Lord, thank you for shielding my miscarried children from the 1980s cultural bleedback sullying so much of this new millenium. The new book "Spectres of Inheritance" (by Chrisott McAcademic; Gerd University Press; $22) points out with zesty dread that the eighties were a bad prequel for now, a phantom menace in tapered britches: we are re-fraught with eighties fads, toys, celebrities, design, and fashion. We're also cylically dolloping attention on things that never left, the profiles of which seemed to zenith under Reagan and Elderbush: empires, evil, AIDS, Africa, cocaine, and turning outer space into either a minefield or an Ultimate Laser Tag. And of course, Ferris Bueller's Decade Off haunts music in ways wonderful (turn on the Lite Brites again, please, Interpol) and ways heinous (that payola-punk band the Colecos covering Glenn Frey). Orwell deserves to win another golden Prescie from the Hindsight/Foresight Institute: whether or not calling his war-peace surveillance-conformity epic 1984 was his idea, he even nailed the year during which so many subtly totalitarian seeds got sown. He didnt predict pop's culpability, though, in helping us ignore global crises. Surely CNN will soon announce which sweet primetime slot will be held by Huey Lewis and The Evening News. Surely the Department of Homeland Security will soon announce that it is training an elite unit of Ghostbusters.
Anyway, dont buy this Thick Pigeon reissue unless you love post-Warhol sub-glam absurdist-meets-infantile eighties-underground New York-ness, or if you're not a feigned-erection-via-Jello-Pudding-Pops-splint (remember Cosby? you named your goldfish Theo? AWESOME) completist of a] New Order (two members play here) b] Sonic Youth (that's a young Kim Gordon's former bandmate singing, and Thurston Moore guests on "Pope") c] atrocious-Tony-Wilson hair-era Factory (this was Fact85 and Factus16, with a seven-inch and compilation track added), d] filmscore genius (the music here is by the man who soul-blowingly soundtracked the snowy car approach that begins Fargo).
More a project than a band, Thick Pigeon was Stanton Miranda (Durutti Column guest vocalist, Jonathan Demme actress, and blasphemer of "Love Will Tear Us Apart" on the awful Virgin anti-tribute A Means To An End-- her version sounds like Belly on herbal ritalin) and Carter Burwell (composer for almost every Coen Brothers film, as well as Psycho 3, to which Miranda also contributed). Their music is minimalist but spacious, and though the ingredients for dance tracks are in the house, the songs are wallflowers teeming with art-faggy whimdulgence. After the first three tracks, Thick Pigeon loses the listener's hope. I know theyre not suposed to be fettered to logic, but even as free-range confections, Miranda's lyrics make as much sense as a dumbwaiter on a pontoon. Burwell clearly cares more about atmosphere than rhythm: his moody keys suggest a sci-fi Satie, but the handclappy beats are rote-- were Ciccone Youth spoofing this album?
With the exception of the Ladytron-like jam "Fred + Andy", on which Miranda softens her warble-burp-chant, the original Too Crazy Cowboys sounds fronted by a prematurely aged Punky Brewster (though "Jeff + Bart" would work without an album around it, as an oddity, as it mixes Miranda's unsinging and unlyrics captivatingly, with tingly anthemic synths and quaintly outdated robot voices). The three bonus tracks are the re-release's keepers: clubbier, they take David Byrne's limp white funk and Factory-ize it (echoes, drum machines) to rock any contemporary warehouse after-binge. Miranda could have benefited from studying Byrne, a fellow art-worlder with unconventional pipes. Only at its end is this eighties revisitation not flukily miserable or befuddlingly lurchy. To quote eighties icon Lloyd Bentsen (the first line of Donnie Darko, you'll remember, is about voting for Dukakis) : "I knew Yaz. Yaz was a friend of mine. Thick Pigeon, youre no Yaz."
