Archive for the recoil tag

Recoil: Faith Healer

Tuesday. Tuesday...I never thought next Tuesday would ever happen. Way back in the wee days of the internet, I was on the Recoil official mailing list--back when that meant daily emails of conversing with other fans, and sometimes Alan Wilder himself, who is surprisingly approachable for someone who used to be a very key member in one of the most important electronic bands ever.

We begged, and begged, but he said it couldn't be done. Recoil could never tour, could never even do a live show... there were just too many people involved. We couldn't expect him to actually pack Douglas McCarthy, Toni Halliday, Moby, Maggie Estep, Siobhan Lynch, Nicole Blackman, Samantha Coerbell, Hildia Cambell, and Diamanda Galás all on a tour bus. Oh come on, we could dream, right?

I guess Alan changed his mind, because he's on tour, and he's coming to The Metro on Tuesday night with Gary Numan. After a LOT of digging around, I was able to discern that he actually accomplished this by bringing no vocalists at all; in their place is film, with imagery chosen specifically for each piece. It's not Diamanda Galás and Douglas McCarthy hanging out on a bus, but I'll take what I can get.

Though nearly impossible given all the options, I choose Recoil's first single and most well-known track, a cover of the Sensational Alex Harvey Band's "Faith Healer" featuring Douglas McCarthy (Nitzer Ebb) from Bloodline*. I can't say it's a good representation of Recoil, because each album and even each song is a work of art that stands on its own, ranging from vintage Bukka White placed over minimal electro and Maggie Estep's hilarious spoken words to Diamanda Galás screeching in tongues and Toni Halliday screaming hate over industrial like nothing you'd ever imagine listening to her spacerocky Curve albums. And I'm not even touching on the whole plane-crash-as-concept-album thing...

official website
buy Bloodline on Amazon.com

*trivia: Foetus also covered this song on Rife, ergo this track is often mistaken for a Foetus cover, not to say that Thirwell's version didn't influence this one.

Tribute to Gary Numan: Radio Heart + My Jesus

Tonight we celebrate the career of electronic music pioneer Gary Numan, and we'll be giving away tickets to his show at Metro on Tuesday. He'll be playing his signature album Pleasure Principle in it's entirety. Also playing: the amazing and beyond definition Recoil (which I'll blog about this weekend), and Daniel Myer project Architect, rounding out the lineup appropriately with a little noisy techno-industrial.

Radio Heart was a project of Hugh Nicholson, a friend of Gary Numan's. Elton John and Ray Cooper also contributed vocals on various tracks, but the three songs featuring Numan are by far the best on the album. The single "Radio Heart", released in 1987, is far more mainstream pop than his own output, and likewise achieved more chart success than Numan had on his own at the time.

My favorite Gary Numan album does not come from his smashing glam-meets-new wave '80s-era work, but his 2000 release Pure. Following in the wake of his wife's repeated miscarriages, Numan took a page from Trent Reznor's book (and one he himself inspired, no less), and wrote an industrial-inspired epic of pain and scathing religious commentary, as exemplified in "My Jesus".

official website
buy Gary Numan at Amazon.com