One record at a time: 539. Kissing The Pink - Certain Things Are Likely

I found this copy of "Certain Things Are Likely" in my favourite second-hand record emporium a couple of years ago. I am fairly sure I overpaid for it, but I prefer to think of this as supporting the cultural ecosystem. If we do not keep retailers like that in business, we will be left with nothing but eBay, and eBay sellers do not put rare Pet Shop Boys records to one side for my next visit like benevolent vinyl-dispensing fairies.

This is Kissing The Pink's third studio album and dates to 1986. After achieving moderate success with their first two albums, this record feels like one final push to broaden the band’s appeal, or at least move them into the part of the shop where everything isn’t reduced in price. Phil Harding was brought in to add his distinctive studio sheen to Peter Walsh's production, giving parts of the record a crisp, radio-friendly finish without completely sanding away the band’s odd edges. One of my favourite bass players, Derek Forbes, appears on two tracks, which is already enough to make me sit up straighter, and even Matt Aitken of the Stock Aitken Waterman production house pops up on guitar. It is a strange but intriguing combination, like finding a serious art installation in the middle of Primark.

What I admire about Kissing the Pink is that they never really abandoned their synth-pop instincts, even when the album is clearly dressed in brighter, more accessible colours. A lot of classically trained musicians can make pop music sound like homework, or worse, like they are doing the audience an intellectual favour. Kissing the Pink avoid that completely. They manage to create memorable pop tunes without giving the impression that they are slumming it, and their humour keeps bubbling away beneath the surface. Even when the songs lean towards the mainstream, there is always the sense that, as soon as someone responsible has left the room, they are quietly adjusting the synth settings to something less sensible.

The opening track "One Step" sounds like the album’s most direct bid for the dance floor. It has the smooth, bright feel that would not have sounded too out of place alongside Madonna, a-ha and assorted other people with excellent hair. The problem is that Nicholas Whitecross’ faux American accent and the dense arrangement of female backing vocals rather swamp the song. Instead of sounding effortless, it feels slightly overstuffed, as if its better instincts are being jostled by too many competing ideas.

"Never Too Late To Love You" suffers from some of the same issues. Nick’s tongue-in-cheek accent and the backing vocals become distracting, even though there is a decent song trying to get out from underneath the arrangement. Of the singles released from the album, the title track is probably my favourite because it feels closest to the band’s natural sound, or at least the version of it allowed out in public after someone had checked its shoes were clean.

Elsewhere, "Identity Card" is relentless pop fun and well worth a listen, while "Jones" borrows neatly from Bowie and Simple Minds to create a pleasing little number. "Can You Hear Me" tries to retain a bit of the band’s eccentric identity by unexpectedly tossing in some bagpipes, although even they cannot quite cut through everything going on around them. The album's nadir is "One Day", which manages the impressive trick of sounding expensive and oddly underpowered at the same time. I am still not sure why anyone would go to the expense of putting a string section on a track and then recording it in a key so low that the singer sounds as if he is trying to retrieve the melody from under the floorboards. 

That is the album in miniature: the compositions are often good, but the presentation sometimes pulls them away from the band’s natural art-pop eccentricity. It leaves "Certain Things Are Likely" as something of a mixed bag, but an interesting one. It may not have turned Kissing The Pink into the chart-conquering concern their record company clearly wanted, and yes, they were dropped afterwards, because pop history is rarely kind. Still, the band live on in the racks, in the memories of people who like their synth-pop with a faint whiff of mischief, and in second-hand record shops where copies like mine sit waiting to be rescued by someone willing to overpay in the name of cultural preservation. Benevolent vinyl-dispensing fairies, consider your work appreciated. 3/5

One record at a time: 538. Justice - Hyperdrama

I have bought all of Justice’s albums since their 2007 debut, “†”, but always on compact disc. It was only with the advent of 2024’s “Hyperdrama” that I abandoned CD in favour of vinyl. The band's back catalogue have all been reissued on vinyl, but I do not feel any burning desire to spend the £86.16 it would require to add them to my shelves. I like Justice, but of the wave of electronic artists who emerged around 2007, they have always fallen a little behind their contemporaries. Digitalism had more imagination, Simian Mobile Disco had sharper production, and Soulwax sounded as if they had found a secret cupboard marked “ideas” and decided not to report it to anyone. Justice make dance music, certainly, but it often veers towards disco and can get a bit silly at times. As I have said on this blog before, I do not like silliness in my music, so I have often found myself tapping my feet in a slightly disapproving manner, which is the most middle-aged form of rebellion available to me.

To be fair, Justice have shifted their sound over time, and this album finds them leaning more into club culture than seventies disco cheese. “Neverender”, which opens the album, is a collaboration with Tame Impala and sounds a bit like Daft Punk with a bit of Chemical Brothers for structural support. It is great stuff. Next up is “Generator”, which throws in various Alpha Juno-style hoover noises and rave sounds you thought had been safely lost to the nineties until they form a particularly excellent audio trifle, complete with string section. “Afterimage” is another massive track, with RIMON’s vocal hovering above the driving rhythms and squealing synths like balm on a sore wound, assuming the balm has been administered at 130 beats per minute.

Also worthy of mention is another Tame Impala collaboration, “One Night/All Night”, whose dark techno pulse suits Justice like a well-tailored jacket. The bass playing of Xavier de Rosnay sounds especially good on tracks like “Dear Alan”, giving the album a muscular low end without making it feel as though it has simply wandered into a gym and started shouting at a mirror.

“Moonlight Rendez-vous” is clearly an attempt to change down a gear, but it falls a bit flat for me and, as we know, saxophone is rarely the answer, children. “Saturnine” reaches for an R&B feel but leaves me colder than an afternoon spent in a chiller, even if there is a cheeky Art of Noise sample lurking in there like it has broken in through a side door. 

“Hyperdrama” is like a crazy puppy that launches itself at you when you first walk in, all paws, teeth and enthusiasm, before gradually remembering it has been to obedience class. It is still a very good puppy, but I cannot help preferring it before it learnt to sit and roll over. 3.5/5

One record at a time: 537. Howard Jones - One To One

This record came into my possession a couple of years ago, though I had completely forgotten where I bought it from until I pulled it from the shelves and spotted the charity shop sticker still proudly clinging to the sleeve proclaiming the sale price of £1.15. As I have lamented before on this blog, charity shops are not exactly awash with treasures these days, so finding something like this feels less like crate-digging and more like encountering a unicorn. There is not a mark on the record and it plays perfectly, so whoever owned it before me clearly treated it with more respect than I treat most houseplants. The median price on Discogs for this album is £2.66, which means I am already more than £1.50 in the black and can enjoy a brief, financially unjustified moment of smugness.

By 1986, Howard Jones had already scored hits around the world and secured his place as an international act. Produced by the legendary Arif Mardin, this album sees Jones using the Fairlight for the first time and aiming for a bigger, glossier sound. Or, depending on your point of view, making a slightly ill-judged bid for the attention of American radio.

The album kicks off with the lead single "You Know I Love You... Don't You?", which was something of a commercial disappointment on release. Personally, I like the song, although I can see why its less-than-fluid lyrics might have slipped past radio programmers with barely a ripple. Second track "The Balance Of Love (Give And Take)" brings in some deep, funky bass, and once the distinctive sound of the DX7 appears, it starts to feel almost perfect from an eighties production perspective.

As the first side progresses, we get a run of well-produced and perfectly competent tracks, but several are missing the little hook that would have pushed them from album-track territory into hit material. The backing vocals on "Where Are We Going?" could not be cheesier if they had been dipped in fondue, while the proto-electro of "Don't Want To Fight Anymore" is so out of place it is almost irresistible. One thing that stands out in Mardin's production is the deeper bass, which gives the record a different feel from Jones's earlier work. The trouble is that bass, however splendidly upholstered, cannot always carry a song on its own.

Side two opens with "Step Into These Shoes", which has a spring in its step but "Pearl in a Shell" it is not. "Will You Still Be There?" is gentler and more reflective, but boy does it go on, and on, and on. "Good Luck, Bad Luck" is one of the more immediate tracks here, with a brisker pulse and the sort of neatly clipped chorus that reminds you HoJo had not entirely mislaid his pop instincts. "Little Bit Of Snow" closes things on a more delicate note, complete with string arrangement and a sense that everyone in the studio had briefly looked up for Page R on the Fairlight and wandered outside to touch grass.

Overall, "One To One" is not Howard Jones at his most dazzling or immediate, but it is far from the misfire some might suggest. It is slick, occasionally over-polished and sometimes a little too keen to sound grown-up, but as a charity shop find for £1.15, it delivers considerably more than the purchase price demanded, which is all one can reasonably ask in this day and age. 3/5

One record at a time: 536. Jean Michel Jarre - Live In Bratislava (Bridge From the Future)

Back in the lead-up to Jarre’s 1990 performance at La Défense in Paris, the ambient piece “Waiting for Cousteau” was played over the PA to build atmosphere and fill the air with music, like a perfume of anticipation. For his more recent grand open-air concert in Bratislava, Slovakia, in 2024, Jarre returned to the same idea, this time using a new composition written specifically for the event.

Ambient music is usually designed to drift gently past you, not arrive in a £90 box set glowing like Doctor Manhattan. Still, with Jean-Michel Jarre, even the background music tends to come with a sense of occasion. 

The piece was titled “Bridge From the Future” and was only made available as part of the “Ultimate Collector’s” box set of the live album documenting the concert. Rather bafflingly, none of the concert itself is presented on vinyl in this set and the only way to hear the ambient piece from physical media is on the 10-inch blue vinyl included in the box. 

Everything about this release feels like it was cobbled together with little attention to detail. Jarre has admitted that the audio was taken from the television broadcast, which used a compressed 128 kbit/s sound file. Most of us probably would not notice the drop in quality, but it hardly screams “Ultimate”, unless “ultimate” now means “recorded off the telly”.

As for the piece "Bridge From the Future", it is fine enough as ambient music. There are rain noises, snippets of reversed speech and the usual drone-like synth textures. It is not meant to seize your attention, more to hover politely in the background, and in that sense it does its job. What grates is having to spend a sizeable amount of money on a poorly judged box set to own it. Sometimes I can see why people use nothing but YouTube for their music. Those of us who prefer physical media are being taken for a ride, and this one does not even come with decent sound. A bridge from the future, perhaps, but unfortunately one that charges a toll. 1/5

One record at a time: 535. Jean Michel Jarre - Versailles 400

“Versailles 400” documents a concert Jarre gave at the Château de Versailles on Christmas Day 2023. Ostensibly, the performance marked the 400th anniversary of the palace, although once you remember that Versailles is a UNESCO World Heritage Site and Jarre is a UNESCO Goodwill Ambassador, you can probably make an educated guess as to who bankrolled the whole thing.

As the concert was held in the Hall of Mirrors, they could only squeeze a few hundred people into the room, so the event was broadcast on YouTube for the unwashed masses. I suspect you had to be related to Jarre, employed by UNESCO, or have a surname that appears on a building somewhere in Paris to get a ticket. The first recordings of the concert were released digitally, with this vinyl edition following the following  year as a limited run of 2,000 individually numbered copies.

As for the music, I’ve complained before about Jarre going all techno and his apparently constant need to update his classic works in an EDM style. I’m not a fan of this approach. I love a solid four-on-the-floor kick drum as much as the next person, especially if the next person is standing in a field in Belgium at three in the morning, but Jarre was always about more than that. His melodies, beguiling chords and sweeping atmospheric twinkle were the point. Put them under a formulaic techno sheen and even the most impressive compositions start to sound oddly flat, like champagne served in a sports bottle.

After the twee and rather fake-sounding baroque opening “La Château”, we are thrust into “Epica Oxygene”. As the name suggests, this is an amalgam of “Oxygene Part IV” and “Epica”. Before you start applauding Jarre’s seemingly endless drive to innovate, it is worth noting that the track was originally created for a Renault commercial. Jarre might call it “a design collaboration”, but he has essentially slapped the tune from “Oxygene” over the beats of “Epica”, given it a polish, and hoped nobody checked the service history. The end result is fine, but it is hardly going to blow up YouTube.

Whenever Jarre plays “Oxygene 2” nowadays, he seems to insist on subjecting us to two and a half minutes of directionless improvisation before launching into the distinctive melody. All this noodling does nothing for the composition. It does not build atmosphere or anticipation; it just gets in the way of the bit we all paid to hear, like someone explaining the fire exits during the best part of a film. “Equinoxe 4” sounds similar to the lacklustre version he created in 1990 for the “Paris La Défense” concert, while the sped-up version of “Equinoxe 7” sounds like it is in a hurry to get out of there because it has remembered it has left the oven on. 

One of my favourite Jarre tracks is “Chronologie 6”, and the version here benefits from staying largely faithful to the perfection of the original. “Zero Gravity” and “Stardust” are a couple of techno and trance behemoths that you either love or loathe. I’m sure younger fans might like them, but for me these tracks don’t really represent Jarre. There is something slightly wrong about a man approaching eighty years of age knocking out thumping techno. Admirable, certainly. Unexpected, definitely. But still slightly like finding your grandad headlining Creamfields. I’m glad the big man is still around, actively making music and engaging with his fans. I just wish he’d make some music I can enjoy again. Never has a lazily created AI image with little relevance to the music been such a fitting sleeve. 2/5

One record at a time: 534. Jean Michel Jarre - Oxymore Works

Back in 2023, I reviewed Jarre's album "Oxymore" and found it dull, oddly joyless, and almost entirely free of either melody or groove, which is quite an achievement for an electronic album. I suggested it was one of his worst records, and time has not softened my view. 

For reasons best known to Jarre, he then released this remix album in which he invited other artists to create new versions of tracks from "Oxymore". In theory, this extends the "Electronica" concept, but in practice it means household names such as Deathpact, French 79 and NSDOS (No? Me neither) get to add a four-on-the-floor kick drum under Jarre’s abstract noodling. Martin Gore of Depeche Mode and Brian Eno return, while Armin van Buuren arrives to pour a thick layer of generic trance over one track, like custard on a circuit board.

Gore's effort, "Brutalism" is a fairly straightforward techno track that repurposes some of the samples from the original and carries the same sinister vibe, but it has neither the groove nor the ideas to sustain interest across its five-minute runtime. It is a similar story with "Epica Extension", which uses the same sound palette as the original and throws in additional rhythm, but still manages to remain stubbornly boring. The same track is also reworked with Armin van Buuren, with results that are exactly as predictable as you fear. "Sex In The Machine Take 2" sounds like something any bedroom musician with a copy of Fruity Loops could create, and the two takes on "Zeitheist" towards the end of the album are similarly vanilla.

My favourite track here is "Brutalism Reprise" which was recorded with Deathpact. You should probably adjust your expectations if you are waiting for the new "Chronologie Part 4", but this one does actually sound pretty good and, more importantly, has something new to offer. The presence of one good track makes this album less a mixed bag and more a charity shop lucky dip where the one decent item is buried beneath several cracked ashtrays and a fondue set nobody wanted in the first place. Honestly, I'd rather listen to David Gray than this, and I do not say that lightly. My fear is that one day the great man might pass from this world, and something like this will end up being his swan song. 1/5

One record at a time: 533. Jean Michel Jarre - Les Granges Brûlées

Created with rudimentary instruments and released before Jean-Michel Jarre had become an established recording artist, “Les Granges Brûlées” occupies that strange pre-fame territory where historical importance and actual listenability are not always on speaking terms. 

As this album was not repressed following its initial release in 1973, it had become rare and sought-after by the time I became aware of it in 1989. Like “Deserted Palace”, I first heard it on a bootleg CD called “Rarities”, and I was so startled by its sound that I half believed it could not really be the work of Jarre at all. It felt less like the missing link between “Deserted Palace” and “Oxygène” and more like someone had locked a young composer in a cupboard with a synthesiser, an organ, and only intermittent access to daylight.

This is, of course, a soundtrack to a film, although once I had heard the music I cannot say I was seized by an urgent need to watch it. Soundtracks are tricky beasts. They may be perfect when welded to the visuals, but left to fend for themselves on a stereo they can sound like someone has mislaid half the evidence. In this case, the film may well be supplying all the tension, motive and atmosphere that the album merely gestures towards.

There are melodies here, and the main theme is perfectly respectable, but the EMS Synthi VCS3 and Farfisa organ seem to be working overtime to produce even the most rudimentary sounds. Given the sparse equipment involved, that is perhaps part of the fascination: you can almost hear the machinery thinking about what it wants to be when it grows up. Even so, fascination is not quite the same as enjoyment. 

Much of the album has an abstract, wintry seriousness to it, while “Zig-Zag” is the obvious anomaly, sitting awkwardly against the record’s otherwise tense and skeletal tone. I still cannot imagine what scene it was meant to accompany, unless the film briefly turns into a chase sequence involving a clown, a small dog, and a suspiciously well-stocked trail of banana skins. To be honest, I was not really surprised that neither Jarre nor his record label appeared to be in a great hurry to re-release the album.

Then, completely out of the blue, “Les Granges Brûlées” finally received an official CD reissue in 2003. Fast forward another twenty years and this limited edition vinyl appeared via Bandcamp on Transversales Disques, remastered from the original master tapes. The record is very nicely pressed and comes in a poly-lined sleeve with a separate card inner, along with that all-important collector’s guarantee of quality: an Obi strip. Because nothing says “serious archival release” quite like a decorative band of paper that immediately makes you terrified of damaging the packaging. 

All in all, this is a handsome, well-presented release with strong sound reproduction and a genuine sense of historical value. It is also, regrettably, a reminder that not every historically interesting record needs to be invited round for dinner. As a document of early electronic film scoring, it is fascinating; as an album to play for pleasure, it remains rather skeletal when divorced from its visuals. 2/5