Clock Dva
Advantage

THE REVIEW

Clock Dva were a strange band in the '80s; not so much for their sounds, which were always somewhat misaligned within the Industrial scene, but for the fact that just when they seemed about to break up, they would release a masterpiece (the same thing would happen during the 1990 reunion, a year in which they would present "Buried Dreams", the hardest and most experimental album of their career, ten years after their debut).
In 1983, following the death of bassist Turner and temporary dispersals into parallel projects, frontman Adi Newton decided to surround himself with a group of new collaborators (including guitarist John Valentine Carruthers and producer/keyboardist Hugh Jones) and effectively reshape the band's sound.
The monolithic Industrial atmospheres of the previous Thirst album disappeared in favor of more accessible music, still nocturnal and urban but decidedly more akin to the British post-punk scene.
Significant novelties in the sound of "Advantage" include an unprecedented taste for more open (at times almost epic) vocals and the presence of more aggressive horn arrangements while drums and drum machines create almost dance-like rhythms against the backdrop of Carruthers' multifaceted guitar distortions.
A sound that constantly enriches itself with progressively different colors, supported by writing capable of capturing multiple nuances, from the most heart-wrenching moments to the more dissonant ones, between solitary pain and ecstatic exaltation.

Instead of empty basements and abandoned factories preyed upon by mutants, the setting this time seems to be the highly romantic one of a large and rainy metropolis. Here, a film noir protagonist roams about in the most classic and dusty of trench coats; the ghosts of detectives with lost souls continuously pass by with their trail of impossible loves, blind dates, and tears lost in the rain.
The sense of threat grows from track to track (or rather, from tale to tale) as Newton's cavernous voice guides us towards hotel rooms that have witnessed indecipherable misdeeds, following the trail of coded messages delivered by fatal blondes while open elevators wait to take us towards some kind of 'eternity'...

To be listened to in a car speeding along some deserted avenue with the wind in your hair, while you breathe in the 'scent of night and wet asphalt' of the Paris within you.

Ah yes, recommended for those who say the '80s were all shit.