Fingerprintz - Beat Noir
#49
1981 Housekeeping
Fingerprintz
Beat Noir
Genre: Very different from the last one
3.25 out of 5
Highlights:
The Beat Escape
Touch Sense
Remember how immensely great Fingerprintz’s 1980 Power Pop/New Wave gem was? This is not that. In fact, the opening track, “The Beat Escape” reminds me more of Queen’s “Fun It” from Jazz. All that’s missing is the gym whistles.
I really don’t know what the Fingerprintz dudes were thinking. This record hews closer to disco and reggae than what they were about before. But, then again, I tend to look at everything through a lens of commercialism. Since my experience is in advertising I often think about the marketing of stuff and how it would be perceived by the consumers. It’s a failing of mine. Probably why I love doing commercials and find long form theater boring and somewhat exhausting.
Who wants to be around the same people for 6 weeks of rehearsals, let alone on the stage, saying the same damned thing every night, with them? I mean, those people are…gag…actors. So, that’s how I see things.
But not how I value music. Having been in a band I always looked at it as the most satisfying form of theater. After all, you don’t have to slog through 2 hours before you see how successful you were, in toto. And, unlike stand-up where each and every sentence requires a response to gauge how you are doing, being in a rock band you get 3 minutes and, if they don’t like it…next song, baby!
So, I have to remember these things when I hear a curio like Beat Noir. Because this sounds like they made music for THEM not the anyone to buy, although had I, I bet I would have liked it. If only to have been the only person to own it.
Or I might have never gotten past song 3. And that would have been fine as the rest of the record sounds like…Duran Duran covering…Talking Heads…covering…B-52s. (Looking at you, “Going Going Gone”)
Weird stuff.
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