Word: albums
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Moving Cities, the American debut of English group Faze Action, opens with a magnificent string arrangement. All well and good, one thinks, but the publicity people said it was a dance album. And then the bassline appears, the drums join in, the title song really kicks in, and you find yourself snapping your fingers, tapping the table and bingo! You're dancing. And now that damn string arrangement won't go out of your head...
Interestingly enough, this is the first album the brothers Simon and Robin Lee have recorded together in the studio, their previous works having been created with one brother in Japan and the other in England. That internationalism pervades into the album, which layers African singing over jazz- and Latin-influenced four-four house beats, throwing in a touch of disco along the way. The production is flawless, and the percussion work and lush flute on "Kariba" is infectious. And their dance music credentials come to the fore when the album finds its groove, as it does with the deep vocals...
...Shop Boys have always made erudite dance music. Few other groups, after all, would take a song title from an Anthony Trollope novel (1993's "Can You Forgive Her?"). In Nightlife, their first studio album since 1996's Bilingual, Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe stick to their forte...
...their favorite themes, broken communication. It's a neatly ironic combination: life is bittersweet, perhaps you should dance. The slower tunes don't quite work. "The Only One" is overly melancholy, while the resurfacing of Kylie Minogue (on "In Denial") won't do her career any favors. Still, the album loves the nightlife, and "New York City Boy" (another Morales track) is a camp anthem to behold. As the boys once sang, "we were never being boring...
...Okay, it sounds hokey. But it was fun. Guster immediately launched into a rocking "What You Wish For," the first song on their new album. Though Guster played primarily from the newly released Lost and Gone Forever, songs from their previous two records, the debut-album Parachute and GoldFly, also made it into their set list. It's hard to describe exactly what Guster sounds like, but at the concert they played at the full range of their abilities. Essentially, they play everything--the surreal, the real and the ingenious. Brian, the group's backbone, works the bongos with awesome...