I sit down to write this half-expecting the official goon squad of the Record Review Office of Standards and Practices to emerge from behind my radiator and make me say it. And, oh no, here they are. (They have eyes that make dogs shiver-- and who'd have thought corduroy and epaulettes would go so well together?) The applicable by laws are firm on this point: If I don't say it, they can revoke my turntable and all of my Peel Sessions. So here you go: "The Italian Kraftwerk." It was either that or mentioning those "Sprockets" segments from Saturday Night Live.
I think they're gone now. So yes, N.O.I.A. were Italian and sounded basically like Kraftwerk. And while they supposedly scored a few popular singles during the mid-80s in their home country, a good portion of their earlier work went unreleased. Two years ago, however, they went back and re-recorded some of those songs, and now Ersatz Audio-- Adult.'s label, and one I'm pretty fond of-- have offered up these "unreleased classics." At least two or three of them, you'll be glad to hear, are just mind-blowingly fantastic, really ridiculously enjoyable.
All of these tracks were written between 1978 and 1982, in Italy, which might lead one to expect a discful of vintage Italo-disco, packed with dark enveloping swells and ominous grinds. But N.O.I.A., as noted, were under the spell of Kraftwerk, not Giorgio Moroder. So what we get is quite different: The precise, minimal beeping of synths and brittle little drum machines, mapping out gridlike streams of ultra-robotic pop so sterile and simplified that its funkiness can feel like a treasure. It's jerky and twinkly and sometimes adorably groovy: All you need to enjoy this is to be the sort of person who'd find watching a big wall of multicolored LED lights blink in repetitive patterns at least as entertaining as, say, watching grass grow. Because, you see, the Kraftwerk in question here isn't just Kraftwerk in general: it's the well-known Kraftwerk of Computer World, the Kraftwerk that, depending on whom you ask, either descended into amusing self-parody or finally matched their playfully rigid robotism to the context of stiff little pop songs.
There are a few tracks in this collection that make it seem as if nothing else is even worth doing. One of the best is "Be Alert", where a cutely formal groove breaks down into a tight, yelping verse before shifting gears and cruising back round again. It's one of the most ingeniously plotted things I've heard in a while, and I'm sure that if you downloaded it you'd only be doing that to tide yourself over until you could attain it legally. Another winner is "Stop Thinking", which does, well, sort of the same thing, only with more of a "Peter Gunn" rhythm: It's the vocals here that prompted that really unfortunate Sprockets reference, with their clipped delivery of questions like, "Don't you know your mind's too much slow?" and repeated proclamations of, "You must stop thinking!"
Tracks like these function as spazzy pop as much as Kraftwerk and Devo did, thanks in part to a certain carefree quality: On "Korowa Milk Bar", they even reconfigure that classic rock 'n' roll four-step harmony-- you know, the one from "Twist & Shout". Seven tracks later, they're offering "grazie mille" to Kraftwerk and paying homage with synth-speech reworkings of their songs, "The Robots" mutating lovingly into "We Wanna Glow".
Obviously there's plenty of futurism: much talk of traveling in electric wheelchairs and computers making "No Mistakes". Interestingly, there's also Cold War politics: "Stop Thinking", for instance, is followed by the presumably less sarcastic "West Is the Best". (You can trust central Europeans to make more realistic moral distinctions about communism than Americans, who've never been allowed to take it seriously enough to form very enlightened responses.) Following that is "Hunger in the East"-- a song about, well, Social Darwinism-- whose message has only grown more pertinent a couple decades on: "Selection now means hunger in the East." If you've listened to many synth records from this period, you'll be unsurprised to hear there's a song about Japan, only in this case it's called "Nagasaki Forced Fun 1945". You'll also be unsurprised to hear that this collection is a bit monochromatic (duh) and contains a bunch of cute beepy synth patterns that repeat a whole awful lot. If this sounds unappealing to you, it's safe to assume you're not a part of the target audience.
So: I used to go around trying to convince people that Men without Hats' Rhythm of Youth was the best example of this kind of music that I'd come across-- and before you laugh, be aware that most of that record sounds as much like Gang of Four as it does "Safety Dance". But the best of these tracks ("Be Alert", "Korowa Milk Bar", "Stop Thinking") are currently getting a lot more spins than much of other stuff in my bedroom.
