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04 April 2004
David J, Estranged (Heyday)
It's not hard for David J, charter member of Bauhaus, Tones on Tail, and Love and Rockets, to come across as modest and subtle (some would say slight) on his solo albums, which have appeared every few years since 1983. One of the breed of vaguely eccentric English songwriters which includes Julian Cope, the Jazz Butcher, and Robyn Hitchcock, J has never in those 20 years developed a distinctive style that differentiates him from any of them, and his reedy, languid singing voice remains his most notable feature. Like prior albums, Estranged is loaded with too many songs with too few viable melodies, so that its hard to marshal the interested attention required to extract anything meaningful from his frequently oblique, semi-surreal lyrics. Ballads such as "In the Great Blue Whenever" and "If Anything Should Ever Happen to You" show the most promise, but these tend to drag on as well, diffusing rather than concentrating the emotion they might have evoked. Little has changed in J's musical approach since the '80s -- he prefers a cleanly produced sound with thin, tinny acoustic guitars back by washes of sustained chords held by a keyboard or a elaborately treated electric guitar -- giving this record a time capsule flavor, except it reflects a compelling, popular sound of no particular era, and it's unlikely to inspire the desire to return to this time that never was.
— Rob Horning
.: posted by Editor 9:56 AM
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