Customer Reviews

Dress for Excess

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3 star:		(1)
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1 star:		(1)

 

 

Some of the material in Dress For Excess are songs from Flaunt It lightly coated in different flavours of something more pop-palatable, but without sacrificing or muting Neal X's blaring lead guitar, techno beat, or the randomly-inserted vocal samples. It's just as weird and partying as Flaunt It.

In "Albinoni vs Star Wars", the famous mournful melody by Albinoni sounds out on electronic synthesizers, with a cacophony of "what's going on here?" followed by "it's beautiful!" Probably referring to mushroom clouds. Then comes the familiar Sputnik sound and Neal X's blaring punk guitars. This is a song of post-nuclear apocalypse, of radiation ("feel the heat") that has made mankind sterile: "I'm shooting blanks."

The futuristic "Boom Boom Satellite" is more along Depeche Mode or Xymox, except with more body and personality, with some females singing "Sha la la laa laalaa!"

"Hey Jayne Mansfield Superstar!" is the first song sounding anything remotely like material from Flaunt It. It's a funny, irreverent tribute to the blonde turbo-bodied sex goddess of the 1950's and 1960's whose "private life was a publicist's dream." The vocal imitations of her are from her movie Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?; the repeated "She's got it" is a nod to Little Richard's song "She's Got It" from Girl Can't Help It. My favourite song here. Love that pink guitar and that swift electronic drum solo!

"Supercrook Blues" continues the usual Sputnik party mode and owes nods to Carl Perkins "dancing in my blue suede shoes," and Little Richard: "Awopbopaloobop". The mock news item samples and some hot guitar work boost this song.

"Rio Rocks!" about the decadent night life of Rio de Janeiro, ratchets the rhythm up a notch, with a host of people singing "Day-O!" a la Harry Belafonte. Overall message: "Some like it hot, some like it cool, like it or not, this is what you got, space age party that's never gonna stop. Another superlative number.

"Success" was produced by Stock-Aitken-Waterman (Kylie Minogue, Rick Astley) and some might accuse the Sigues of selling out. Yes, the dance rhythm is undeniably S-A-W, but it might as well be Sputnik-Aitken-Waterman. Another song of decadence, champagne, Saville Row suits, on the beach with a Rolls Royce, girls, just vulgarly flaunting luxury. A yuppy's wet dream come true!

"Dance Dance Dance" is a slow dance number with a quick-paced synth backbeat. "Orgasm" is the sniggeringly playful naughty song, complete with various people saying or yelling "Oh my god!" and a naughty bass beat. "M*A*D (Mutual Assured Destruction)" is the anti-nuclear song, and it boogies to a mad beat despite the subject matter. The one imitated sample saying "God forbid this might lead to nuclear war" is taken from the Bond movie, The Living Daylights and "Let's play thermonuclear attack" is from Wargames. Typical vocal imitations have that 80's Cold War anti-Soviet rhetoric: "They're a bunch of commies!", "God bless America", and even Ollie North: "I'll take you on any day, sucker." If a video was to be made of this song, include clips from Dr. Strangelove, Fail Safe, and Wargames. Best lyric: "You've never ever lost by being too strong and you're never too strong when you got the bomb."

The quiet and acoustic guitar, with whooshing special effects "Is This The Future" ends the album and is a big contrast after all the excitement. Hey, after one had gone MAD, maybe this simplistic sound is all the music one will ever have.

When SSS leader TJ BoSSS proclaimed that he wanted to have a band that combined the very best elements of Suicide, Eddie Cochran, Elvis, Donna Summer, etc, He hit the nail on the head with SIGUE SIGUE SPUTNIK! Dress For Excess, their second album, blazes a path of turbocharged relentless rhythms, overdubbed staccato beat vocals with cut and paste guitar licks that confront tired, cliched, do it by the numbers rock and roll and turns it on its head! To fully appreciate SSS you have to bring to the table a sense of humor, a sense of vision and having a broad musical knowledge base adds to the overall excitement. I wholeheartedly recommended this cd to music fans who understand the wildly frenetic history of rock and roll and who are not afraid to embrace a group who pushed the HELL out of that 'Old School' envelope and charted a musical course, complete with colorful homage, to its extreme limits!!!

the Caroline label did such a bang up job on some of the Human League reissues, so it's a HUGE disappointment to see this no frills reissue of Sigue Sigue Sputnik. HOW could they NOT include the 12" version of the song Success, the marriage of sigue sigue with the SAW production team behind all the Dead or Alive hits? Plus there was the great B-side Frankenstein Cha Cha to that 12" single that should have been included as well. What a missed opportunity.

This is going to be a short review because the last reviewer summed up the album very nicely.

This album is definitely better and more polished than "Flaunt It." Not that there was anything wrong with their debut, other than about 5 songs on there sounded like watered down versions of "Love Missile F1-11." However, that album had one song which was stronger than any song on "Dress For Excess" - "Massive Retaliation." With the borrowed melody of Beethoven's "Fifth Symphony", stabbing bass and heavy head-bobbing beats, this is the song you would want to listen to loudly while driving slowly down the street.

My favorites on "Dress..." are "Albinoni Vs. Star Wars" (a complex song which starts off slowly and dramatically, then immediately starts rockin' with authority), "Orgasm" (something tells me that the samples of people screaming "Oh My God!!!" throughout the song were taken out of context), "Boom Boom Satellite" and "Danceorama." And if you can find it, the remix of "Success" is nice, but the single version is good as well.

I didn't really have much else to add; however, I wanted to provide one minor correction. The sample in the song "M.A.D." which says, "I'll take you on any day, sucker!" was NOT Ollie North. Being the 80s fan that I am, I recognized that line as being spoken by John Cusack from the movie "Better Off Dead", where the blond guy who stole his girlfriend challenged him to a downhill ski race, and that's when John's character accepted the challenge by delivering that line.

This album may sound a bit dated with the nuclear war references (big concern in the 80s), but it's still a great album which I highly recommend.

Now this is bad. Their debut album 'Flaunt It' is charming, in a way, because of the novelty, although it's still not very good. 'Dress for Excess', on the other hand, doesn't have novelty going for it, and some of the willfully-shambolic bravado of the first album has transformed into almost-conventional INXS-esque rock'n'roll, but not nearly as good. 'Success' is essentially the only listenable track. It's produced by Stock, Aitken and Waterman, and is similar to lots of other SAW hits - loud bass, bits of contemporary house, all wrapped up in shiney pop gloss, utterly hollow. It's a shame the whole album wasn't like it. 'Hey Jayne Mansfield Superstar!' sounds exactly like all the songs on 'Flaunt It' (they have the same music but with different words), whilst the rest of the album is dreadful. 'Rio Rocks!', for example, is a twisted brainwrong version of 'La Bamba', and tells us that the band think that Rio, like, rocks! We know this because the chorus tells us over and over again. It sounds like a band who have lost all hope and are just going through the motions.