Luke Haines is one of those pop pariahs that almost seems destined to fail before the public eye. Pop music and megalomania are uneasy bedfellows, and no one seems quite so determined to marry them as Haines. Best known for his cerebral roles with The Auteurs and Black Box Recorder, Haines is a perfectionist with a fractured sense of beauty and harmony. His timeless Britpop recordings with The Auteurs on albums such as New Wave hinted at an uncomfortable cynical melancholy, but this is where Haines lets his witty dissatisfaction bubble to the surface. Loosely based around the story of the German Red Army Faction, an extreme-left quasi-terrorist group from the 1970's, Baader Meinhof is naïve socialist propaganda viewed posthumously with an invigorating dose of funk. Haines abandons the pop classicism of his earlier work for a sparse, Stevie Wonder-meets-Karl Marx platter of fractured dance music. Funky clavinets, Arabesque strings, and fuzzy guitars soundtrack a manifesto of daring, incendiary propaganda as Haines embodies the PLO-backed amateur revolutionaries of the Baader-Meinhof group on buzzy death disco groovers like "There's Gonna Be An Accident", "Mogadishu", and "...It's A Moral Issue". In all honesty, revolution has sounded more fun than this, but Baader Meinhof is a funky and fascinating interpretation of one of the most bizarre manifestations of counterculture of the early 70's, eyed by the most crotchety tunesmith of the 90's.
No comments:
Post a Comment