ABC - The Lexicon Of Love
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Music CD Cover
Artist: ABCEdition: Music CD
Format: Original recording remastered
CD Release Date: 2002-02-05
Music Label: Island / Mercury
Soundtracks:
- Show Me
- Poison Arrow
- Many Happy Returns
- Tears Are Not Enough
- Valentine's Day
- The Look Of Love (Part One)
- Date Stamp
- All Of My Heart
- 4 Ever 2 Gether
- The Look Of Love (Part Four)
- Theme From 'Mantrap'
Free Music Notes for The Lexicon Of Love
Free Music Review: A benchmark for the digital recording era.
Hit: 5 Stars
"We spend a lot of time writing and crafting the songs-they must be danceable, memorable, intelligent, functional, passionate. These things shouldn't be excluded from pop music-they should be exploited and exaggerated."
ABC's debut album, coming out in 1982 amongst a flurry of Post-Disco/Brit New Wave acts, linked ABC with bands like Spandau Ballet, Human League, Culture Club, Kajagoogoo, Gary Numan, Scritti Politti and Howard Jones. Certainly many of those bands shared a love of classic Motown, but ABC was never part of any scene, and considered themselves outsiders. From the first "The Lexicon of Love" was something else entirely and seemed to cut through the airwaves like a knife once the first piano chords and wailing saxophone of "The Look of Love" gave way to the funky syncopated baseline and lead singer Martin Fry's choir-boy inflected voice declaring dramatically:
"When your world is full of strange arrangements
And gravity won't pull you through
You know you're missing out on something
Well that something depends on you...."
The song instantly propelled them to fame in the US and Europe, but unlike many of their contemporaries, ABC had a fully realized album to back up their single. Over twenty years later, "The Lexicon of Love" is increasingly mentioned in the list of recording studio masterworks, largely due to the skill, audacity and precociousness of studio engineer wonderboy Trevor Horn, who cut his teeth with the Buggles, and had embraced the DIY - Keyboard/Synth/Pop esthetic and with this recording, declared himself heir apparent the minute it was released and people realized just how damn good a bunch of machines in service of some well crafted pop songs could sound.
I don't think it's hyperbole whatsoever to say that this album was a dividing point and paradigm shift in the history of modern recorded music. It subsequently inspired what is now a long line of producer/engineers as artists, and can be traced directly to the work of Jimmy Jam/Terry Lewis, and contemporary acts like NIN, Prodigy, Daft Punk, Crystal Method, and the collected works of Dr. Dre. The samples, the lush orchestral flourishes, the Fairlight, the pulsing Base and Drum lines that still sound fresh twenty years later -- this is an album that is best described as unabashedly artificial, in service curiously to the demands of idealists who would accept nothing less than a sound that would grab your ears, and pack the dance floor of London's most fashionable night club.
Certainly ABC as credited, was primarily Martin Fry, who gave the band it's New Romantic front man image, Motown influences, and sex appeal (not to mention that bit of vintage 80's sexual-preference ambiguity) supported primarily through the years by guitarist Mark White. Fry's arch english annunciation and distinctive warbling tenor voice which frequently jumps a falseto octave when the time seems right, matched perfectly his penchant for ambiguously clever rhyming wordplay. But the ABC of "Lexicon of love" was more a collaborative studio project with contributions not only from Horn and the other 2 members of ABC, but also Anne Dudley (who would become Art of Noise with Horn) providing Orchestral flourishes on keyboards, and Tessa Web who sings choruses, and provides backing vocals on several tracks most notably "Poison Arrow" which became a major radio hit, and staple of MTV.
"The Look of Love" is very much studio lightning in a bottle, and provides a high water mark of the studio art joining the list of similarly regarded albums like "Pet Sounds", "Sgt. Pepper's" and "Dark Side of the Moon". What the IPod/MP3 generation will likely miss is that "Lexicon of Love" was also a carefully constructed and arranged collection of song, with instrumental diversions inserted between tracks, and songs that flow from one to another elevating the collection to something more than the sum of its parts. That this was the intention and design was made quite clear in the album liner, which featured what appeared to be lyrics to a song, but were in fact, snippets of lines from each of the songs placed together to form one continuous lyric.
In the short-attention-span 21st century, where software on our digital player creates a virtual radio station, few newcomers to the songs on the album will probably ever fully appreciate the way the absence or presence of a second or two of silence can help build on the theatrical design of an album like this one -- how the opening track "Show Me" flows into "Poison Arrow" for example. If you can, listen to the CD without those features on to get the full effect. It's no surprise that in the years since the album was released, people who first experienced it on vinyl and were blown away and forever changed by what it accomplished sonically, have made sure the album appears on magazine and critics best lists, despite all the assumptions that accompanied it originally, when ABC was seen as one of many bands to be consumed and dicarded as byproducts of a short lived fad.
The bands follow up, "Beauty Stab" was a major departure from this album, and perhaps an attempt to acknowledge that despite the 14 additional musicians the band required to to perform the songs of "Lexicon of Love" on their first world tour, ABC actually had aspirations to be an honest to goodness guitar/drums/bass performing unit. It would be an understatement to say that what for many other bands would have been seen as a strong collection, for ABC was a spectacular disaster.
Which is not to say, that it's even possible to seperate where the artistry of Fry and his bandmates, and their years of songwriting and performance, honing their material ends, and the studio wizardy and session musician contributions begin. In other words, without the songs, and the conceptual design, studio perfection can only get you so far. The two halves were required for the whole. "The Lexicon of Love" was born of collaboration and shared aspirations, and despite Fry's deliberation, long recruitment and rehearsal period, and intense focused vision, it certainly is less the product of a band, and more a carefully crafted art piece, offering a first glimpses of what the digital age had in store for us.
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