Pete Shelley - Homosapien
#648
1981 Housekeeping
Pete Shelley
Homosapien
Genre: New Wave
3.75 out of 5
Highlights:
Homosapien
Yesterday’s Not Here
Fiddling with new technology, instead of getting a new Buzzcocks album, Pete Shelley put out one of the definitive “New Wave” singles of the era. I’ve never heard the title track as anything but the synthetic earworm it is. I do wonder if it were sped up and attacked with the full band would it have been as pervasive? Maybe it would be “Orgasm Addict Pt. II”.
At the time it was sort of cutting edge. Over time the programmed plasticity of it all grew old and dusty and now, with the explosion of computer driven music, it sounds less quaint. Like it took a trip back to that edge and almost stands tall with the Peter Gabriels and Gary Numans.
There’s a lot of shit going on here. There’s experimentation, as on “I Generate a Feeling”, which is immediately followed by synth-schmaltz of Keats song which has me wondering just how much Marc Almond Pete Shelley was listening to at the time.
But, closing out Side One is the retro-by-way-of-studio-antics “Qu'est-Ce Que C'est Que Ça”. And that reminds me that, while Shelley can’t sing, he’s better than Fad Gadget at Fad’s own game.
By the end you are fairly sure that the time in studio, knob fiddling took precedence over actual songwriting. In the end, the album is more of a curio than a long lasting meal.
