Where we're going, we don't need roads. Remember with me, if you will, a time when cocaine was as rampant as synthesizers. When a wave of unprecedented M&A activity and yuppie-style prosperity was driving Wall Street to record heights. Sequels and superhero movies dominated at the box office, while starlets with limited discernible musical talent were releasing remarkably enduring pop songs. A conservative Republican was in the White House, giving aid and comfort to Iran as if he were someone who wasn't quite all there.
I'm talking, as you know if you're reading two words ahead, about 2006, when Gruff Rhys and Boom Bip first announced their collaboration under the name Neon Neon. Just as a yearning for the 60s characterized much of the indie pop and indie rock of the 1980s-- from R.E.M.'s jingle-jangle mourning to C86's "perfect pop" to the slowed-down garage-y guitar heroics of Dinosaur Jr.-- so the memory of the 1980s has dominated certain music circles in recent years. Whether electrohouse, new wave, new rave, synth-pop, Miami bass, Detroit techno, Chicago house, Italo disco, Balearic, or, most recently, the revival of what used to be called "world music", the 80s have left their mark on the YouTube era. Now if only the 49ers could win four Super Bowls again.
Rhys, solo artist and frontman for Welsh psych-poppers Super Furry Animals, and Boom Bip, the electronic/hip-hop producer known to his folks as Bryan Hollon, bring an eclectic background to the early-1980s revival. For an album conceived two years ago*, Stainless Style* captures a lot of what's been in the past few years' zeitgeist-- from Alan Braxe and Fred Falke's "Rubicon" to Chromeo and Cool Kids (if not quite all the way to Yeasayer); a recent Neon Neon "influences" mix included the Italian prog song that lays the foundation for Justice's "Phantom". And then the bright, 1980s-style guitar pop, murky electro rap, and cybernetic white-boy funk make for an album that upends some of the stereotypes about the hollowness of sleek 80s chrome. Hey, there's heart behind all this silvery excess.
The more melodic, Rhys-fronted tunes sped up on me first, and they're also the most chronologically displaced. Bizarre Princess Leia brush-off "I Told Her on Aderaan" puts the Cars beneath 1980s snare sounds, angelic synths, kitschy spoken-word interjections, and one of the catchiest choruses so far this year. The midtempo candidate for a weepy beach break-up music video, "Steel Your Girl", comes close, with chiming soft-rock guitars and phased keyboard. "Video games are nothing but illusion," Rhys begins. Factory farewell "Belfast" leans more toward wistful Duran Duran synth-pop. To all this, the herky-jerk call-and-response "Dream Girls" and shades-are-good electro creep-out "Michael Douglas" are wrecks by comparison.
Not that there's a clear divide between songs where Rhys seems dominant and ones where Boom Bip takes over. Raquel Welch ode "Raquel" and its Miami Sound Machine (and then Run-D.M.C.) beats comes closest to melding the SFA frontman's skewed pop vision and Hollon's electro-conscious hip-hop. On "I Lust U", meanwhile, Rhys duets with Welsh singer Cate Le Bon, trading one-liners on an Italo-tinged dream not too far from something like Simian Mobile Disco's "I Believe". Spank Rock and Sean Tillman get in a couple of snappy verses amid the Prince-ly groove and Midnite Vulture-isms of Har Mar Superstar on first single "Trick for Treat". A messed-up title pun and Rhys's fuzzed-out oddness sort of redeem Yo Majesty's heavy-breathing shtick on "Sweat Shop" (where's Missy Elliott?), but Fatlip's scene-setting rap on "Luxury Pool" is more biography than biopic, helped by a hiccuping, fame-pimping hook.
As a crossover side project involving an artist linked to 1990s Britpop, Neon Neon were bound to get compared to Gorillaz. Stainless Style is more consistent as an album than Damon Albarn's output with his first non-Blur group, and the potential hits, for what it's worth, hit equally hard. "Oh, how many are my foes?/ How many rise against me?" Rhys sings, with a choir of himself, on the title track and finale. Tuneful and engaging, though not flawless, Stainless Style holds a mirror up to a generation of 1980s nostalgia and, by warmly and humorously depicting a human being behind the bizarre rise and fall an engineer playboy, reminds us there's more to that most notoriously superficial decade than, well, surfaces. There's Huey Lewis, for example.
