Released on 29 January 1990, "Cloudcuckooland" was the debut album by Ian Broudie band The Lightning Seeds, the album peaked at 50 in the UK and No. 46 on Billboard 200, the album spawned three singles "Pure", "Joy" & "All I Want", and "Pure was the band's first hit in the United Kingdom, and their only top 40 entry in the United States.
A 12-track album of nerd-pop with tthreads of imagery about shooting stars, crystal lights, butterflies and sleeping giants, it's the stuff of easy access imagination, earnest lyricism that conflates love poetry with moony sentimentalism.
The Lightning Seeds was originally a solo project for Ian Broudie, pictured on the album cover with spectacles and a bowl cut, captured in a moment of wistful confusion. Broudie was an institution long-before this release, he was a fixture on the Liverpool scene as a member of Big in Japan, Original Mirrors and Care, and more notably as a producer, collaborating with Echo & the Bunnymen on their early albums, so the guy really knows how to play.
The hit from Cloudcuckooland, was definitely "Pure", a fanciful sparkler of a love song that charted both in the UK Top 20 and on the US Billboard Top 40. Demure horn chirps accented by low-high guitar string plucks make this prelude sound like a dawning, as gentle strumming seeps into the background and three note synth arpeggios advance and reverse like a proud, pretty birdsong, but the album had other hidden gems, "All I Want" the follow-up single, embraces the same qualities as "Pure", the track introduces a choppy toy harpsichord voice in the bridge, leading into a final stanza emboldened by swaying, long-bowed string phrases. The instrumentation is synth-sourced it seems, so the grandness it’s going for actually sounds quaint in its artificiality, back in the day the singles like "Pure" and "All I Want", drew comparisons to a less burlesque Pet Shop Boys or a Matthew Sweet synth tribute band, also "All I Want" was covered by Susanna Hoffs, formerly of the Bangles, on her 1996 album Susanna Hoffs. Which was a minor US hit and a UK hit at No. 33 for two weeks.
Other worth track are "Control the Flame” is the jazzy expression of Broudie’s inner horndog (“Can’t control/ Control desire/ But who the hell’d want to calm this fever”), On this song the intent is to give voice to the beast within, the mid-tempo prayer for action "Bound in a Nutshell," digging deep in the euphemistically titled "Love Explosion" the extreme contrast between the low-tone swampiness and Broudie’s own fluttery vocals settles in as cartoonishness. Some other experiments resound more favorably.
The other single "Joy" recalls a processed beat of George Michael's "Careless Whisper" vibe, and of course "Frenzy" pops off with a scritchy-scratch and lathers up into a hooky synth-pop party song.
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