bruceb

..."This new album by Asia is very solid stuff" has to be in there somewhere. For that matter, any comment at all on a new album by Asia must.

But in fact I learned just today that they put out an album in 2008, titled Phoenix, and it is very solid stuff. It's the original lineup: Geoff Downs, Steve Howe, Carl Palmer, and John Wetton. The music is very much like their vintage sound, but it has...aw, this kind of thing is always tricky to describe, but what the heck. It doesn't sound like they're revisiting the style because they're stuck, or just that they need a buck, but because they genuinely want to do it. The lyrics have picked up a touch of depth - a couple decades more of life under everyone's belt will do that, or should.

I'm enjoying it a lot, and if the pop side of prog is your thing, it's worth checking out.

Yup, 'tis true, I've always liked at least some of the Pet Shop Boys' music - it's the sort of thing that'd normally be too smooth/sweet for me, but they do it smart and funny, and I'm a sucker for both of those. So when I saw that they had a new album out, I was interested; when I saw that Trevor Horn had produced it, I reached for the iTunes store.

This is a really good album.

The sound is familiar - they haven't gone goth or grunge or anything, they're just working with deeper layering and their customary assemblage of simple units of music into pleasing wholes. Lyrically, they're continuing to write about where they are now and what they notice the neighbors being up to lately. They are hitting middle age, not trying to deny it or pretend that they're still the hottest kids on the dance floor, appalled by a lot of the big-scale trends and crises in their society, and yo-yo-ing a little between ironic mockery, despairing wishes that they could just turn off some of the hurting for a while, anger expressed with a biting chill, and the continuing desire to have reasons to feel better about themselves and the world. Well, that's my neighborhood too, and this comes as close to anything new I've heard in the last couple of years to being the soundtrack for my wandering musings.

The Boys have always been good for bracketing the cynicism and satire with glimpses of honest, wide-eyed yearning for something better - of the romanticism that can be both blessing and curse, depending on how it gets along with judgment. That's very much present on Fundamental, except with the awareness of how much that fulfillment depends on others, individually and collectively, turned up.

Particular highlights, lowlights, and others below the cut. With lyrics quoted, so it's a lot of short lines.

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