Word: albums
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Following 1984 singles "Another Silent Day" and "Send My Heart," The Adventures is their album debut. Avoiding the politics that often pervade the music of bands with similar roots (Gribben, Gribben, and Sharpe hail from Belfast) the band instead opts for stock song themes like love, sex, and relationships. Though lyrics are easily accessible, they at times become slightly monotonous, if not boring...
MUSICALLY, THE ADVENTURES are rather ordinary, deviating little from the standard pop fare. They do, however, manage to set themselves apart slightly from the mainstream with a pervading chimey guitar and vocal harmony throughout. The problem is that a distinctive style fails to carry through the entire album with much force, and their limited experimentation fails to stumble randomly upon Goldilocks' golden mean...
...songs themselves carry through fairly faithfully with Simon's claimed themes. "Baby Doll Love" depicts the sexual charms of young girls, and "A Million Miles from Happiness" discusses love, faith, disappointment, and heroin. In addition to the nine original cuts on the album, the opening track, "I Want You Back," is a cover of a song originally written by Dave Faulkner, of the Australian band Hoodoo Gurus. Simon provides an interesting synth-pop adaptation of this wild tune, but the more driving and sincere Gurus version remains vastly superior...
...album supposedly draws its name from the title of a Sex Pistols bootleg; however, there is little evidence of punk influence on this record. Vocals are strongly imitative of circa-1977 David Bowie, though occasionally a glint of Billy Idol's solo work also comes through. In general, the sound suffers from blatant overuse of drum machines and synthesizers...
What a Life! is the second album from the Australian band Divinyls. Their music is claimed to form a synthesis of punk and pop. Singer Christina Amphlett manages to prove marginally successful in this endeavor, though the sound is generally much closer to pop than to punk...