Music Go Music have the simple syrup of pop extravagance running through their veins. These arena-sized songs are composed with such savage efficiency that you find yourself humming along before two bars have gone by. They are as assured and crafted as ABBA and ELO’s best songs of ‘76, yet Music Go Music sounds fresh. They’ve exploded the formulas from the inside out, sounding like a hundred others and no one else. “Light of Love” is a true celebration of pop music’s potential - laying a thin sheen of magic over the world around it, and making the tedious bits of the human experience a little less so.
Thirty years ago these songs would have been recorded by coke-fueled session musicians and millionaire producers in Nassau or Stockholm for $5000 a day. They would have been performed in huge arenas and played in every mall as the soundtrack to the prom queen’s shopping spree. It was music made by the few for the very, very many. Thirty years on, it could only be re-imagined by a band whose members came of age playing music in the tradition of those that ended up killing it off: the punkers. Now that punk’s branches sag heavy with the crass kudzu of of x-treme ubiquity (Hot Topic, wallet chains, totally-in-your-face Mountain Dew commercials), its old nemesis has become the new underdog. This time it’s leaner, wiser, and has been distilled down to an essence of the bloated dinosaur that it grew into the last time around. There are no wasted notes, no fat, no filler. “Light of Love” plays like the first three tracks of a future Greatest Hits album.
“Speak to me, darling, in hushed tones. Tell me your heart’s true desire” sings Gala Bell on the title track, equal parts Debby Harry, Karen Carpenter, and Kate Bush. Maybe it’s the wonderfully layered vocals, maybe the rich synth textures, maybe their impossibly uplifting nature, but there is something immediately familiar about these songs. At first listen, we’re inexorably drawn into their sphere. For at least a moment, we are surrounded by the halo of their refracted energy - we can bask in the light of love. |
