There's probably a reason the biographical album doesn't have a strong pop tradition. Lou Reed and John Cale advocated for the genius of Andy Warhol with some success on on 1990's Songs for Drella, and Neutral Milk Hotel's 1998 indie-rock touchstone In the Aeroplane Over the Sea draws on the life story of Anne Frank. But unlike Hollywood biopics, which strike Oscar gold almost annually, bio-albums are few and far between.
If anyone can popularize the bio-album concept, it should be Gruff Rhys and Bryan Hollon. Whether solo or as frontman for long-running Welsh psych-pop anarchists Super Furry Animals, Rhys has always had a knack for communicating lofty ideas with sly wit, warm feeling, and memorably inventive settings. Hollon, an accomplished experimental hip-hop producer/DJ in his own right as Boom Bip, updated 1980s new wave and electro masterfully on his first album with Rhys as Neon Neon, 2008's Stainless Style.
Though that Mercury Music Prize-nominated full-length was inspired by the life of automaker John DeLorean, in a sense Neon Neon's second effort represents their first true bio-album. The silvery, retro-futurist excess of the greed-is-good decade pervaded Stainless Style, and lyrical references to the engineer playboy's life were certainly present, but the record was stuffed with great songs that humanized 80s-retro clichés whether or not you knew there was a story attached. Praxis Makes Perfect's songs never quite hit the highs of its predecessor's best tracks, but it's a more coherent album, and still strangely rewarding in its own way. It's just impossible to separate from its subject.
That subject is Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, a wealthy Italian scion turned left-wing political activist and publisher. He smuggled Boris Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago out of Soviet Russia, published books banned as obscene in Italy-- including Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer-- and played basketball with Fidel Castro in 1960s Cuba. You know that famous image of Che Guevara? Feltrinelli acquired and popularized it. He died, under disputed circumstances, near Milan in 1972, where authorities said he accidentally blew himself up in an act of leftism terrorism against the capitalist structure.
Feltrinelli's story, in other words, is as weird and fascinating in its own way as DeLorean's, full of unlikely contradictions that make it ripe for dramatization. What's all the more intriguing is that Neon Neon choose to tell the story not with the musical styles of Feltrinelli's own lifetime, but with much the same deceptively plasticized synth pop as on Stainless Style. It's as if we're experiencing Feltrinelli's life through the lens of his ultimate failure-- from the perspective of a world where revolutionary idealism had given way to the start of corporate consumer capitalism as we now know it. Imagine if "Mad Men" had Debbie Gibson on the soundtrack.
The anachronism is delicious, and when Neon Neon succeed in wedding their high-minded tale to wryly tacky throwback pop, the juxtapositions can be similarly satisfying. "Dr. Zhivago" has a chorus so soaring it should get the name Pasternak stuck your head even if you can't pronounce it. "Mid Century Modern Nightmare" is another highlight, making rhyming "bourgeoisie" with "tea" sound not only natural but desirable amid its peppy new-wave clatter. Shuffling first video selection "Hammer & Sickle" offers one more unshakable refrain, this time about "the winner, the loser, and the middle man."
Sometimes the audacious lengths to which Neon Neon carry their outlandish conceit lifts up songs that might otherwise fall flat. Those unfamiliar with the full details of Feltrinelli's life story might not fully understand how consumerist ode "Shopping (I Like To)"-- frosty synth-pop that melodically hints at Hall and Oates' "Maneater"-- fits in. But the fact that Rhys and Hollon have roped in a husky guest vocal from Italian model-singer Sabrina Salerno, who scored a campy 80s Europop hit with "Boys (Summertime Love)", is a master stroke of grinning cheekiness. Elsewhere, the actress Asia Argento, daughter of Italian horror director Dario Argento, gives voice to quotes from Feltrinelli himself, ensuring for better or worse that unlike on Stainless Style, here our hero is rarely far from mind.
It's telling, though, that Neon Neon, along with National Theatre Wales, have put together an "immersive theatrical experience" based on the album. The record alone makes for the latest solid effort from these two outsize talents, but the stage show ought to be the ideal way to enjoy it. When the songs drag, as they do here toward the end, on tracks like horn-bleating "Listen to the Rainbow", they should still be effective as a soundtrack to a visual performance. Rhys, in particular, has a way with high-concept gigs: He billed his off-the-wall 2010 solo tour as a quest to follow in the footsteps of an 18th-century Welsh explorer who searched America for a mythical tribe of Welsh-speaking Native Americans. And after all, if the Marxist notion of "praxis" had to do with turning philosophy into action, then a live show based on Praxis should make its cheerful Reagonomics-chic radicalism truly-- sorry, but Rhys does loves his puns-- perfect. The bio-album, sadly, might still be an idea whose time has not yet come.
