Album: Box Frenzy
Artist: Pop Will Eat Itself
Label: Chapter 22 Records
Year: 1987
Rating: 3/5
Summary: Silly yet catchy eighties music.
After spending a few years writing catchy but short songs featuring
the standard electric guitar and acoustic drum setup of rock'n'roll,
Pop Will Eat Itself swapped their drum kit for a drum machine and
completely changed their style in time for their debut album, the
appropriately named Box Frenzy.
The album's sound is very late eighties, with a digital drum machine
and the TR-808 creating the bass heavy rhythms and a sampler providing
snippets of various eighties pop songs, while the vocals are more
often rapped than sung.
The group clearly didn't take themselves too seriously, which is
reflected in this fun, silly album. Even when a lyric borders on
being slightly offensive, I can't help but let the band off on the
grounds that the lyrics are so tongue-in-cheek that they'll make all
but the most jaded listener laugh.
Compared to their next album, This Is the Day... This Is the Hour... This Is This!, Box Frenzy sounds simple
and amateur, but it's so charming and catchy that you'll at least
end up humming a few of its tunes.
Most of the tracks are love songs, albeit love songs written by
juvenile men who sound afraid of commitment. While they didn't
exactly win any awards, the mixture of humourous lyrics, regular pop
structures and genuinely catchy tunes earns this album a place on
my shelf. Anyone who writes a rap duet with the lines "She likes
to get down, she likes to get dirty, we like to fool around like
Pinky and Perky" is all right in my book.