Customer Reviews

Let's Submerge: The Anthology

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

 

 

Poly Styrene sings about tube stations, package plastic and anti-septic mouth-wash. S & M, rat infestations and suicide.
Her backing group play loud raucous pop with dashes of blazing saxophone.
It's a special combination.

Poly Styrene is a genuine one-off; a loner, a misfit. Her songs describe in brilliantly observed and acerbically realised fashion, what it's like to be the perpetual underdog, the dissolute, the eternal victim.
Like so many others of her time.
The difference - Poly Styrene never once stoops to the level of ghastly icon's like Jimmy Pursey; dismally urging 'unity' and 'rebellion'
(splutter!) among the 'working classes' and the exploited. She's got mounds more dignity and class.
Her creative levels are higher than a hundred ultra-conservative Oi! groups and two hundred crypto-capitalist Crass's.

X-Ray Spex belong with the Pistols, the Clash and Siouxsie. I suppose you'd call that 'real punk' (a tiny canon), and musically, they live comfortably with any of their better known 1977 contemporaries.

Sure she's angry, and we're certainly in the realm of the caveman (or should that be 'cavewoman'?) music that has pre-occupied your nerveless, heroic reviewer lately, but Poly Styrene is a tad more refined, just a touch more noble. You could say she's evolved into something more akin to the Stone-Age than the barbarous and uncouth 'rock-man' of pre-'new wave'.

She's tiny, sings hoarsely and nervously and is the worst dancer the worlds ever seen, but she's got iron in her blood and acid in her spit. If I were to print you some Styrene words, you would think she's at least as good as Strummer or Lydon, and better than the rest. She's razor-sharp and lively.

Surprisingly, the live cuts on 'Anthology'(and that's NOT a Styrene title) are ok, if over-abundant, and unsurprisingly, certain session versions of various tracks are better than the originals, but the real stuff, the quality items are the early singles, and 'Germ-Free Adolescents' - X-Ray Spex violent debut album. Anything and everything is included here.

Slightly dangerous rock music (only slightly), with eye-opening lyrics sure to impress, and melodic twists and turns throughout the often loud, but never boorish fugues.
"I'm a cliché, I'm a cliché..." Poly Styrene claims at one stage, but she's fooling no-one.
That's one accusation you could NEVER point at her.

Classic Punk at its Best! Been listening to X Ray Spex for 25 years. THese songs never get old. GREAT ALBUM

This Cd is great. I only heard I am cliche before i bought it but after I heard the rest of the cd I couldn't stop listening to it. Germ Free Adolescents is one of my new all time favorite songs ever.

If you're going to build a rock collection that means anything you need to include this CD.

I could write more but that might take time away from you listening to it or ordering it faster.

Rest in Peace, sweetheart. While this album is way too consumer oriented, it does NOTHING to diminish what you did!

The 52 cuts on this two-CD set comprise perhaps 15 or 20 different songs; the total comes from inclusion of demos (or varying audio quality, live performances (on John Peel and at The Roxy) and backing tracks. For a band that, in its time and place, was not just an early progenitor of punk but, more importantly, a critical initiator of the evolutionary process that moved women in music from girl groups to riot girlzzz and beyond, the songs are now surprisingly mainstream-sounding melodically. It's a bit of a disorienting effect: these superbly cutting and incendiary lyrics - projected by a voice that seems to be coming from Johnny Rotten's kid sister - being propelled by rhythms that are, while admittedly loud and accelerated, conventional in their bases. The music is good, but it's not ground-breaking like that of the Pistols or The Clash. In fact, there are times that Logic's sax playing recalls Mott the Hoople. And, as you listen to 'My Mind Is a Plastic Bag,' are you not reminded of beat poety against a free-from jazz backdrop?

Furthermore, I feel the impact of the songs themselves is diminished by the inclusion of what can be considered repetitive and extraneous material; this is particularly the case with the backing track cuts. For me, adding these to an anthology reeks of mercenary mercantilism on the record company's part. I hope the band had little or no say in the development and design of this bloated compendium.

There are, however, some magnificent nuggets amidst my perceptions of dross. Go to the second disc and listen - with the volume up high enough to overload your system and hurt your ears - the set of songs from The Roxy. Listen to the intended and unintended chaos from a band sounding like they haven't been together very long. Listen to the competition between Poly Styrene's voice and Laura Logic's sax. Finally, listen to Poly Styrene's voice crack and almost collapse on the reprise of 'Oh Bondage! Up Yours!' It's here that one sees at last just what made Xray Spex; a do-it-yourself approach of derision and rejection. Go there and forget the rest.