DRASTIC PLASTIC

On this album, Bill Nelson took his band straight into new wave territory, which meant jettisoning all of Be Bop Deluxe's prog and glam tendencies. This was presumably connected with his interest in futurism, since the leaner sound of new wave and synth pop were considered the music of the coming techno age. There's a definite lack of warmth and passionate guitar heroics here, but the album does work as a whole. The manifesto is laid out in the first track, "Electrical Language", a robotic sounding ode to the possibilities of musical techonology. "Panic in the World' is a chugging rocker that wouldn't sound out of place on a Cars or Utopia album and is the best-known track on the record. The rest of the album is in a similar vein, and if it had been the band's debut, there's no doubt we'd be comparing them more to XTC and Talking Heads than to Bowie and Queen. The exception is the beautiful closing ballad, "Island of the Dead", which features some melodic guitar and dreamy lyrics that would have fit in well on Modern Music or Sunburst Finish. This ain't a prog album, but if you appreciate quality songwriting and new wave music, it could be a nice discovery. Not the place for a Nelson newbie to start, though. Feeling that he'd exhausted the commercial and artistic potential of the band, Nelson broke it up after this album and moved on to his next project, Bill Nelson' Red Noise, which took the post punk ideas of Drastic Plastic to greater extremes.