If they are remembered at all, I suspect Martha & the Muffins have been reduced mainly to a question in a pub trivia quiz with vague suggestions of a time when new wave was angular, quirky, and wore a skinny tie; although to be fair, it was four fucking decades ago. Like everyone, I thought Echo Beach was great, but retained impressions beyond the token hit single thanks to my record collecting pal at school who obsessively snapped up subsequent singles by anyone whose debut smash had already found its way into his heart, particularly if coloured vinyl was involved. So I dutifully borrowed and taped the five or six which came after Echo Beach along with the b-sides because - who knows? - just in case, and life went on.
Recently going through old tapes - all of which still play just fine, thank you very much - listening to Saigon again, not having heard it in maybe thirty years or more, was like being punched in the face. The song chugs along on its tidy wee new wave beat, keyboard wistfully keening away in the background, and then we come to the end of the verse and that riff is like going over the humpback of a rollercoaster just as the amphetamine hits. I was aware of there having been an album or two and had vague memories of studying the sleeves in record stores, specifically HMV in Coventry. It seemed like further investigation was long overdue.
The production is slightly flat, underscoring the illusion of the tidy little college band in shiny shoes playing their songs for you, but this only means it takes longer for the magic to work its way through; and the more you listen, the more it seems like the Muffins were at least a Canadian equivalent of the Talking Heads, probably more jagged than they sound here but nevertheless something which conveniently coincided with the mainstream more than played up to it. We're not quite talking Devo, but we're definitely not talking Huey Lewis and the fucking News. Behind the radio friendly mix, the instrumentation is pretty wild, peppering all manner of structural somersaults with blasts of jazzy noise, and offsetting squeals of the unexpected against metronomic repetition of a kind which would doubtless have beardy old men wetting themselves had it been originated in Düsseldorf in the seventies. I suspect this band were not served well by their own billing which seemed to miss everything that made them worth hearing, and surely the Peter Saville sleeve should have been a clue.
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