808 State - ex:el (1991)

Ordinarily I'd have no truck with the sort of self-conscious typographic gymnastics which flout the convention of titles beginning with an upper-case letter, but Ex:el looks weird, so just this once…

This probably wasn't the best album recorded by 808 State, but it's the only one I bought - apart from the thing they did with MC Tunes - so it's the one I'm going to write about. I know they paid their dues and all that, and one of them was A Guy Called Gerald, but listening to this in 2018, I can't help think of all those camouflaged knobs who spent the latter part of the eighties impersonating Front 242, scowling and chanting about obedience over the usual sequencer riffs, all wearing sunhats and blowing whistles by the next decade, having decided that all that techno stuff is dead easy and was only what they'd been doing all along anyway, plus the clubs are a lot safer now that it's not just black people*…

I went back and listened to Newbuild on One'sTube so I know that wasn't where they were coming from at all, and yet that's what ex:el sounds like for the most part. It's too expensive, although as such seemed very much at home on ZTT - acid house which Trevor Horn would be able to understand through being a patently better standard of dance music. Mostly it's beats with a series of jazzy riffs noodling up one after the other in orderly fashion - which is what camouflaged knobs thought acid house did, and which I suspect may have been responsible for intelligent house, or whatever it was called - the ponderously shit stuff. Like most things aimed at either the feet or the arse, intelligent is rarely anything like so satisfying as stupid, which is why the best track here is Cübik because it's a great big slab of square wave during which we can close our eyes and pretend we're listening to Altern-8. The thoroughly overrated Björk provides characteristically arbitrary vocalisations on two tracks, underscoring the image of a band pissing about in the studio, trying out stuff to see what will happen; also underscoring the truism that the best techno albums tended to be collections of established bangers - because that's the best word I could think of - and techno artists shouldn't make albums in the same way that, for example, Yes, made albums.

So ex:el isn't bad, but apart from Cübik and maybe one or two of the others - depending on just how many of those fucking things you've taken - it's more or less a collection of theme tunes and incidental music for regional news programmes.

You'd be better off with the real thing.

*: Because the internet is mostly thick twats these days, I feel I should explain that I present this statement as an example of the sort of thing a camouflaged knob who had spent the latter part of the eighties impersonating Front 242 might say. I am therefore commenting upon a fucking stupid observation rather than making one.