Metamatic Forums John Foxx John Foxx And The Maths Interplay; WARNING! Full album review below!

I can’t lie. I want Christmas early this year. I’ve been trawling various secondhand record shops of Soho and Notting Hill for the best part of a month now. So I was delighted to finally track it down in the rain and neon of Caaaaaamden-guv. There it was.

Interplay

Hmmmmm. Should I buy it? Unwrapping presents early n all that etc etc.

I think that argument raged in my head for – ooooo – all of 0.2 milliseconds.

So…Interplay…

Shatterproof you know, but that doesn’t make it any less suprising – it sounds ‘tastier’ on here, with its 808 beats and various hoodlum bleeps and sinister strings and stabs. Don’t meet this track in a dark alleyway – you won’t come out too good.

Catwalk has a bassline that’s been around since Booker T. and the M.G.'s – and that’s not a bad thing! It’s that Blues sound that’s normally hidden in his work or at least buried lightly under topsoil. Not here – uh uh – it’s writ large in neon for all to see. In an alternate universe there’s a Blues band performing this and following it up with Burning Car, Green Onions and Smokestack Lightning…hell, I’d pay to see them.

Evergreen is a little longer than the version we know – such a fantastic song, I hope it becomes a staple of any future live sets. I just love the way it quietly kicks and echoes through the streets and silent trees. Forever Evergreen. So pretty and blissful it shouldn’t be allowed.

Watching a Building On Fire is where it goes full-on Metamatic; Mr No, only this time Burial-ised with a new groove. Mira becomes a modern day Gina X with Foxx in full-on crooner mode à la Your Kisses Burn and the bassline. Oh, the bassline - the bassline bleeps and burns – stunning. He needs to do more stuff like this. He needs to do more stuff like all of it.

****!!!! Interplay – is that a real guitar? Woah! It’s almost acoustic! The vocal! Woah – The Vocal! Bleeps sequence and echo, wrapping warmly around the guitar, the thunder and the rain. There’s a universe out there where this song/line of flight follows In Mysterious Ways.

I calculated everything,
looked at it everyway.
Considered all the angles,
the chance of any break.

I counted all the elements,
every possible mistake.
Accommodated every change,
but not the interplay

Heartbreaking, breathtaking and very touching. It stands out like the Empire State on a grey New York skyline wet with rain. The ‘almost dropped my chips’ track on the album…and that’s saying something on an album full of ‘almost dropped my chips’ tracks.

Summerland – moves down the motorway opened by Catwalk and has ‘Giorgio Moroder’ lit large in neon signage warning drivers; ‘DISCO 5km” with its “…grief and sunsets streaming through” and “...ghosts from 1994…” the roads are dark, car-lights through the trees, Wardour Street, Archway, Suicide Bridge. Just gets better and better on every play. Got to say it’s vocally superb this album and lyrically he’s looking through the sunlight of The Golden Section. Sumerland has a Moroder breakdown that goes a bit, well, best described as Les Chants Magnétiques – which isn’t Moroder but I can live with that too. As will you also. Tell your friends.

And another thing – Have I mentioned the vocals? The tracks we’ve all heard so far really don’t give you an overall idea of the vocals on this album – this is one of his best vocal performances ever. Fact. And the songwriting – again – as I mention above – we’re somewhere between the streets of Metamatic with Shatterproof and Destination, but there are lyrically places he’s not visited since The Golden Section.

Well if Summerland charged, Running Man shifts a few gears forward – and – bass guitar! Proper bass guitar – early Cure bass guitar – alongside the fat Moog-ish bass synthesizer. It’s one of those next level songs – I have no idea what the music terminology for such things are but it just keeps pumping, moving up and up a gear, and then it breaks down into fat synth bass that goes a bit The Quiet Men and strings come in, finishing with a rising sequencer pattern…and laser blasts – yeah laser blasts. Stunning. And there’s 70s tape echo on the vocals – bliss!

A Falling Star is pure CR-78 (funnily enough, the same rhythm pattern as on George McCrae’s Rock Your Baby – early pressings of which, were the first ever commercial pop single to use a drum machine (Bentley Rhythm Ace) – Foxx and Benge on a serious roots trip then!).

Over the CR-78 some beautiful analogue drifts about and phases and filters and folds in and out of some drifting ghost-like vocals;

Some love will last forever,
as the sunsets roll over the waves.

And the last time someone saw you,
they say you looked just the same.

And behind you, in the sky -
A falling star

Gorgeous. Just gorgeous. We should be locked-up for listening to this.

After A Falling Star, Destination almost sounds out of place (I’d of put September Town on - but then I’m not in The Maths…*sigh*…I would of applied for membership but would of stood around looking at a wall of Moog saying “yeah but what do these wires do?” and short-circuiting all of Shoreditch…which might not of been a bad thing, but I digress…) and you’ll probably feel that way too, well, until the chorus arrives and those big sinister strings kick in at least. There’s lots of sinister strings on this album. And beauty. But mostly sinister strings.

And then it arrives - slowly, as if by a sunlit canal, passing slowly under the dipping willow trees and delivered by a canal boat sailored by Cluster – The Good Shadow. Last year at the Roundhouse, this was the ‘almost dropped my chips’ track. And still is. I’ve been living with an echo of this song in my head for almost a year now. Everyday. Everyday. It really is all I hoped it would be and more.

Complaint #1: The Good Shadow needs to be about 20 minutes long and released on 8-track so I can play it on loop. Forever.

Complaint #2: these basskick/facekick analogue frequencies should be on 180gsm double vinyl for full-on frequency overload!

Fact #1: You are gonna love this!

Fact #2: No, really - You are gonna love this!

Cheers Gazza,

Excellent review.

As I said to you on Twitter you jammy beggar!

Brian

Cheers Guv!

Can't stop playing it - damn addictive I tell you

What is Catwalk ROckWrok like?

Thanks for the great review Garry!
I hope Townsend will start shipping 'm early! (they usually do )

First impressions in comparison to the album version is that It's got some nicely shredded and rusting malicious Daleks going "CAT-WALK!" over Foxx's shoulder along with some extra analogue on it.

Hi Garry
Thanks for the review.

Not long for the rest of the world to wait.

I'm really looking forward to this album.

Peter

Molto bene! Couldn't resist reading your review Gaz just as you couldn't resist listening to the album.
Excellent review - looking forward to loving it.

This sounds like it will be the best new album of anything by anyone, in a long, long time!!

Let's hope Townsend ship early!

Am I the only one who likes Destination? I think it's fantastic! The processed drumming, the epic synth melodies, the sci-fi vocals... Easily one of my favourite Foxx tracks.

I'm sure the version of Destination on the album is a different mix to the single version. It's shorter in length and feels tighter, more dynamic somehow. Well that's the impression I was left with anyway. I don't dislike Destination at all, it's just that, once you hear it in context with the other tracks, you'll realise just how much the collaboration has developed since we first heard it.

Cheers lads!

It just unfolds more and more on every play. Yesterday was the quiet shock and awe of the whole thing, today it’s settling in, little electric sparks going off every now and then. Like Summerland – yesterday, it felt almost like ‘the Disco song’, but today, listening to the songwriting, it’s quietly extraordinary. Really.

Just to enforce what I’ve said and Martin says above – the songwriting and the vocal performances are incredibly strong and rich on here.

It's been a long time coming. I've been yearning for a full-on vocal/songwriting album from John for a good few years now. Sounds like patience is going to pay off!

From the clips of other tracks I've heard, I can't imagine Destination fitting in very well any more - September Town however, I think, would. But I guess the decision was made at the time that it was the album track - but at least by your accounts, it's a slightly different version to what we got 18 months ago.

Well that's always the way . .or always used to be: the "single" released sometime before the album always sounded different to the other tracks but after a while it all blends in.
Innit.

Hmm. In hindsight I should have badgered the powers that be for a promo copy to review on Quiet City!

Oh well, I'll just be sitting in great anticipation under the letterbox towards the end of the week.

Ooops - I was just going to slightly edit my previous post, and I deleted the whole thing!!

Garry's review is very much in line with my enthusiasm and response to Interplay - it really does contain some of John's best songs for years. Vocally and lyrically on the top of his form, drawing on themes, ideas and sounds from across his catalogue.

re: Destination - I wasn't sure about the track fitting in when I first heard the album, but it really does, perhaps because this version is a lot grittier, harder and altogether monstrous than on the single.
I don't think September Town would have worked instead, cos it doesn't have the depth.
Destination is the Million Cars or Shifting City of Interplay and just sends shivers down the spine.

If you haven't done so yet, place on order.
This is gonna be a seller…

I've tried putting off reading your review Garry, but having stuck my finger in one eye and allowed myself to read with my other eye only the bits about the tracks that I'm so far familiar with I've managed to enjoy what you've had to say about Shatterproof, Evergreen, Destination, and Good Shadow.

Sure, there's a few other tracks on the album that I heard at the Roundhouse, but I honestly didn't absorb them - with the exception of Good Shadow - a track I'm really looking forward to hearing again.

As regards Destination versus September Town, at first I totally agreed with you, and thinking that the track had the right degree of come-down helping ease the end of the album towards the graceful closer of Good Shadow, but when I listened online to September Town (after a big long gap) I was quite disappointed by the way it sounded like a B-side. So, I'm now in the other camp with Destination, agreeing with Martin, and for me its hopefully going to be this albums Impossible...

How dare you sir! Confound you young man! 20 paces! Pistls at Dawn in Hyde Park!!!!

But seriously guv. I love September Town BUT... The version of Destination on the album is significantly different and really grows on you. Initially though, I can't deny - I thought September Town would of been better.

But hell! With a myriad of choices; who am I to complain???!

My good Sir Beach, only today was I informed by ethernet-express that the Maestro's new bounty has been dispatched to my private residence. So, duties permitting I will take leave to retire to my gentleman's chambers and surrender my ears to the delectable music of 'Inter-play', and let it be noted that I may yet change my mind on the arrangement of the confection within, for I have acquiesced to the joys of many a previous Foxxwerk, and have learned that 'context is everything'.

In the words of a wiser man than I - a fat little man sporting a moustache - I shall go compare.

"Go Compare!, Go Compare!". "If September Town seems better, while Destination seems not to figure, then I'll check online and Go Compare again". "It makes sense to listen again, and go compare". "Go Compare! Go Compare!". "And I’ll thank my stars that good Sir Beach made me Go Compare..."

Does anyone have a link to this album on iTunes, otherwise I'll trek to my local HMV.

Maybe iTunes have lost it along with other missing albums such as FGTH Liverpool and countless Art Of Noise albums...........Rant Over!

Sorry John I don't know if it's available on iTunes.

I'm about 10 plays into this now.

It is as fantastic as Garry's review paints it.
This album is an instant classic.

It is brilliant, its sounds in places like Metamatic was launched into an orbiting debris field of antique space synths and drum machines, time warped into the future and Interplay came out of the other end.

Retrofuture this album is.

Shatterproof - Sounding a lot better than the raw stem version that was available for remixers.
Even before recent interviews I knew there was something familiar about the vocal style on this.William Burroughs Naked Lunch is the link.

Synths I liked best on this are the Moog Modular with it's big random arpeggios & also the Arp Odyssey bassline. Makes it sound so raw, fresh and experimental.

Catwalk - If the B52s made an electro version of Loveshack then mixed it up with electro surf music this is what you would get. Maybe one of the best tracks on the album. Trouble is there are so many to choose from. It is very catchy.

Watching a building on Fire - Some wicked Metamatic sounding effects mixed up in this. I think the most experimental track on the album.Mira's vocals sound un-earthly,alien but beautiful.

Interplay - The bassline & playing sound almost like Tony Levin which leads to a slight vibe of Peter Gabriel’s Don’t Give Up. It’s a lovely song. I love the thunderstorm in the background.

Summerland - Has an arpeggiated intro part that reminds me a bit of the theme to 80s TV series Airwolf. Nice and up tempo.

The Running Man - Another up tempo mover with hints of The Quiet Man in the intro.

A falling Star -Lovely lyrics.

Destination - Sounds better than ever in its newly remixed clothing.

The Good Shadow - This just simply leaves me with a big emotional lump in my throat.I think this is the one I like most. As Garry says way too short & over too soon.

Brian

I've posted my own full review over on Quiet City, but I am absolutely loving Interplay - it's been a long wait but well worth it.

For me the best tracks are A Falling Star, Summerland, Catwalk, Shatterproof and Evergreen.

I like the Bowie-esque title track a lot, although with it's Japan-style 'real' bass it's the only one that somehow sounds a bit dated. But on the other hand you've got John's most moving and emotive vocal on record; pure and untreated, sounding absolutely wonderful. A very moody track.

It's actually The Good Shadow which does nothing for me at all. Maybe I was expecting much more after reading so many positive comments about it. The lyrics seem barely audiable and I really don't like the vocal treatment; I find it too heavy.

Good to read everyone's reviews of the new album

I'm playing it non-stop at the moment too, and for me Watching A Building On Fire is the stand-out track, along with Interplay which is a thing of rare beauty, perfectly understated.

Summerland is close to becoming my favourite on the album. It certainly is one of the best new albums I've heard in a long time. It deserves to be huge.

Is that tape hiss mixed with rain on Interplay?

Just listened whilst out walking lunchtime.Cant stop playing this album.

Yes it's just been blasting in my ears during my lunch break. Destination distorts on my iPod headphones!

Not a sign of it in HMV though - not a sausage! I was hoping to at least see it in the Foxx section, or ideally alongside "Credo" on the new releases stand - but nope. How can such an anticipated album with great reviews all round, not even make it into the shop on it's day of release?! So I bought my copy of Credo and got out of there.

I'm enjoying reading all your comments, makes the mouth water. I haven't given it a spin yet, despite receiving it on Saturday. I think I might read all the lyrics first. The packaging is really nice, especially the coloured spines!

Brilliant!

Splendiferous!!!

'it' has finally been hand-delivered to my residence by a trusty servant of the League Of Postal Transference. The maestro's bounty is here, and its exterior finery is most sumptuous.

No time to listen to it mind, as I must haste to work now

God speed you and likewise on your return, so that you may encounter this most wondrous of artefacts and the aural pleasure contained within.

We've got two threads on Interplay presently in use, which one should I be posting in?

I'm hoping to finally get to listen to the album, um, pretty soon. In fact I've only just opened the digipak a moment ago and Wow!!!
that first image of a chic computer room really made me take notice - it obviously engaged the sci-fi mode in the brain and pressed the correct technofantasy buttons

Crikey, I've just opened the rest of it, what a bloody fantastic piece of design! I want to live onboard whatever starship/moonbase those images represent...

That's NASA's 80's Computer Room full of CrayXMP mainframes .

The average Playstation is a lot more powerful these days.

Brian

Hey, why cant our home games systems fly us to the moon and back
Back when I was a child I thought that anything that had the NASA utilitarian look was incredibly boring, a bit like having the stylistic equivalent of a fridge-freezer or washing machine as a spacecraft, but nowadays I love it all!

Glad to see that MemberD has posted a link in the other Interplay thread to the inside package design, well worth a look for anyone who hasn't yet got this digipak.

Similar reaction (I think) when listening to Evergreen. When it kicked off, I exclaimed "Yes! Tape hiss!". Haven't heard it for such a long time!!

It's a cracker of an album, and absolutely screams to be played on decent equipment. The bass is so rich, and my iPod just does not cut the proverbial mustard.

Agree there, it needs to be played on decent equipment, I tried it in the car once, it didnt sound good, but on the hi-fi at home, well its a different story. Just superb.

Just received a package through the post from Resident Music a Brighton independent music shop, amongst the goods was a lovely leaflet on which they list their top 30 albums of 2011, nice to see that Interplay is at 18, excuse my geekiness but its just behind Tom Waits at 17 and its three ahead of Panda Bear and five ahead of PJ Harvey, seeing a new Foxx album within a great list of contemporary and older artists is pretty cool.

After a flurry of activity a couple of years ago I've had a couple of quiet years on the JF front, and although I was aware of the Maths colloboration I didn't hear any of it till the summer. Summerland and Catwalk are great, and the unofficial videos on YouTube work very well. I'm glad they haven't been taken down.

The remix of WABOF is also excellent.

Interplay, definitely an album of the year for 2011 for many people.

I think there’s more emphasis being placed here on a consciously romantic trajectory from John within one of his 'electro' album’s than he’s done for some time, it’s the most instantly likeable, complete, and brightest work for me that he’s provided since..? Well, is making a point out of this a non-starter, there’s different seasons in the journey of John’s musical output, that’s how it’s always lived and grown and held our interest and we’ve admired it or otherwise in our individual degrees of response. The official critics/reviewers have positively embraced Interplay, but as long-time fan’s we’ve long done without the need of that external confirmation, personally, and I hope many agree that, Interplay is a classic album to equal the intelligent progressive pop of John’s solo period. In that past he steered his art in part through a highly flirtatious enthusiasm towards various influences, artists such as the Beatles and Van Morrison were happily romanced and wed to John’s style, and now today his current blissful empowerment to creativity has been logically and emotionally filtered through producer/performer Benge’s unique studio and sympathetic understanding of the Foxx legacy

There’s a confidence and balance in the choice of tracks, everything just fits as the album climbs gradually upwards from the start where John’s vocals inspired by William Burroughs rasping manner (and so particularly suited to John’s own voice) are forced out over the irresistible beat of Shatterproof. Second track Catwalk with its fashionable blend of 60’s sway gives call to the ‘sound of the crowd’, to ‘gather round now’, ‘put your body in a pose’ and 'pass around now' as Evergreen comes flowing along all warm and breezy. The tango of Watching A Building On Fire has Foxx lyrics of old echoed here along with some old-school electro effects being floated into the mix, the album then rests and reflects for a moment with the unexpectedly affecting and thoughtful Interplay and its subtle hint of David Sylvian-style introversion.

After the interlude of Interplay the album moves forward with Summerland and its emotive mixture of uncertain joy tinged with that typical Foxxian regret making the hair stand up on the back of your neck, there’s also a déjà vu present with shades of John’s Dance With Me being encouraged into here but in a more brighter optimistic vision. If there was any such thing as pop justice in the world then Summerland would’ve been a number-one smash hit single, going onto being a popular staple on pub jukeboxes countrywide for the next quarter of a century until rediscovery and appropriation in 2036 as part of the soundtrack for an obscure indie movie or an over-hyped British romcom, leaving the viewer compelled to seek out the fascinating source/origins of the music.

The Running Man hits up the techno in something akin to a salute to John’s old comrade in arms Louis Gordon, but the softer pace of A Falling Star following on almost makes The Running Man seem out of place. The darkly hued A Falling Star like Summerland is another hair-raising track, wow, two on one album, now that’s real proper Foxx Mah-gic!, and both songs could’ve come straight from John’s ‘beauty period’ of The Garden through to The Golden Section and In Mysterious Ways. Destination with John’s Eno-esque vocals slips in like a sleek mysterious stealth submarine gliding silently into harbour, its a track that just rolls effortlessly forward lifting the album towards a climax, surely it should have been the finale going out on an upward destination… but its an intelligent peak that leads to the 'Endless, Endless' intro and graceful romance of Good Shadow. Its hypnotic floaty vibe is the right choice as closing track, sadly ten minutes too short and finished before we see through the golden clouds, oh well, we can always play the entire album over again, that’s what 2012 is for!