Any Trouble - Wheels in Motion
#454
August 1981 LISTENING POST DISCOVERY
Any Trouble
Wheels in Motion
Genre: Power Pop Genius
4.75 out of 5
Highlights:
Trouble With Love
Open Fire
As Lovers Do
Walking In Chains
Dimming of the Day. (FTR: This is all of Side One)
Another Heartache
Eastern Promise
Ever have one of those mornings when you are the only one up and you make your coffee and fire up the next album in the queue and for no reason your brain flashes on another band and you aren’t sure if the simile is correct but you go with it anyway cuz you’re a couple songs in and you’ve started this review already and you are loathe to rewrite anything and that band is one that you’ve heard a couple times but mostly remember because they were guests on The Colbert Report and you always meant to investigate The Apples in Stereo but you were always listening to something else or something came up and you just plum forgot?
Okay, so that happened.
But, why?
Because there’s little for me to expound on except, dammit, Any Trouble is really good. Their first album was a revelation and this one, while a little overproduced and kleeeeeeen, is extraordinary. It’s jangly and new wavy and power poppy and should have been all over college radio in 1981.
Was it?
After I got through Side One and had highlighted every track I thought, based on the opening, that “To Be A King” might be the first sagging song and then the crazy, constantly modulating pre-chorus happened and burst into the chorus and I realized that Clive Gregson should be pedestalized along with Graham Parker and Elvis Costello and Chris Difford and all of his contemporaries and it’s a crime that he isn’t.
The only track I didn’t highlight was “Power Cut” and I could easily have. Maybe I should have. They even know to put the most challenging and pretentious song where it belongs: At the end.
https://music.apple.com/us/album/wheels-in-motion/1364619683
