horn in the producer's chair, the album couldn't help but ooze quality to spare. But production quality isn't everything, and the feel of the album suggests that they treated commercial success as a given (Ron Howard as NARRATOR: It wasn't.) and concluded they could do as they pleased. The hoity-toity narration, competently delivered as it is, is part of that problem, but so are the unrelated aria interludes (e.g., "On Being Blue" and "Born on a Sunday"), the irritating rap on top of an otherwise solid technogroove ("Metaforce," complete with KLF-style AoN callouts), and, well, tracks that are just plain irritating (the fatally repetitive "Metaphor on the Floor"). Do I think I wasted this fragment of my student loans I'm still paying back? Well, not so much, because there are still some remarkable moments like the lead-in "Il Pleure (At the Turn of the Century)" and "The Holy Egoism of Genius," plus the ambient audio seafoam of "Out of this World (Version 138)." These are legitimately good, though only one track truly feels the most like classic AoN and the most like it achieves the album's premise, that being "Rapt: In the Evening Air" with its melody line and slinky strutting bass (and Rakim's rap here isn't nearly as obnoxious). As proof I submit the best two tracks, the "Moments in Love"-inspired "Approximate Mood Swing No. 2" and "Pause," beautifully layered arrangements both, but overall far more Debussy than Noise. (I admit the last one I listen to as little as possible now because of an inseparable association with loneliness and isolation. After all, it was lean times back then, and it turns out living alone in a school full of high achievers is more isolating than you might think.) For an album this anxiously awaited it turned out to be a really mixed bag, neither meeting the standard for a comeback nor an artistic achievement, thus explaining why other than various compilations and reissues there's not been a lot of Noise nor Art since then. It's a shame because with a little more restraint and a little less hubris, the high points prove they might have really done something special with it. On the second disc of the deluxe issue are four equally irksome remixes of "Metaforce" that fail to improve on its fundamental problems; it would have been more interesting (and a better value) to include Reduction, the companion limited edition album of outtakes. Because I was a poor student, remember, I could only afford the 5-track version of the custom CD (I selected "An Extra Pulse of Beauty" as the title and cover art), which included various early takes and B-sides. If you were rich or silly, I think you could buy all 12, though I was and am neither; I'd call the ones I selected interesting, but in retrospect I could have done without the "live in studio" version of Beat Box ("One Made Earlier") even though the 12-inch version of "Closer (To The Edit)" I chose was almost Blue-Best Of quality. (Content: no concerns.)

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The Best of the Art of Noise

This is a mildly challenging review to write not because of the music but because of the sheer number of editions that exist. In broad strokes, however, you've got a Blue and you've got a Pink (and at least one release has both), and one is clearly better than the other. As with many proto-ambient acts sometimes the quantity is just as important as the quality, and the 12" mixes on Blue — particularly the CD release — frankly deliver. While the lead-in "Opus 4" is a little underdeveloped, the big hits are mostly here, including the classic "Beat Box" (especially glittering on the long-play CD as "Beatbox (Diversion One)"), the slightly ominous "Close (To The Edit)," "Dragnet '88" (I liked it, but the music is clearly better than the movie), and my personal two favourites: the extended Max Headroom feature "Paranoimia," Matt Frewer gabble intact, and the so sumptuous it brought tears to my wife's eyes "Moments in Love," this 7 minute form eclipsed only by the 10 minute ecstasy on the vinyl of Into Battle (which you can find on the CD of Daft). Low points, but only by comparison, are eight minutes of Tom Jones trying to get in your pants ("Kiss," although I appreciate the smarmyness as contrast) and the harsh and lugubrious "Legacy;" this, plus the peculiar omission of "The Army Now" from their first EP, loses that fifth star but is still a must-have for any collector of synthopop. Pink, however, is almost atavistic in its choices, reverting to 7" mixes for virtually all the tracks. There are also some appallingly suspect substitutions, such as the complete absence of "Beat Box" (replaced by "Yebo," its world beat fusion being fun to listen to, but hardly revolutionary) and "Moments" (replaced by "Instruments of Darkness" which is just trite in its message); only the replacement of "Close (To The Edit)" with "Robinson Crusoe" is anything close to an even swap. There is still "Peter Gunn" with the wacky Duane Eddy twang, but less of it, and another version of "Paranoimia" with a slightly different script that Edison Carter fans will want to find. The rest is the same but in abridgment, and abridgment is pretty much the entire theme of Pink: a meagre compilation that only hints at luxury, but enough remains to tempt listeners back to the superior release. Will I still be perfect tomorrow? Perhaps, but only one of these two will be. (Content: Tom Jones' hormones.)

Blue: 🌟🌟🌟🌟
Pink: 🌟🌟🌟