Peach Union - Audiopeach
Real live songs with a decidedly electronic edge. We've been waiting a while for this album and really didn't know what to expect.
First impressions are of a band destined for the top twenty bits of pop charts around the world and although the names of three guys called Stock, Aitken and Waterman popped into my head while enjoying a scrumptious first listen I feel confident that the reputations of the constituent members of Peach Union will not be put into doubt for producing such a well conceived and executed work of electropop.
Just to give you an idea of the reputations we're dealing with, Peach Union consists of Pascal Gabriel, responsible for influential electronic music releases by S'Express and Bomb The Bass in the late eighties. He also produced, among other things, EMF's hit song Unbelievable and the Peter Murphy album Cascade where he met Paul Statham, the ex-Bauhaus singer's keyboard player, programmer and co-writer since the mid eighties. Paul shortly afterwards left the clutches of the prince of darkness and started collaborating with Pascal. They later met Lisa Lamb, who had recently returned from a stint as a dancer in Las Vegas, at an art exhibition in London and seem to be doing a great job helping to build her reputation from where it left off with Band Of Gypsies and Washington DC's Troublefunk.
The opening track On My Own sets the tone for the whole album, namely giant no-nonsense wholesome helpings of pop, and there's plenty for everyone. This is one of the few albums I've heard that works just as well on a system at home as it does out late at night surrounded by hundreds of people. I was also reminded of the type of music I heard on the radio while growing up, music from the Burt Bacharach (did I just say Burt Bacharach) school of songwriting which ultimately puts it all onto the melody line, and as with many of those timeless masterpieces the vocals had to be strong enough to carry the complex arrangements that helped make the music unique.
Lisa Lamb certainly has the voice, and Gabriel and Statham certainly have what it takes to make all the modern state of the art musical equipment they have at their disposal do what it needs to do.
Rating: 871,400 (out of a possible 1,000,000)
