Terrorist trivia time! Did you know that Hezbollah operates a satellite TV network called Al Mana that boasts a viewership of 10 million and even features English-language news? True story. Its primary purpose is to recruit young Palestinians into martyr brigades, via detailed instructions and the now-proverbial 72-virgin retirement plan. In short, it's a TV network whose main objective is convincing its viewers to kill themselves.
This pretty much happens to be Luke Haines' modus operandi, as well. There are talented songwriters who make disdain for the listener a part of their mystique (yup, Will Oldham), but Haines must be the only one to fashion it into a persistent lyrical trope. The very first Black Box Recorder single, "Child Psychology", extended you an invitation to "kill yourself or get over it." A quick skim through Haines' back catalog yields more fizzy bile. To date, the man has lit aircraft on fire, ordered girls to sing in the wreckage, implicated the listener in child murders and kidnappings, mused about blowing up clubs and murdering artists, and proposed marriage to Andy Warhol's attempted assassin Valerie Solanas. There's also his work as Baader-Meinhof, which glorified the legendary German anarchists of the same name, from their first demented meeting to their mass suicide in jail. It was a funk album.
Haines has mellowed only once, on 2000's The Facts of Life, crafting the eponymous single-- an affectionate semi-spoken treatise on puberty-- that somehow became a minor UK hit. As British reviewers methodically noted, it could have been even more popular had Haines not referred to his record label as "fucking cunts" in an interview. The Top of the Pops moment came and went but the taste of it fuels the entirety of Passionoia, his third album with Black Box Recorder. The CD is a blunt parody of a "success is hell" concept album, wherein hilarity stems from the fact that The Facts of Life wasn't that big of a smash: In order to properly disdain his success, Haines has to wildly inflate it.
Passionoia begins with "The School Song", a spoof of Black Box Recorder's sole hit and an auto-comment as bitter as "Rape Me", with none of the self-denegration. The contempt here is all outward: vocalist Sarah Nixey, cast as a starchy principal, spews S&M-speak; ("You lot need a bit of toughening up/ You're weak and spoilt, look at you") while a choir of children chant "Black Box Recorder!" Yes, it's as obvious as it sounds, and it's not only a terrible opener, but a major misstep for the band in general.
Surprisingly, things pick up immediately afterward, the remaining nine songs standing as almost uniformly terrific. "Being Number One" is a Blur-ry lark listing perks of fame: "Triumphant return to the hometown/ Treated with love and respect/ A special school assembly/ Before, they would have broken my neck." On "The New Diana", the band achieves accidental poignancy, even as the song's narrator is a ditz calmly listing her qualifications for the post of the next English Rose. "Andrew Ridgeley" mocks celebrity in general by dredging up the lesser half of Wham! for exaggerated worship. Haines even finds time to riff on his status as the band's ventriloquist, having Sarah Nixey intone the lyric, "This is Sarah Nixey talking."
Passionoia is just esoteric enough to pleasantly fluster (go decipher "GSOH Q.E.D.", a pursed-lips romp through newspaper personals). But it's also wickedly smart; if you think intelligence in indie lyrics must come at the expense of coherence, take in a couple of these impeccably linear narratives. The arrangements, meanwhile, are Haines' usual fare-- deceptively cute, a tad on the lazy side, but always memorable. The funniest thing about Black Box Recorder has always been that, embodying all things British, they end up sounding French. This paradox is in full effect on Passionoia: Blippier numbers seem informed by Air, and chord progressions borrow from disco-era Gainsbourg. If you confronted Luke Haines about it, he'd probably chalk it up to situationism and Guy Debord and free-floating signifiers. Or maybe he'd just say fuck it and kill you.
