Nostalgia has turned the 1980s into a feel-good decade of nothing but John Hughes movies, colorful clothing and technological breakthroughs. Yet it was anything but. The era of excess was a bucketful of maladies: Sex killed you. Runaway inflation. Crack cocaine. Richard Marx.<\/p>\n
Today the lasting snapshot of the \u201980s is embodied through its music \u2014 there\u2019s rarely a day when tunes from the decade aren\u2019t heard on the radio, in commercials or on movie soundtracks. For a brief window of time, The Outfield ruled the 1980s, as the British trio brought to America its love of baseball and a tremendous set of hook-laden songs. Its 1985 debut album Play Deep was a smash, and the single \u201cYour Love\u201d continues to be played 25 years later (Even Katy Perry covered it, though she should be sued for her dreadful interpretation).<\/p>\n
Fast forward 26 years and The Outfield has returned with Replay, its 10th studio album and first since 2006, and if I had to use a baseball term to describe the offering (a practice the band loves to do on songs and album titles), it must be strikeout. Or 0-for-12. It\u2019s one thing to sound like the 1980s when it is the 1980s, but quite another when it\u2019s 2011. The band should be forced to hear Perry\u2019s slipshod version of its shining hit over and over again, for it can\u2019t be worse than hearing Replay more than once
Maybe it\u2019s Tony Lewis\u2019 voice, a high-tonal cry that dominates everything below it. Or perhaps the rehash of musical cliches \u2014 the drum break in \u201cAladdin\u2019s Cave\u201d is pure Night Ranger. Who the hell does an homage to Night Ranger? Ultimately it comes down to a matter of editing, as the record lingers like an overly-long hangnail.<\/p>\n
Take \u201cProcess\u201d (please), a perfect song for a movie musical montage, if you like that sort of thing. It opens with an arpeggio guitar arrangement you\u2019ve heard many times before, followed by a drum intro so ordinary and rote, even a 2-year-old knows when it\u2019s coming and how it sounds. The chorus, the bridge is all so typical, it\u2019s paint by numbers in song form.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s not all a loss. One song of the lot has a nice mix of rhythm and purpose as Lewis winds down the screech to a bare minimum. The song\u2019s name: \u201cA Long, Long Time Ago.\u201d How apropos.<\/p>\n
I guess you can\u2019t blame the band too much \u2014 this is what it knows and it\u2019s worked in the past. The longing is apparent, as the lyrics to \u201cDisraeli Years\u201d begin \u201cThose were the days\/ soundtrack to our lives\/ it\u2019s hard to explain\/ the way it made me feel.\u201d Hey, I understand, and I can say way back when it made me feel pretty good. But it\u2019s past time to move along.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Nostalgia has turned the 1980s into a feel-good decade of nothing but John Hughes movies, colorful clothing and technological breakthroughs. Yet it was anything but. The era of excess was a bucketful of maladies: Sex killed you. Runaway inflation. Crack cocaine. Richard Marx. Today the lasting snapshot of the \u201980s is embodied through its music […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1157,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[46],"tags":[245,244],"class_list":["post-1156","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-review","tag-replay","tag-the-outfield"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/abandonedcouches.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1156","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/abandonedcouches.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/abandonedcouches.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abandonedcouches.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abandonedcouches.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1156"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/abandonedcouches.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1156\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1158,"href":"https:\/\/abandonedcouches.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1156\/revisions\/1158"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abandonedcouches.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/1157"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/abandonedcouches.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1156"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abandonedcouches.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1156"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abandonedcouches.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1156"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}