Band Apart

Album review

Short-lived French/American duo Band Apart existed in a nebulous territory for their brief but productive run in the early '80s. Happening in tandem with post-punk darkness, no wave abrasiveness, and synth pop's frigid approach to melody, Band Apart was all of these things and something more than them at the same time. With just a scratchy self-titled EP in 1981 and a more refined album, Marseille, in 1983, the group vanished without making much impact but still lingered as a cult favorite. This reissue collects all four songs from the group's EP and select cuts from their LP, offering a look at their wide-ranging styles, some of which transcended the trends of the era to predict sounds that were yet to develop. The group was largely the work of New York-based poet, lyricist, singer, and musician Jayne Bliss and French multi-instrumentalist Medak Mader. Early songs tend to be sharper and angsty, be it the stumbling synth pulse and metallic noisiness of "Strainer" or the muted moodiness of "Jaguar." Bliss' whispery vocals are both sinister and distant here, buried in the mix under layers of alien sounds trying to pass for pop. This mysterious veil lifts somewhat on blissful-but-caustic songs like "Le Mont Des Olives" or the post-Eno melodicism of "Eve Ryonne." The sound is raw, but these songs' hypnotic layers of melody would resurface in different forms years later, the washes of guitar predicting shoegaze texture and the underwater production planting a seed for generations of lo-fi and dream pop artists yet to come. Songs from Marseille are more geared toward the dance floor but are as strange as the rest of the collection. Wobbly bass and nervous auxiliary percussion struggle to convey a steady rhythm on "Ham Sandwich," and plodding, disoriented songs like the chorus-drenched "Lover" aim for pop immediacy but end up somewhere demented. The bright and thoughtful "O My Beautiful Song" finds balance for all of Band Apart's ill-fitting impulses. Sounding like a meeting of Cocteau Twins' icy atmospheres and Cleaners from Venus' homespun song worlds, the tune is not without its weirdness, but it's the most captivating and human sounding of the band's insular creations. Both ahead of their time and somehow outside of it as well, Band Apart's slight and curious discography is as engaging as many of their peers who made far bigger waves.

© Fred Thomas /TiVo