Customer Reviews

Cost of Loving

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

"The Cost of Loving" is classic Style Council and it will draw you back to the early 80's with remarkable ease. I remember watching Friday Night Videos one evening and seeing this incredible band called Style Council during my early teens. They were an interracil British pop group and I had neither seen nor heard anything like them up until that point. Needless to say, I have been a big fan of their's since that fateful day. The ablum is an excellent example of how the British re-invent American R&B and Jazz and turn it into something their very own. Highlights on this album include "The Cost of Loving" "Angel" and "Heavens Above."

Music like this is rarely made anymore. It is truely unique.

Yes I have heard this album many many times and yes I've already reviewed it before under my old name but I felt it was time to do something more in depth with it than I did before. Paul Weller's earlier records for with the Style Council tended towards the relatively diverse and met with mixed results. For the most part the results of this album commercially weren't mixed,and they weren't that great either. Since my original review I've come to the conclusion that has to do with this music by and large is not only uptempo but is based in different varieties of funk. Obviously inspired by the music that Jam & Lewis were putting out during this time period "It Didn't Matter" resulted in,musically one of the finest singles the band had put together thus far with it's strong synth bass line,rhythm guitar and fairly slow dance beat-great in the mid 80's funk context. "Right To Go" is just out and out funk with one of the finest and most obvious basslines of any of their songs and features an Regan/Thatcher-based political rap by the UK's own Dynamic Three. "Heavens Above" ups the tempo a bit and concentrates heavily on the drumming and the rhythm and does so with a well executed use of horns. On "Fairy Tales" and the title song there's a bit more of a balance between the slower beat and the horn oriented sound. There are also three ballads here in "Waiting",which is beautifully structured 80' soul in the same way as "Angel" and "A Woman's Song" are. Perhaps it was the heavy funk and R&B content from someone like Weller,who apparently had other expectations by him from the following he had eariler. Earlier Style Council music by and large focused on 60's R&B and soul-jazz with only the occasional nod to this type of music,however slickly it was produced. However this album thoroughly acknowledged the 70's in the music and because of the closeness to that decade maybe it wasn't given the kind of recognition it truly does deserve. Especially considering the high quality of the songwriting,musicianship and general atmospherics.

While never understood in the US and considered yesterday's news all too quickly at home in the UK, The Style Council is probably the most sincere, and committed project of Paul Weller's amazing career. Interacial by design, musically diverse by intention and politically aware, TSC accomplished much even without the help of labels, radio or video. The Cost of Loving is the sum of all these parts and then some. It Didn't Matter and Angel are incomparable. Waiting and The Cost of Loving are smooth and magical. If you want to hear TSC at their zenith, then this is the album to buy.

My cassette version of this album finally wore out after 18 years so I picked up the CD - this is a great and, for the Style Council, fairly compact album. A lot of their stuff, the imports at least, are crammed full of interesting tracks that go on forever but The Cost of Loving is the exception that I've come across. From the popping bass and rap beats of "Right To Go" with it's shots at Thatcher and Reagan to the great horn section on "Fairy Tales" to the opening piano on "The Cost of Loving", this is an album of very catchy songs. It was so frustrating to not find the Style Council at my local record shop when I was a kid, thank goodness I was able to replace this album on CD.

Oh how swiftly even Council fans dismiss this album and
considering todays so-called "soul" how wrong they seem.The
opening track "It Didn't Matter" is one of the best album openers
I've heard-it shoulda been on the American Top 10 hit list in 87!
"Right To Go" is a strident pro-voting rap with a great beat while "Heavens Above' is a fantastic James Brown-like funk number.The tital track is a very poignant piece of neo soul while
the bands cover of the oldie "Angel" dwarfs the orginal in terms
of feeling and passion and it's filled out by several other like
numbers.
The trouble with the Style Council is they never
adapted any formula out of these-there best songs-on there next
album,continuing to create ambitious music that unfortunately
went over even their most open minded listers heads.This is the
only time the band really found a dinstinct focus and stuck with
it.It needs serious re-evaluation.