British Electric Foundation - "Music Of Quality and Distinction Volume 3

British Electric Foundation - Music of Quality and Distinction Volume 3

16 x File, MP3, Album, UK, 2013

Wall of Sound

I thought the chances would be very slim that this would even be listenable, but alas, it’s a fantastic album.   It guess it took British Electric Foundation 20 some odd years to recover from Volume 2, which, without a doubt,  I tremendously disliked with a certain amount of passion.  But Volume 3 which came out of nowhere, well basically a typing mistake on Spotify, it came up upon my eyes. 

Like the other two volumes, British Electric Foundation (Heaven 17) chose specific artists to cover a song, and usually the song choices are really good, but sometimes I feel there is a subtext to their choices as well.  Nevertheless we Boy George doing Lou Reed’s “Make Up” and surprisingly The Stooges’ “I wanna Be Your Dog.”  Now that sounds like a strange mash-up of singer and song, but George does it well, and its a great track on this album.  

The one that really made me go gaga is someone named Maxim, who is a Russian pop singer.  He does the fantastic “The Day Before You Came” a masterpiece song from late ABBA.  His performance of the song resembles Joel Gray’s character in Cabaret.  Campy as hell and it works.  Glenn Gregory, who is the Heaven 17 singer comes up quite nicely with Frank Sinatra’ middle-age angst “It Was A Very Good Year” and a beautiful piano version of Billy MacKenzie’s (Associates) “Party Fears Two.”   And do we need another version of “God Only Knows?”  Sure, why not.  It is such a beautiful ballad, a Brian Wilson piece of genius work.  Overall this is a great collection of songs re-thunk by Martyn Ware.  In other words New Wave’s revenge.