The Buzzcocks are likely the consummate New Wave singles band. Last year's Singles Going Steady, a compilation of sixteen sweet-and-sour pop vignettes that made up this English group's official American debut, boasted as many pithy hooks and punchy backbeats as Elton John managed in a decade – and the Buzzcocks whipped theirs out in a little over eighteen months.
These guys have a problem, though. The Buzzcocks have yet to cut an album that hits with as much musical wallop as even their most offhand singles. God knows, it isn't for want of trying. A Different Kind of Tension, technically the band's fourth LP, is bursting with many of the same laudable features that
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graced the
Singles Going Steady set: bold and big-bottomed rhythms, combustible buzz-blur guitars and leader Pete Shelley's rushed, iambic vocals. But over the course of an entire album, the Buzzcocks invariably convert these virtues into vices, resulting in a catchall of reworked riffs and static, similar tempos.
That said, A Different Kind of Tension is the Buzzcocks' most formidable record yet. Though the group still tends to spout a ceaseless stream of arty non sequiturs–e.g., "When it comes to playing games/Of who are we/We've never found out why though/That our own raison d'être/We can't see" – chief songwriter Shelley has finally arrived at something approaching a hard-bitten and reasonable world view. Largely, it's a wry, ironic blend of pessimism, amorousness and alienation that fuels such lines as: "Though I've got this special feeling/I'd be wrong to call it love/For the word entails a few things/That I would be well rid of." Later, in "Money," he's even more resigned: "You are a stranger/But I'm even stranger/What can I do/Life's getting stranger."
But Shelley's strongest statement comes in "I Believe." Founded on a fierce, saw-toothed rhythm, the song is a long litany of simple credos, covering everything from the Workers' Revolution to the Immaculate Conception, only to be intercut with the singer's poignant, staccato cry: "There is no love in this world anymore." Pete Shelley might be saying that, without love as a guiding ethic, most beliefs mean little. But given his brave-new-world bias, he probably means just what he sings: there is no love in this world anymore. So what we choose to exalt in its place had better be something more than splayed beliefs. Not bad stuff for a singles band. (RS 318)
MIKAL GILMORE
The Buzzcocks keep the blistering punk energy of their debut EP alive and match it with the soaring magic of their early singles on this breathtaking debut. The brilliant punk-pop of "I Don't Mind" becomes something of a blueprint for the band -- and rock 'n 'roll's very future. On an album this special, a key tune like "Fiction Romance" didn't even become a single.
