12 April 2022

AMERICAN ENGLISH

 



I imagine AMERICAN ENGLISH made perfect sense in 1989.  The San Francisco ensemble played a unique brand of outsider pop with a B-movie vibe drenched in horns. The recording sounds like it is a production - and I don't mean that I think there was a "producer" per se, I mean something more like "damn, what a production!" because everything is shamelessly over the top. And it doesn't sound normal, this isn't (nor was it ever) radio music in any traditional sense....think WORLD/INFERNO FRIENDSHIP SOCIETY meets WHAM!. Or remember when Zappa did "Valley Girl" and seemed to try to dumb down his sound so that the lowest common denominator could maybe get it....? Well imagine IDIOT FLESH trying the same thing but landing just short of the commercially accessible mark. Maybe No Words On The Other Side isn't for you, and the truth is that I'm not even sure if it's for me after a couple of listens, but it's weird...so I'm gonna keep digging in to see what I find. 


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