As people keep mentioning the bass on this, time for a rant about one of the few things I dislike about this album. When it first came out, I liked pretty much everything about it but over the years as I’ve heard more and more music I have revised my view of some of the bass on here, where I have multifold issues.
ABCs goal was to fuse soul and new wave and in doing that have a significant element of funk to what they were doing. I think it's trying to be funky in the traditional sense, in the spirit of Larry Graham and probably more so Bernard Edwards. But it’s not funky like that, in a number of places it’s too mechanical and technical for technicality's sake which then set against the very clear soul/philly sound influences flying around the rest of the album make it sound like an archetypal 80's pastiche of being funky . There's loads of isolated popping without any slap because, well who knows why, because presumably they thought it was good? This is further exacerbated by the fact the strings have a real warmth to them that makes the bass jar even more at times. I’m pretty sure all the bass is real and though it's good playing especially Brad Lang who Horn brought in as a session musician, it’s misplaced and as trademark 80s as it is, for me it sometimes doesn’t sit in the mix right for what it was supposed to achieve; there are multiple occasions where it’s just too discrete and divorced from the rest of the sound. This is not always the case, at times when there’s a less is more approach, it works really well for example in All of My Heart where Lang's playing is restrained and works beautifully. But if you'll pardon the pun, there's times where Trevor Horn just needs a slap.
On the subject of which
[START SIDE RANT/ Given he was a kid who grew up learning double bass from his Dad, Trevor Horn's approach to basslines far too often does does my head in. The most egregious example is probably Frankie Goes to Hollywood. I could never understand as a youngster quite why I hated their sound as much as did, however I later learnt how he was creating the bass lines and that was, musically speaking, probably a good 75% of why I couldn't abide them. Just because you can do something with a piece of kit doesn’t mean you should and his technique for lobbing real bass into a Synclavier and programming it all from there, was very clever, really technically demanding and sounded unearthly.
Unearthly but not in a good way.
Don’t get me wrong I love synthesised bass but what Horn did to get some of his sounds was create a foul chimera of the real and the synthesised that like a mythic creature that fits neither one world or the other is doomed to wander in a limbo of sonic shiteness. Who TF am I to lecture Trevor Horn, but that doesn’t alter the fact it gets right on my tits. One of the reasons I love Pino Palladino from that era is even though he was Mr fretless bass he never sounded pastiche, generally speaking no titting about either in performance or production just playing the bloody thing. Whereas it seemed that most bass players Trevor Horn got his hands on he either dismissed as crap and replaced them with someone or something else or for the ones he thought were good encouraged them to play completely over the top with no real sense of the groove and then chucked additional production at it to add insult to injury. Someone should have said to him, when it comes to rhythm sections there is such a thing as being too clever mate.
/END SIDE RANT]
