This release marked a transition from their jazz-funk beginnings to the funky pop they are best known for―a transition which eventually resulted in the departure of drummer Phil Gould subsequent to the release of their follow up studio album Running in the Family (1987). The cover photo is of Hafnarfjall, a mountain in west Iceland.
Level 42, who in 1985 produced arguably their finest album in World Machine, though lost half their original line-up in the process including one of the finest-ever British drummers. Now their record label Polydor wanted a more concerted assault on the singles charts and a more current sound, and to that end outstanding bassist/vocalist Mark King took much more of a lead than before.
Alongside co-producer/keys man Wally Badarou, the band laid down the most cohesive, streamlined collection of songs in their career thus far with two or three obvious singles at demo stage. Not everyone in the band was happy with this brave new musical direction either. Main lyricist and drummer Phil Gould (brother of ex-manager John and guitarist Boon) had always peppered Level 42’s songs with allusions to psychology, science fiction and esoteric spirituality, drawing on writers like Arthur Koestler, Hermann Hesse and EM Forster, but by early 1985 the pressure was on to deliver boy/girl songs with universal themes. Phil has talked about Polydor wanting the band to do party anthems. He struggled against this direction, rightly surmising that they would quickly become typecast as a clichéd Brit-funk band.
Though he did eventually tone down the lyrical imagery a bit on World Machine, he still smuggled in some depth and despair to songs such as the title track, "Physical Presence", "Leaving Me Now" and "Coup D'Etat". The music of World Machine is its consistency of tone; you can drop the needle anywhere and hear
the quality. Engineer Julian Mendelsohn is a big contributor to that.
The band had mastered the kind of half-time funk groove which had frequently littered their earlier work, and the style reached its apogee here with bassists and drummers rushing off to play along to "Good Man In A Storm", "A Physical Presence", "Leaving Me Now", "Dream Crazy" and "It's Not The Same For Us"
But the sequence-heavy nature of some other tracks such as "Something About You" and "I Sleep On My Heart" also aroused some musical differences in the band. It’s intriguing to imagine what these songs would have sounded like shorn of their ‘hi-tech’ elements. Level 42 had secured several hits before, but "Something About You" was the real breakthrough, it reached #7 in the US singles chart, perhaps inspired by a really good accompanying video.
No hay comentarios.:
Publicar un comentario