Mondo-Meltdown Rockers

NINETY PER CENT of everything is crap," Theodore Sturgeon, the science fiction author, once observed, and that analysis certainly holds true for science fiction's third cousin, electronic music. With electronic music--and in particular with synthesizers--so many people working within the idiom are crass imitators of others' modest successes.

Poor Walter Carlos, who produced Switched on Bach, for example, can't be held responsible for the creations of Emerson, Lake and Palmer, Yes, Tomita, Vangelis, or Mike Oldfield, but his quasiorchestral synthesizer products directly influenced fatuous schools of rock and roll. For a long time, no one seemed to know what else to do with the synthesizer. More recently, Georgio Moroder and Donna Summer realized in "I Feel Love" a sound which no one will ever duplicate for sheer originality or sensuality. Nevertheless, millions of depraved Moog owners, sitting in their velour studios, will continue vainly to plagarize that legacy.

Ultravox was a band which never enjoyed much commercial success but always had plenty of local influence. In the last year, two bands, Gary Numan's Tubeway Army and Mi Sex, have been foisted upon an unknowing and unwilling public in an attempt to sell Ultravox's sound. Both bands at least acknowledge their huge debt to the lesser-known Ultravox, but unfortunately, they borrowed the style and left the substance behind. They wear someone else's clothes but they have no idea how to put them on.

Gary Numan and Mi Sex derive most of their ideas from the third Ultravox album, Systems of Romance, recorded in Germany with Conny Plank, a legendary producer of German electronic bands. On Systems of Romance, Ultravox abruptly departed from its first-record flirtations with Eno and the tempestuous attempts at punk mentality on the second release, Ha! Ha! Ha! The band took the Great Leap Forward, both in terms of control and content, shifting from mondo-meltdown rockers to cool and cerebral nouveau disco. The main interest moved to, the machines themselves. Push a button and watch the lights blink. It was hypnotic and irresistible.

They fashioned "Dislocation," for example, around a sythesized percussion track whose tone ascended and fell in a circular manner. The music formed itself around this very rhythmic motive, creating the impression that the metallic noise produced the song. The band performed throughout like a well-oiled generator. The whirrs, pops, and clicks all worked toward redefining Ultravox around a Kraftwerkian philosophy.

But Ultravox lost its contrast with Island Records, and after a final U.S. tour, the band exorcised vocalist John Foxx amidst ruffled feathers and misunderstandings. The word than spread that Foxx was working on a totally electronic record, and that he would produce it for his new independent label. By that point, however, Gary Numan had the near world eating out of his metal palm; it was all too easy to imagine Foxx copying his own imposter, and slapping together a buch of machine mumbo-jumbo with titles like "Submarining with the Aliens" and "The Aliens Meet the Happy Hollisters."

Foxx's Metamatic, on Metal Beat Records, finds him one step ahead of his admiring but intellectually limited imitators. Drums or guitars do not infiltrate the record, and only an occassional overdubbed bass peaks out from behind the circuitry. Foxx can take credit for engineering most of the impressive synthesizer work.

METAMATIC finds the metamorphosis complete. John Foxx has joined the German brigade, complete with disco beat, limited musical cosmology, and spectacular special effects. He has entered the machines and, apparently, won. Foxx has taken a handful of songs and a handful of song fragments and given them the grand tour of the synthesizers. Nothing more, nothing less. Even though there's nothing experimental about Metamatic, the overall conceptualization more than compensates for form, as with the best of Kraftwerk.

Two tracks, "He's a Liquid" and "Touch an Go," are leftover from Ultravox's final days. Neither one makes much sense as pure electronics either musically or lyrically, but Foxx obvioulsy felt that the "tunes" were too good to lose. He has always been a melody man at heart, and here the power of the chord change rules over the power of the machine. Chalk this up as the disc's only conceptual mistake; they are still stimulating songs.

Although most of the tracks are complete unto themselves, others feel like they never graduated from the idea stage. "Lieutenient 030," for example, resembles Romance's "Dislocation," since he built it around a looping scale generated by a rhythm machine. The sparse textures which Foxx places on top of the scale only further accentuate the beat. But with lyrics like "male caucasian/Kennedy hairline" the whole thing degenerates into the realm of the pointless. "Lieutenient 030" remains exactly as it first appears: an excellent idea that's half finished.

With the flotsam out of the way, one can concentrate on the Metamatic's real successes. The single drawn from the album, "Underpass," has steadily climbed the British charts, and it's easy to see why. Five steady synthesized beats enter over a shifting electronic hum, and then all hell breaks loose. A six-note phrase is repeated on two different scales at breakneck pace. Echoes and imitations emerge from behind the phrase's hidden contours. Amidst this turmoil, Foxx delivers the verses, in mechanized fashion with metallic overtones, and screams the chorus from a world away. "Underpass" beats recent Gary Numan products like "Complex" and "Cars" in every conceivable way. For one thing, Foxx's song has a wonderful sense of dynamics. Numan's work, on the other hand, remains as flat on an audiophile's dream system as it does on a car radio. Foxx's lyrics go far beyond the Gary Numan "we are all morons" school of metaphors, evoking both an indefinable nostalgia and a definite sense of detachment:

Well I used to remember

Now it's all gone...

World War something...

We were somebody's sons.

When he wrote for Ultravox, Foxx tended toward the oblique and metaphorical. His compositions, like "Lonely Hunter" from the first album or "The Man Who Dies Every Day" from Ha! Ha! Ha!, often became obscure and laughably existential. On Metamatic, none of the images insult the intelligence, with the exception of "He's a Liquid." The words on this album are fragments pieced together from a collective past. A line like "Some time ago a figure strolled along the esplanade" from "A Blurred Girl" evokes a certain misty, mushy image in each of us, and linked together, these recollections form jagged edges of the complete picture. He supplies no details but makes the gist clear. Foxx has the ability to tap our emotional reservoirs with just a few evocative phrases, like these from "A New Kind of Man:"

He feels the rain upon his face

He's young again, 19 again,

Blue hills on a distant skyline

Someone took his hand...

An underwater kind of silence--

Humming of electric pylons--

"Don't forget me" fades in static--

Another scene began...

He was a new kind of man.

"Plaza," "No-One Driving," and "A Blurred Girl," among others, succeed in part because these simple lyrics never stoop to simple-mindedness. Foxx, also varies the tracks, using his voice in more ways than you can shake a stick at. On "Plaza," he sings completely off key with a surprisingly effective result. A lot of thought has gone into the presentation of his basically unmalleable voice, and to almost universally excellent results.

Today, Ultravox languishes under the guidance of Midge Ure, imported from Thin Lizzy. John Foxx, though, was thrown out at just the right time. Numan has made him an honorary godfather figure, and Foxx plays the role well. Just when most of us thought he had gone the way of all of the honest idealists trapped in a music business they didn't create, Foxx redesigned himself for the 1980s and triumphed:

He stepped out of the film again Brushed off the dust and walked away...