Listeners
Avg. rating
3.8
Popularity
5,660

4.5/5 stars
Edited

This album teeters on the edge of pretension, staying just enough in the realm of earnestness that it’s rather impressive a group of immensely young British guys could write an album so sophisticated in its sound.

It sounds like a band of four guys—well, five if you count guitarist Rob Dean, who was one foot out of the door during GTP’s production—desperately trying to be better than the sum of their inspirations. Their previous album Quiet Life, while good, hardly sounds like anything more than a little bit Velvet Underground, a little bit Roxy Music, and a little bit David Bowie. Gentlemen Take Polaroids sounds like a group of young guys trying hard to take their songwriting craft to another level. It worked!

David Sylvian, singing in a slightly lower register than on previous albums, sounds determined to leave his youth behind. Richard Barbieri injects a dreary, dizzying miasma into every track, while Steve Jansen’s drumming maintains a Krautrock rhythm to keep everything from floating away. Lastly Mick Karn’s basslines are so weird and yelpy, and so obviously his creation, that you’d be shocked (and appalled) that David Sylvian took sole writing credit for every original track, aside for a Ryuichi Sakamoto co-write on the final track.

It’s wild to think that while the band members were barely 21, they were pushing their fourth album out with GTP. The result reveals that they were simply unable to find their voice, unable to move past their influences, until they had given it a shot two or three times. This really could’ve been their last album before throwing in the towel. Fortunately they produced Tin Drum a year later.

Comments

Showing 0 comments

You need to be logged in to comment.