Thompson Twins
Big Trash

The colorful and quirky cover of this late-eighties work introduces yet another step for the Twins towards the dominance of violent, dance-oriented percussion, at the expense of the development and incisiveness of melodic lines.

This is, after all, what would happen to the entire club scene in the nineties with the rise of dub, techno, drum&bass, etc., with their obsessive, deafening rhythms that overpower without any suitable, airy melodic spans leading to the feeling of real songs. “Big Trash” is therefore a fitting title, perfectly aligned with what TT sought: a big rhythmic mess.

Among the eleven tracks offered, I find “Bombers in the Sky” quite enjoyable because it’s essentially dance rock, full as it is with guitars, including solos. “Daddy” is also nice at the start, with its flaunted childish choir, as is the closing “Wild,” rounded out by a lovely pitch shifter effect on the vocals and perfect piano breaks that add dynamics to the lush bed of flanger-soaked electric guitar.

Of course, that archetypal eighties electronic snare, with its cut-off reverb, keeps pounding away mercilessly at full speed from start to finish… So much so that the various tracks could actually be mixed into each other without causing any disruption to the swaying, arm waving, and hip rolling of devoted club-goers.

I certainly miss this poppy dance music from the Twins; it's enough to compare it to the grooves on offer today, awful both in their rhythms and in their (anti-)melodies drowned in autotune. Melodies? They’re nothing more than litanies and refrains, anti-musical mumblings, random chatter over the usual dull, percussive pumping—completely lacking in swing and so muddled that you strongly feel dragged backward rather than pushed forward, as any genuinely driving rhythm should do.

Records like this, though admittedly mediocre, are musical nectar compared to today’s pop dance garbage. And to think that back in their day, this synth pop—and before it, disco music—basically got on my nerves, with a few exceptions, the blessed Thompson Twins among them.