Lightning Seeds
Dizzy Heights
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Lightning Seeds
Dizzy Heights
Epic, 1997, 2000
RiYL: Pet Shop Boys, New Order, Electronic |
Count the Lightning Seeds amongst this group, and don't plan on booting them out anytime soon. That is, if Dizzy Heights is the type of album that chief Seed Ian Broudie will continue to release. True, Heights is Broudie's fourth album of catchy pop/electronica nuggets and pleasant enough to warrant more than just a casual listen. But it also treads no sonic turf that hasn't already been trampled on by Pet Shop Boys, New Order or the Lightning Seeds themselves.
Heights gets off to a good start with "Imaginary Friends," a sarcastic yarn about those who "shake off the past with a change of address." Here, we get a warbled, jangly melody that would make Electronic proud.
"You Bet Your Life" marries the bounce of Jellyfish with the pop sensibility of Thirteen-era Teenage Fanclub, and "Waiting For Today To Happen," co-written with Manic Street Preachers' Nicky Wire, is definitely single material. But in a flash, Heights is sucked into a netherworld of redundant riffs ("Wishaway") and predictable song structures ("Touch And Go").
Most of the tunes on Heights are hopelessly retro to the point of frustration (namely "What If.."), a fact which can be directly pinned on the use of cornball synth programming. The keys ruin only the intro of "Like You Do" but completely vanquish the dreadful, pseudo-dance number "Sugar Coated Iceberg."
Even when Broudie gets creative, he can't seem to avoid stepping on toes. "You Showed Me" includes a sampled organ, hip-hop drums and pitch-bending synths that, taken together, sound like a Korg keyboard on "demo." And while "Fingers And Thumbs" wails more aggressively than anything else on the record, it still sounds like a reach. Ho-hum couplets like "instead of making me glad/it's driving me mad" don't help the cause.
Heights avoids complete disaster with "Ready Or Not," a hit U.K. single in 1996. Tribal rumblings precede a guitar melody which Broudie follows almost exactly with his vocals.
But at this late date, it takes more than a drum machine and keyboard to stand out from the pack, and despite a couple of memorable numbers, Dizzy Heights crumbles under the weight of its own un-originality.
JONATHAN COHEN | Jonathan Cohen co-created Nude As The News with his Indiana University mates Troy Carpenter and Ben French. When not traversing the globe for business and pleasure, he holds down the fort as a senior editor for Billboard in New York. Stop him and he just may ask, "what for lunch?"