1980-1981: Years of Growth and Ferment 5: The Joe Jackson Band's dark New Wave masterpiece "Beat Crazy"
Jesus Criminy Fuck is this a good record for your ass. Profoundly dark, profoundly innovative and about as tight a sonic definition of New Wave as was ever recorded. This was the last album by the original Joe Jackson Band, and Joe's second-to-last great record. Brilliant and underrated drummer Dave Houghton rules the day here, his super-tight, super-exciting drumming augmented with all sorts of great arrangements and great dub-mixing. Boy, did New Wave turn out some great drummers. Like Copeland, history has been unkind to these guys, focusing too heavily on songwriting. New Wave was a sonic event; most of the songs were 60's tunes with disaffected lyrics. It was the instrumental attack, the joyful and unselfconscious incorporation of West Indian rhythms and the economy of arrangement that made New Wave New Wave.
Here we have all these things in spades as well as a guitar that never once wanders from the roll of a rhythm instrument, bass playing so well-arranged and well-thought-out as to defy description and the needle-sharp deployment of melodica and morse-code electric piano. And as with many records of this era, the echo unit is the fifth member of the band; no instrument escapes delay treatments carried out in tight, time-synched dub form.
The themes are classic New Wave disaffection; voodoo, anger, the prostitute that lives upstairs, kids today, the battle of the sexes, the battle of the races. Great stuff. The mood of darkness never lifts except to reveal moments of wry humor and resignation. What a great record this is; the cover is brilliant, the band is so tight it pisses mist, and the songs and arrangements and production work in seamless synchronization. And bassist Graham Maby is THE FUCKING MAN.
Hooray for 1980. Hooray for Joe Jackson. Hooray for groups that grew and developed as much as these guys did between 1979 and 1980.
Three cheers for "Beat Crazy", a singular snapshot of a really cool time.
posted by Bobby Lightfoot at 03:30
2 Comments:
You got good taste, Bobby. Not that you needed me to tell you that.
This record would be worth hearing even if all it consisted of was Joe's opening scream and the sudden influx of drums. Just those 10 seconds.
Yeah, baby! *Great*, great album. Back in that 80s decade, if I had less than an hour to practice drums, this was the tape -- yes, *tape* -- I'd reach for. The band covers so many styles and speeds. And you're right, Houghton is great.
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