Day 0615 - Idlewild

Everything But the Girl "Idlewild" (1988)

Everything But the Girl named themselves after a department store advertisement that proclaimed it could provide all your bedroom needs "...everything but the girl".   Despite the skeezy origin of their name, they made beautiful, sultry and soulful music.

I was more familiar with EBtG's later more electronic-tinged music, but this was really nice.  Their soulful tunes are given a vaguely jazzy flavour due to the horn section.   Smooth as silk.

Day 0572 - The Colour of Spring

Talk Talk "The Colour of the Spring"

 
Talk Talk, one of the earlier bands to employ the new sound of synthesizers is here, one of the first bands to abandon them.  The synths are ousted for pianos, organs and interesting guitar textures, and the results are brilliant!

There is some competent pop-rock in the shape of "Life's What You Make it" and "Happiness is Easy" which has a moody trumpet solo and a child choir to lift it above standard fare.  There are some moodier tracks like "Chameleon Day", where Mark Hollis' haunting tenor backed with a semi-classical backdrop of piano and keyboards almost predicts the moodier moments of A Perfect Circle.

Day 0470 - Hypnotised

The Undertones "Hypnotised" (1980)

I wasn't really too fussed on the previous Undertones album on this list; it was kind of fairly nondescript punk with a little extra melody thrown in.

This one is more of the same but with the punk dialled down a little and the pop/melody turned up slightly, and yet it seems so much better (to my ears). Maybe they reached the punk/melody 'bliss point' or were on a bit of a roll songwriting-wise... who knows?

Again it's not one that I'm really planning on revisiting, but it's more enjoyable and a lot of the songs just seem 'familiar'. I kind of feel like they could potentially have been an early influence on Blur (of whom I am a fan), going by the similarities in sound.