TIM DE LISLE
Altered Images
Mascara Streakz Out Friday
★★★★★ Ezra Furman
All Of Us Flames Out Friday
★★★★★
Altered Images are back after a break between albums that lasted 39 years and two months. That is not a record – Abba held out for nine months longer before last year’s reunion, and they don’t even make the top 20 on the Wikipedia page devoted to this vital subject.
Still, it’s quite a sabbatical, especially for a band whose previous three studio albums spanned only two years, 1981 to 1983. When the last of those LPs landed, Singer and actress Clare Grogan (above) was 21. Now – you may want to sit down before you read the next two words – she’s 60.
Comebacks are all in the timing, and Altered Images have got it right in two ways. Their name could hardly be more contemporary, with millions of us altering images every day on our phones; and their era is being revived. This year’s hottest new album, Harry’s House by Harry Styles, is drenched in the 1980s. When Altered Images supported The Human League last December, they went down a storm.
In one way, though, they’ve got their timing wrong. Breezy dance-pop no longer sells if it’s made by older people. Even Madonna hasn’t had a Top 20 single for more than ten years.
While Mascara Streakz will no doubt make the Top 20 albums, it may not stay there long.
But you have to admire them for trying, and for sticking to their guns – frisky rhythms, choppy guitars, sassy lyrics and breathy vocals. Grogan hasn’t lost her girlish charm or the glint of mischief in her voice.
Her co-writers include Stephen Lironi, her longtime bandmate (reader, she married him); Bernard Butler, the former Suede guitarist now collecting rave reviews with Jessie Buckley; Bobby Bluebell of The Bluebells, and Johnny McElhone, who was in Altered Images before joining Texas. They’re all Scottish apart from Butler, Grogan’s neighbour in Crouch End, London, and probably an honorary Scot. Between them they’ve made a very likeable album. It’s well worth a listen, but my advice would be to dip into it online (try Glitter Ball or Lost Of Love) and go to Altered Images’ headline tour next month. To see Grogan on stage, having the time of her life, is to feel that age is no match for joie de vivre.
Ezra Furman (left) is on a roll. After supplying much of the soundtrack for the Netflix hit Sex Education, she has gone from a well-kept secret to a cult figure. At 35, she could yet become a star.
All Of Us Flames, Furman’s ninth album, sparkles like her sixth, the masterly Perpetual Motion People. As a trans woman, she represents the outsiders – always a crucial constituency in the parliament of pop, and never more so than now.
If songwriting was just about lyrics, Furman would already be a legend. Her observations are succinct, original and fearless. ‘The human mind is a pile of s**t,’ one song begins, ‘new life takes root in it.’ Another is called I Saw The Truth Undressing.
The melodies are not so distinctive, with some blatant debts to Lou Reed and Talking Heads, but they’re deliciously direct. And let’s face it: many great albums have got away with words that were outshone by the music. There’s room for the odd one that goes the other way.