Reviews (page 8 of 8)
Every time I think I might feel like I’m getting into it they do something to remind me I’m really not
This is a fun album. It is also an absolutely terrible album where I often genuinely wondered how on earth Soft Cell recorded, let alone released, these tracks. On 'Youth', Marc Almond can't hit a single note even if his life depended on it. The only bearable moments are 'Tainted Love', 'Seedy Films', and the closer 'Say Hello, Wave Goodbye'. Having sung and danced countless times in my life to 'Tainted Love', I've wondered why I hadn't dived deeper into their discography. Now I know why.
I feel fru-fru-fru-fru-frustration listening to this. How is this a serious record!? The lyrics sound as if improvised a lazy afternoon. The production is equally lazy and just plain boring. Also Almond's vocals are horrendous. He almost seems to deliberately avoid hitting any tones on the entire record. This is the sound of the high school singer you all applauded out of pity and then talked about behind his back. Imagine being this bad and still have the courage to release "Sex Dwarf".
Everything was terrible except the Tainted Love/Where Did Our Love Go? combo. If I heard Spinal Tap singing Sex Dwarf I would have liked it, but the fact that it wasn't a parody is disturbing. Considering that this was probably a pretty influential album, and there were occasional interesting non-lyrical moments, I can add half a star but that's the best I can do. 1.5 stars.
Awful.
This sounds like punk like singing with synthesizers. It has one good song "Chips on my Shoulder". I don't think synth music is my jam.
Their version of "Tainted Love" slaps and slaps hard. If we were only rating that song, this thing is a 5 with a bullet. It's such a great version that few realize that Tainted Love is actually a cover. But the rest of this is something of a snooze. There seem to be some blue prints for the Pet Shop Boys sprinkled throughout. But as the kids would say, there's no THERE there. Props, I guess, for making their take on Tainted Love the definitive version. One HIT wonders don't belong on this list. I'd rather the list made room for a One ALBUM wonder, like The Knack's "Get The Knack". Now that's an album with songs that live up to (and some would say surpass) their one hit (My Sharona).
I like the music but not the singers voice or vocal style. Tainted love is a banger. I'm not a huge fan of 80s electronic music. It sounds dated and cheesy.
nope
Definitely not for me.
I disliked this. Quite a bit. "Tainted Love" is of course fondly remembered, though I have to wonder, in the context of the rest of the album, how I would feel about "Tainted Love" if I heard it for the first time today with the rest of "Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret." I can't decide if Soft Cell is authentically presenting themselves (or at least an exaggerated version of themselves), or if this is all for show. Marc Almond wrote this stuff when he was in his early 20s... so why does he present the mid-life crisis of a 40-year-old middle class worker bee, and also the late 20s crisis of a bedsitter? "I have life/ I have cage/ I'm going bald/ I want to tell the world/ I've done nothing/ I've achieved nothing/ I work for a firm/ But I want to burn it down, down" and also "I think it's time to cook a meal/ To fill the emptiness I feel/ Spend my money going out/ I've nothing in I'm left without" So much discontentedness! Give these guys something to help them feel better about their life/the world! (They apparently got heavily into ecstacy in the next few years.) And then there's the entirety of "Sex Dwarf." I just can't. It's probably not serious? I mean, if that's your fetish, more power to you, as long as everyone is consenting and there's no problematic power imbalance. But was a whole song about it really necessary? This was an apparently positive review - Melody Maker magazine said "Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret... confronts clubland with its patchy past, rubs perspective in its pretty painted face and acts like it means nothing... Aggressively embarrassing, Cabaret is the brashest, most brilliant and least-caring indictment of pop music's bankruptcy I've ever heard. No compassion, no sorrow, no joy, it just faces facts and moves to the motions... Like traditional cabaret, the whole thing parodies true emotion and like the best subversive cabaret its shallowness makes those devalued emotions even more painful – the very real decadence of this album springs from its callous realisation of pop's impotency, and yet its bored resignation to the ritual." Brash and brilliant sound positive, but the rest? So it was just meant to be subversive? I guess it was, but lyrically and musically this did not do for me what other subversive music from psychedelic and punk rock have done.
One star for my daughter repeatedly asking me what a sex store is because of this album.
I couldn’t get past one song after tainted love, which my friend ryan used to call the BART song because that incessant beep sounded like the BART train horns. I like the song well enough. I remember there were two versions. The reasonably long enough version and then the long version that moved into where did our love go and sometimes the radio would play that one and it felt kind of special. But it turns out there’s a third version. And it’s about 20 minutes long, which is seventeen minutes and thirty seconds longer than most any song should be. This tells me (a) they think this is their best song and that it’s super good so they should just keep playing it forever and (b) consequently, the remainder of the album is likely G_d awful. The next song confirmed this, so I didn’t continue.
not very memorable unfortunately
Hmm, is this really a good album or does it just have "Tainted Love" on it... UPDATE: Gave up at "Sex Dwarf" wtf is this shit lol
Definitely NOT my genre of music!
FUCKING AWFUL
Is that Pedro Pascal in this band? Nah, nevermind he'd never do something so middling that your best song is a cover of a better song.
This is the most 80s album I’ve heard in a while...
No
Woof. Pass. There are so many similar bands from this time that are more interesting.
Liked a couple of songs, sounds the same throughout. 1/5