The Buggles are a footnote in the history of rock and pop music, but they're one of my favorite footnotes. They are best known today for (a) "Video Killed the Radio Star," the song whose music video was the first music video over shown on MTV, (b) launching in earnest the career of Trevor Horn, who would go on to become one of the most important music producers of the 80s and 90s, (c) featuring in one of the funniest and most baffling periods in the history of the band Yes, and (d) launching in earnest the career of Geoff Downes, who would go on to become the keyboardist and central figure of Asia (and one of the most insufferably thin-skinned musicians I've ever come across), but as an entity unto themselves, they're somewhat forgotten beyond the success of their best known single. Their first album, The Age of Plastic, is one that initially didn't appeal to me at all but eventually grew on me immensely, and their second album (basically a Horn solo project) is a fascinating one, an album that I think deserves far better than its current very-out-of-print fate. As a band built primarily around keyboards and bass guitar, with guitar used only very sparingly, they created an overall sound that bridged the past and the future as well as anybody could, and while their brand of artsy minimalist sci-fi synth pop is one that probably wouldn't appeal to somebody who generally wants a little more grit, it's a brand that has long appealed to me a lot. Ultimately, they get a * rating from me, but this is a very enthusiastic * rating, and I wish that circumstances had allowed for more than what we ultimately got.
Best song: Living In The Plastic Age
The rest of the album, for me, is a little less immaculate than the spectacular opening duo, but I still enjoy it thoroughly, both in general and in terms of individual songs. Initially, though, I kinda hated it (including the first two tracks), and while nowadays the album is generally regarded favorably more often than not, the album has sometimes drawn some especially severe criticism that largely dovetails with my first reaction. When I first heard this album, my exposure to New Wave music, on the one hand, and electronic music, on the other hand, was severely limited, and so, when I first listened to this, my initial reaction was essentially that I didn't want to hear music that sounded like it had been made by robots. Or, to use a little more precision, I didn't want to hear music made by humans who sounded like robots who sounded like they were trying to sound like humans; there was an uncanny valley aspect to this music that instinctually repulsed me. Nowadays, I still think that my initial sense of this music falling in an uncanny valley wasn't especially wrong, and I also think that Downes in particular often landed in that range with his keyboard approaches throughout his career going forward; at the same time, I came to realize that it was one thing to land in that range unintentionally, and quite another to land in that range intentionally, and part of what ended up drawing me to this sound was the way Horn and Downes used this approach to create an oddly bleak, always incredibly moody vision of the future.
Returning to the album itself, the opening duo is followed by the menacing "Kid Dynamo," featuring a version of the iconic downward "Echoes" riff (and later "Phantom of the Opera" riff), with Horn keeping his voice in its lower range and heavily processed, and while I tend to think of this as one of the lesser songs on the album (even after coming around hard to this album over the years I'm still not entirely convinced of the parts where the band approximates "rocking"), I still enjoy it plenty, especially when Horn sings "Kid Dynamo-whoa-whoa-whoa-whoa ..." in the way he does. Much more interesting to me is the side-closer, "I Love You (Miss Robot)," a track that packs an incredible amount of emotional potency given how sparse the arrangement is (it's mainly just bass, lots of keyboards, a very low-key vocal from Horn, and a vocal from Downes sung through a vocoder). Downes claimed the song was essentially about having emotionless, mechanical sex with women while on tour, and while the lyrics are more superficially about falling in love with a robot who is incapable of reciprocating, I find that the underlying loneliness inherent to this more directly relevant interpretation makes the song rise far above a novelty and instead become something roughly on par with "Summer '68" by Pink Floyd (another song about the emptiness of sex without connection).
On the second side, the first two tracks strike me as good enough, but I've also long considered them both a clear dip in the album. After more than 20 years of regularly listening to this album, I still get parts of "Clean Clean" mixed up in my head with parts of "Kid Dynamo," and while "Clean Clean" is an interesting rocker with some strong vocal hooks (I especially love "I'm gonna, take a ride gonna pick up the team (picking up, pickin' up the team)"), this track once again shows that there's a hard cap on how much I can enjoy this band trying to rock (on the other hand, though, it has one of the most bonkers synth solos of the whole album, so that helps a lot). "Elstree" is a gentler song, this time about a person who tries to make himself relevant to history by acting in movies but who will instead fade away like so many B-movie actors, yet it's one that I always end up enjoying more on its own than I do as part of the album; it's pretty, and it's memorable, but I almost always find myself starting to lilt a bit when I get to this point in the album.
Fortunately, this album finishes very strong. "Astroboy (And the Proles on Parade)" has long been one of my favorite deep cuts on this album (maybe my favorite beyond the opening duo), and for all I know it might just be a function of how much I love the vulnerable way Trevor sings "Astro boy" before the snotty "I'm watching the proles on parade" part, but the song is more than that: the cross of the low-key sci-fi lounge jazz at the song's foundation and the bombastic synths overpowering everything on top is just about a perfect manifestation of what I love so much about this album's general arrangement approach. And finally, the closing "Johnny on the Monorail" ends the album on a dark, driving, up-tempo note, dominated by pulsating, simple bass under the verses, with a grand chorus that's made to sound even grander when it's later imitated with bombastic piano, before everything wraps up with mocking laughter fading into oblivion under oppressive production.
The CD edition of this album that I have also has three bonus tracks that are worth hearing and which merit mention here. "Island" (named for their recording label) is little more than a roughly 3:30 reggae-ish vamp with lots of Downes keyboards and Horn singing "Island" over and over, but the two of them create an absolutely fascinating atmosphere that far transcends its paltry raw elements. Next comes "Technopop," which might be somewhat Buggles-by-numbers in some individual aspects, but which also has an especially terrific keyboard line, some unexpected horn lines during the chorus, and some rhythmic disturbances that make the song anything but by-numbers on the whole. And finally, there's an alternate version of "Johnny on the Monorail" (literally titled "Johnny on the Monorail (a very different version)"), which strips away a lot of the oppressive production gloom and presents a much brighter and punchy version, and while I certainly don't prefer it to the original (I really liked that oppressive production gloom), I nonetheless like this version a lot and am glad to have it.
Overall, then, I'm glad that I ultimately decided to give this album and band a second chance after I initially went "ugh this sounds gross and they ruined Yes," because today both of those statements seem ludicrous to me. This isn't an album for everybody, and somebody who wants their music to sound more "natural" in general might not ever come around to this, but if the words "synth-heavy futurist New Wave" don't immediately give you an allergic reaction then you need to give this a serious listen. And besides, Geoff Downes never sounded cooler or more interesting than he does on this album.
Best song: I Am A Camera
*The Age Of Plastic - 1980 Island*
C
(Very Good / Great)
Adventures In Modern Recording - 1981 Carrere
9
(Good)
I absolutely understand why this album hasn't made a comparable impact to its predecessor, but I've found this album fascinating ever since I first heard it, and I don't think it deserves to have disappeared like it has. Rather than building a common sonic pallette that establishes a common unifying atmosphere, this album goes hard in the other direction: every track (apart from the title track reprise at the end) on here feels, in many ways, like it comes from a totally different project from all of the other tracks, and while I could understand somebody observing this (especially in conjunction with the overall songwriting, which is considerably less sharp than on The Age of Plastic) and dismissing the album as confused, I instead hear it as a fascinating splattering of sonic color. Some later reviews, written after Horn had established himself as one of the most interesting producers of the 80s and beyond, observed that this album previews many aspects of his production style that he would use later (but weren't in common use at the time), and I think this observation grabs a key element of why I find this album interesting: this album is much more about Horn experimenting with sonic colors in the context of relatively simple sketches than it is about creating elaborately conceived paintings with those colors, but the act of creating those colors is interesting to me, and this aspect helps compensate for how I don't actually think most of the songs are that interesting when stripped of those colors.
My favorite track on here is actually "I Am a Camera," a stripped-down version of "Into the Lens" from Drama: I came around on the Yes version of this pretty hard over the years, but even with that, I still think this Buggles version is easily its match or maybe even its superior. With all of the metallic prog furnishings taken away, the song still manages to thrive because (a) it's a really interesting song at its core, and (b) leaning all the way into the atmospheric strengths of the song, even giving a slightly mysterious and seductive feel, manages to cast an entirely new (and overwhelmingly positive) light on it. Trevor Horn himself believed this the superior version, and while I understand why the circumstances of his work with Yes might color his perspective, I can't help but agree with him.
The rest of the album has some relative ups and downs, but I still find the sound consistently interesting even if my attention wavers some over time. The opening title track is a big-sounding would-be anthem with a big fat chorus (and decent verses, though slightly rambling in spots), but it's the mid-song break, with wordless vocals cut into by the synths and the drums (before giving away into a more standard keyboard and guitars passage), which most clearly points the way to the future, and that's what ends up making the song stand out most for me. "Beatnik" is mostly just a simple guitar-bass ska-like groove with light keyboards and vocals that only stand out with the "I was a Beatnik I was a Beatnik ..." chorus, and it's not really much of a song, but I weirdly don't get bored with it (some of the keyboards in the middle really help in this regard), and that's enough for me. From there, the first side is rounded by "Vermillion Sands," less a coherent song than a bunch of fragments arbitrarily slammed into the same track (and thus stretching the track nearly 7 minutes, which I'm always kinda shocked by every time I look at the runtimes), but I like each of the individual keyboard parts (all from Downes, who still sounds much cooler as a Buggle than he ever would later) a lot, and perhaps more than any other track on the album this one illustrates the gap in how much I should enjoy the album based on pure songwriting quality and how much I actually enjoy it.
The second half of the album is a bit less striking, but I generally like it on the whole. "On TV" is mostly just a fun drum track and a silly hook with "it can only happen ON TV," but that was enough to make it a minor hit in Canada and a minor hit in my heart. "Inner City" is the closest the album comes to trying to replicate the sci-fi atmospheric gloom of The Age of Plastic, but it's done in a much cheerier way, and that tension between what I expect to hear and what I actually hear intrigues me. "Lenny" is a goofy number (about various Renaissance-era scientists, sort of) that reached the top 10 in the Netherlands because why not, and while most of the track escapes me in its relative monotony (I can hear those piercing synth chords only so many times), I find a lot of resonance when Trevor goes especially high in his range with the line "When the ships do not fall off the world, does it mean there's a wall there." And finally, "Rainbow Warrior" is better when it's a full-on slow moody atmospheric burner than when it tries to become something intended for a larger soundspace, but it's still much better than not.
The bonus tracks are once again also worth hearing, especially for Yes historians. Aside from the 12" mix of "I Am a Camera," the bonus tracks (which include many other curiosities I'm not mentioning here) include three demos that preview material from the Fly From Here (a Drama semi-sequel with Benoit David on vocals) and Fly From Here: Return Trip (a reworked version of Fly From Here with Horn on vocals, making it a Drama sequel) albums Yes would release decades later: "We Can Fly From Here - Part 1" and "We Can Fly From Here - Part 2" each preview parts of the "Fly From Here" suite (released there under the names "We Can Fly From Here" and "Sad Night at the Airfield"), and "Riding the Tide" previews the track "LIfe on a Film Set." All of these tracks, which would ultimately end up as highlights of those Yes albums, sound surprisingly well-formed here, and I find them very interesting.
Overall, then, Adventures in Modern Recording is definitely a footnote of an album from a band that's a footnote of rock music, but it's a footnote I always enjoy returning to, and I hope the 2010 reissue (or something like it) returns into print someday so that more people who learn about the Buggles can easily hear material from it. Trevor Horn The Producer had a much greater impact than Trevor Horn The Songwriter/Singer/Performer, but I really wish he'd gotten more of a chance than he ultimately did.