Front 242, "Front By Front"

The fourth in a series of albums I haven't heard in over twenty years ...

Very little has been written about industrial music.  Google for "industrial music criticism" or something similar and you'll find multiple links to S. Alexander Reed's "Assimilate: A Critical History of Industrial Music" (which I haven't read) and various odds and sods.  The biographies and oral histories never coalesced.  Good luck even finding a few industrial albums on the plethora of 80's or 90's "best of" lists that have appeared in recent years.

I hate to fall back on cliche's like "style over substance", but I think that many of the key bands were genuinely uninterested in making "classic albums" or achieving similar rock-crit benchmarks.  They were radicals in their politics, performances, and sought to provoke visceral reactions to their music.  Not for nothing that Front 242 popularized the term "electronic body music" to describe themselves.  I always found that term to be deceptively simple and rather underappreciated.  "Body music" doesn't refer to music that gets in your feels and touches your soul -- a description that apply to many other genres.  It's a physical feeling, an abuse of one's body while the crushing beats, clangs, and snarls collectively tear away at your chest cavity when listening or dancing at high volume.  Plenty of bands start out as political agitators and rebels and most eventually refocus themselves towards the task of appealing to a wider audience and making great albums that will stand the test of time (e.g. U2) .  Industrial acts were particularly fixated on radical aesthetics that would challenge contemporary audiences and couldn't care less about showing up on a listicle three decades later.  Nine Inch Nails and Ministry proved there was a path into the mainstream via this music (taking completely different routes -- NIN appealed to teen angst while Ministry courted the metalheads) but so many of the initial late 70's and 80's wave of industrial bands are missing from the commonly accepted musical canon. 

Despite not having heard "Front By Front" in over twenty years, I found myself humming the basic melodies and recalling basic lyrics just from reading the song titles.  I can't say that about the first three albums I revisited in this series.  The first four songs are impeccable. "Until Death (Us Do Part)" is a perfect overture to the album. This is about as pop as Front 242 would get, the synth hooks are Depeche Mode-like in their catchiness.  "Circling Overland" ramps up the brutality with a primitive, bludgeoning backbeat.  The album's darker turn is rounded out by ominous faux-strings and paranoid lyrics about an omnipresent air force surveying all of Western Europe.  "Im Rhythmus Bleiben", as the title suggests, is a series of pulverizing rhythms punctuated by repetitions of the title with increasing urgency.  "Felines" shows a more sensual side to the band, with a slower tempo and a spidery, curdling bassline.  None of this music seems to have aged much, possibly because there haven't been enough copycats mining it for inspiration.  The lack of overexposure has kept this stuff relatively fresh. 

The second half of the album is more mundane and repetitive, but like I said, these bands weren't necessarily about trying to craft classic albums.  The exception, of course, is "Headhunter", arguably the finest single this genre has ever produced.  Much like the title character stalking his prey, stealth rhythms and vocal samples pop up everywhere, whirs, clicks, and muffled shouts are constantly lurking but can do nothing to derail the galloping backbeat.  It's a complex song with a shoutable, club-ready chorus.

My cassette version contained not only "Welcome to Paradise" (a cut and paste club smash in and of itself) and the entire "Never Stop" EP, but seventy consecutive minutes of Front 242 was too exhausting then, and still is now.  You absorb most of their best tricks about about thirty minutes and then it gets repetitive with diminishing returns.  But at its best, "Front By Front" still sounds fresh and confrontational, with lyrical themes that still resonate today.   

Alphaville, "The Singles Collection"

This is the third album in a series of albums that I haven't heard in over twenty years ...

While it's technically true that I haven't listened to this exact album in decades (having bought it on cassette for peanuts), I haven heard the singles numerous times over the years, because Alphaville continue to receive steady airplay even today.  Or rather, Alphaville's two best known singles have never really gone away, save for a short time during the 90's.  Like many bands of their era, Alphaville were completely out of place during the early 90's but revived their career once non-ironic 80's nostalgia kicked in.   Jay-Z's sample/cover of "Forever Young" brought them full circle, rescuing them from being an 80's trivia question in the US and introducing them to a completely new generation of fans.  Jay and Mr. Hudson's "Young Forever" was a top ten Billboard hit, far and away bigger than anything they achieved in the 80's.  

"The Singles Collection" was timed around the re-release of the "Forever Young" single, and seemed designed to give them one last crack at breaking through in the US market.  Maybe there was a stigma about European bands looking and sounding too European.  The open vowels and strained pronunciation in "Forever Young" are a clear giveaway as the band's non-British origins. You might say that it didn't seem to hurt a-ha, but "Take On Me" a) had the iconic, way ahead of its time video, and b) was the crazy exception that proved the rule.  Between "Dancing Queen" in 1977 and the rise of Milli Vanilli and Roxette in 1989, a span of twelve years, there were only five number one Billboard hits by continental European acts:

Stars on 45, "Stars on 45 Medley"
Vangelis, "Chariots of Fire"
a-ha, "Take On Me"
Jan Hammer, "Miami Vice Theme"
Falco, "Rock Me Amadeus"

By my count, that's three novelty songs, two movie tie-ins ("Rock Me Amadeus" counts as both), and only one proper, non-gimmicky number one hit -- "Take On Me".  Not to mention that Jan Hammer was living in the US and was a US citizen when he topped the charts -- with the theme song to an American TV show -- and probably shouldn't be on this list.  It was simply not a good time for German bands trying to find success in the US.  It seems they could improve their chances by exploiting their front line Cold War cred and singing about nuclear war paranoia (Nena's smash hit "99 Red Balloons" hit #2).  "Forever Young" pushed all the right buttons (fear of the bomb, teenage melodrama, yanking every heartstring in the chorus) but couldn't even scrape the top fifty.  Alphaville's victory was in the long game, their love song spans five different decades and still matters today.   

It also didn't help that they released a compilation called "The Singles Collection" with only four songs.  It suggested that they were a flash in the pan who didn't even have enough songs to pad out the rest of their supposed greatest hits compilation.  The song selection was unusual, considering that they had four other singles from their first two albums that could have been included, all of which had performed well on European charts  Nevertheless, I loved the format, and still do today.  Think of it as a double EP of remixes, and its a brilliant concept.  You get the single version and a DJ-friendly  extended version of each song, perfect for parties or just for those times when four minutes of a great song isn't long enough. 

"Forever Young". Is there another song whose original version and its radically different remix were almost interchangeably successful?  I can think of R. Kelly's "Ignition (Remix)" and the Todd Terry mix of Everything But the Girl's "Missing", I'm sure there are others.

"Big In Japan".  Still a monster song, and I love how the remix breaks down its rich, spidery, multiple bass lines. 

"Red Rose".  This song is the jewel hiding in plain sight on this collection.  Oddly enough, it wasn't a hit anywhere at the time, but it should have been.  Its driving, vaguely Motown-ish beat suggested a shift away from typical synth pop and toward a groovy, almost Robert Palmer-esque rock and roll vibe.  It was an attempt to appeal to American tastes, but nobody was biting. What a shame ...

"Dance With Me".  The clear #4 on this compilation, with a hokey chorus that I've never been able to enjoy, but still a glorious slice of bouncy roller-rink and 80's teen movie ready synth pop.  Far from their finest moment, but still better than most other bands in the genre were managing at the time.