Smokes Now Open Attraction None

 

So the honeymoon has ended.

I am allowed to walk outside without an attendant watching me for imminent collapse. It rained but I still took my secret cigarettes with me and had a blessed infusion of vapours. They kill me. They nearly did. But I have not smoked for 6 months, so I am becoming whole as the real me, not the dying me.

The real me does not only review music he can be kind about. I appreciate that limiting myself to that limits my output, and I know from my days writing fanzines to sell at gigs that everyone, and bizarrely none more than the bands, love a bad review far more than the kind ones. I did once write a terrible 500 word piece for a British music paper called Sounds in which I utterly loathed a Love and Rockets single. I was paid for my work and I won plaudits from my peers. It wasn't as good as being in a band but it was better than being on the outside. Then I was in a club in London with the man who now calls himself Ted Pepper, although in those days his alias was Andre Stalin. We met David J, the ultra talented bass-player from Love and Rockets and engaged in conversation. Well Andre led the way with a blazing assault of stupidity but to seize the initiative I blurted out that it was I who had reviewed their single. J looked at me with recognition. A slight smirk but then cold dead eyes. There was a definite twitch. Then he turned and left and his associate Glenn confided that their crew had photocopied my words and pasted them to the window of their tourbus.

So anyway, that was a long way around to tell you that my policy of "Mr Nice" is over and I will endeavour to write more and not reserve myself for only the gems I find in the flow.

Here is the next song. It is called No Attraction by No Smokes. They have given me my final sentence right there, in the title. A gift. I thank them for that. They describe themselves as Alt-Art Pop with an 80s vibe (no, I did not make that up). I could stop there. No, I must continue.

I lived through the 80s. It was good, except for one thing. Except for the conveyor belt of pseudo-alternative, corporate artists with big pay checks, no artistic vision and enough promotion to invade the airwaves, and enough cheekbones to masquerade briefly as serious independent artists.

I hated them. I called them scum and I despised them.

No Smokes, who already had me annoyed with their name in my enforced abstinence from cigarettes have that production down to perfection,. The drum sound, the awkward try-too-hard synthesiser and the androidinal vocals. I have very little to say about the song other than it sounds exactly like you would imagine a band trying to sound like a bad band from the 1980s would sound like.

How did it make me feel?

Well it left No Attraction.