(Polydor)
!! CAUTION !!
Maybe it's just that the great @horse_ebooks letdown has me cranky this week, but there's really something irksome and phony about "performance art" in general, right? Not talking about the kind that has some sense of wit about it but mostly those confused examples of weirdness for its own self-important sake. Witness the juvenile behavior we're currently witnessing of those who now assign what seemed strange and surreal and genuinely offbeat with, uh, Meaning. The most interesting thing about Art of Noise now, divorced from the time when their 12" singles made massive waves in the electronic music marketplace, is that there was an acrimonious divide at the center of the story.
The problem comes because both before and after said divide, the Noise wasn't much good and the Art was worse. Prior to the split, which separated '80s aural architect Trevor Horn and rockcrit Paul Morley from their pointy-DJ buddies, the group as operated in quintet-ish form (though it would always be disputed how much Horn and Morley really did) was a mishmash of dandy sampling and massive beats -- adept, to be sure, but just as easily found elsewhere -- with an oblique passion for pseudo-anonymity that likely had some impact on Daft Punk years later. But the songs are so arid and detached, it seems as if they are not really designed to be enjoyed, or to prompt something so gauche as dancing. The vocal pile-on "Opus 4" is at least playful, even if kind of impossible to listen to. "Beatbox (Diversion One)" and "Moments in Love," both legendary for their impact on a wide world of Fairlight synthpop and club music (especially in the UK), now sound like the terminally insecure twiddlings of very embarrassed sound engineers -- which is pretty much the reality. Like a lot of awful things that have variously been labeled "intelligent dance music," it's dance music for people who hate both the dance part and the music part. Doesn't mean there isn't historical interest, but that's the limit.
Still, everyone is correct that what came after Horn and Morley's departure is far, far worse and a depressing portrait of the losing battle between "Art" and commerce in the Thatchereagan 1980s. Here's a song with everpopular voice of the people Max Headroom, subject of lots of commercials and a dismal sci-fi series. Here's an entirely unsavory recording of Tom Jones schmoozing over a Prince song that deserves no such obscenity, to which AoN add... kind of a beat, I guess. Here's a straightforward cover of Henry Mancini's Peter Gunn theme, with Duane Eddy's twangy guitar boning for some reward money. Here's a fucking song from the fucking '80s remake of Dragnet, which features samples of the dialogue from the film; that is a thing that someone put on an album that you are expected to actually listen to. Taken in full, it's a dreadful career rundown indeed, missing only a Pepsi jingle or two, but one doubts there's much else to deeply and enjoyably investigate. Why not scrape the barrel, then?
So the one genuine score is the kooky, stylish and slightly menacing "Close (To the Edit)," a tricky layering of car sounds, mysterious vocal noises, very Trevor Horn synth hits and highly digitized "funk"... and even it is as much an artifact of its time as such highly commercial techno artifacts as M/A/R/R/S' "Pump Up the Volume" and Herbie Hancock's "Rockit." At best, this compilation is a quaint experience. At worst, it's a chance to hear Tom Jones change "women, not girls" to "women and girls" on an antiseptic, toothpaste-commercial cover of "Kiss" and depressingly realize that neither he nor the group is in on the joke. And the modern equivalent of Art of Noise sit in an installation answering phones with "businessy" phrases, and it's supposed to be... something. Art indeed. This is shit.
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