"Won't you come see about me?I'll be alone, dancing, you know it, babyTell me your troubles and doubtsGiving me everything inside and out"
Oh yeah, Simple Minds. They're that Breakfast Club band, with the "(Don't You) Forget About Me" song, right? Well, yes. But years before that, they were just one more upstart band toiling in the post-punk swamp of the late-70s UK, cutting tangled avant-dance records for the clubs in Orwell's Oceania. And after years of letting them languish Stateside as U2 clones from the decade of hairspray and coke, Virgin has now gone and given their early catalog the remaster/reissue treatment for a new, more danceable decade. What a time to be alive.
I'm not going to set any Simple Minds LP up as a masterpiece, because I'd be lying if I did, but they nevertheless made a few excellent albums, and they're certainly worth a look and a listen for folks who just can't get enough of that wonderful post-punk. Although Virgin has reissued 12 Simple Minds albums-- nearly their entire oeuvre-- I've chosen to focus on two of their most wonderfully strange records, 1979's Reel to Real Cacophony and 1980's Empires and Dance, the band's sophomore and junior albums, respectively. These two albums feature Simple Minds pulling themselves together musically and finding their direction. Here, the band is moving away from its disorganized debut, Life in a Day (to say it was padded with filler is pretty charitable) and toward the expansive, reverb-soaked anthems that characterized its greatest achievement, 1982's New Gold Dream (81-82-83-84), and their eventual string of U.S. hits.
Reel to Real is the wildest ride the Simple Minds ever went on, foraying into soundscape weirdness (check the bugged-out bass riff that lends contour to the ambient squiggle of "Veldt"), as well as spiky mirror-ball rock and gothic motorik. Jim Kerr's vocals wouldn't yet attain their full Bonoesque bombast for a few years-- here, he instead falls somewhere between Bryan Ferry and Colin Newman, at once spastic and strangely reserved. "Reel to Real" opens the album at a crawl, with the band banging out a cockeyed rhythm and Kerr snaking through it wraithlike. The album's peaks include the wickedly loopy "Carnival (Shelter in a Suitcase)", which veers between Can of Bees psych verses and crazy circus synth parts over percolating bass, and "Changeling", a bristling dance track led by a nasty, fuzzed-out synth. "Changeling" pairs nicely with "Premonition", which-- with its insistent bass and Kerr's bombastic chorus-- is the album's best predicator of the band's future.
The approach is more refined on Empires and Dance, but at that time, Simple Minds still hadn't completely reined in their experimental tendencies. "Twist/Run/Repulsion" shows the band's Roxy Music influence more clearly than any of their other songs. Not only do Kerr's motormouth vocals sound like Ferry, but the dissonant horn blasts, syncopated bassline, and recording of a female announcer speaking French over an intercom kick it quite a bit further into leftfield than it initially seems willing to go. The album is much slower than its predecessor, but is nevertheless dominated by a triumvirate of propulsive songs that break up the medium pacing. Opener "I Travel" whips along on machine-gun synth, bumping bass, and big keyboards. "This Fear of Gods" is a harrowing seven-minute epic of collapsing reverb and buoyant rhythm. The Teutonic synthesizer and choppy beat of "Thirty Frames a Second" make a strange mix, but work nicely under Kerr's twitchy shouting.
Whether you should approach Simple Minds' earliest material depends on your appetite for the open-ended aesthetics of the post-punk era. The band's early albums nestle nicely next to Wire's 154, The Sound's Propaganda, Shriekback's Care, and Neu!'s 75. Each of these two Simple Minds records has its share of inessential material, but that is greatly outweighed by the good stuff. A thoughtfully chosen highlight reel from the band's first six albums would really be an ideal introduction but, as none exists, either of these albums would be a good doorway to an oft-neglected band.
