![]() The following “Midnight” began with an edgy a capella bluesy vocal intro from writer Alison Moyet as she finally put her stamp on the album, apart from singing. I can’t help but think that Clarke had heard “My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts” and thought “I want some of that!” Pure B-side material and it’s hard to believe that it made the cut on the album, thought I could see Mute head Daniel Miller absolutely loving this brush with the avant garde from one of this label’s cash cows at the time. Synthesizers don’t even enter into it until near the 1:30 point. If I wanted something more out of the ordinary, it was delivered on the next track, “I Before E Except After C.” The track sticks out like a sore thumb as the exercise in audio editing never coalesces into anything you could have ever expected from Mr. “Bad Connection” sounded for all the world like a leftover track from the “Speak + Spell Session.” Cheeky electropop with bold, shiny melodies of little complexity. The fact that the singing stopped much less than halfway into it showed a determination not to hew closely to formula. I found the contrapuntal melodies in long instrumental section prior to the middle eight to be quite lovely. ![]() The finely etched electropop seemed to owe a lot to the middle movements of Kraftwerk’s “Autobahn” with the motorik rhythms gently percolating. I found the next track, “Too Pieces” to be more my style. Short, sharp 3 minute dance pop that go in under the wire and left before you had a chance to be bored, even thought the song was almost nothing but hook, in the tried-and-true Vince Clarke fashion. How could I not grab it at that price? More importantly, how would it stack up after all these years off of the Yaz train? I finally gave it a spin this morning and “Don’t Go” remained a strong, if minimal kickoff to the varied synthpop program. By 1985, the LP hit the trade-in pile as I doffed tons of vinyl in the uptick to the digital lifestyle.Ī recent trip to the Harvest Records basement sale revealed a copy of the straight US CD for eight bits. I liked it fine, but was not such a believer that I ever bought their follow-up album, “You And Me Both” in 1983. While I had not been a believer of Clarke-era Depeche Mode, I nevertheless probably bought Yaz’s debut album, “Upstairs At Eric’s” the week of release as it was a high profile release. Much ado was made about “Situation,” the former B-side that had been remixed into a dancefloor breakout hit that was sweeping all of the “rock discos” that I was not frequenting at the time. I recall reading about Yaz, the new band that Vince Clarke either in the “Dance” columns or the “Import” sections. ![]() Yaz: Upstairs At Eric’s – US – CD īack when I was in college, I made it a point to regularly read Billboard Magazine, the bible of the US record industry while whiling aways the hours in the college library. ![]()
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