A large disk melancholic pop: a little dated, but it announces the following

It is - too - easy to judge this record in the light of what followed in Talk Talk - ie Spirit of Eden and Laughing Stock in 1988 and 1990, the founders of the so discs not yet called post rock, twice 45 minutes of languid and cleanly sublime experiments where digital editing gives form to hours and hours of jam, conducted in studio under the rule of brilliantly obsessive Mark Hollis. Or even compare it to the beautiful The Color of Spring of 1986, but still pop record already announcing the luminous minimalism two masterpieces in question, on which the group had already sold off most of its arsenal of synths and percussion Programmable in favor of his richly textured but largely acoustic. Mark Hollis himself describes his artistic development as an ongoing search for the most absolute beauty, as close as possible to the silent music while not being more inspired by Satie as by Trevor Horn production.

Talk Talk has not started less as a pop group. Not always with happiness: it is regrettable hyper dated heaviness of debut album, "The Party's Over", weighed down by a clumsy production and stuffed up the sound of disgust clichés already obsolete six months after the album's release. But his successor in 1984, "It's My Life" in question here - you eventually get there - is an excellent refined pop album, technological and anguished typical of what saved us from Kool and the Ghent at the time the charts ... little we forgive him some good tics mid-80's, and one or two songs a lower pile strength not to choose sides between minimum and languor tubesques ambitions.

Somewhere between the intimate and refined rock art of Japan and The Blue Nile, new wave aesthetic of Simple Minds "New Gold Dream" and "Songs From the Big Chair" by Tears For Fears, Talk Talk mixes this fine uneven album a unique sense of composition both catchy pop and moving, and consummate art of setting contoured high-tech sound stage for the charts at the time. The songs sometimes reach heights in true reconciliation between the dancefloor and pillow: who has not shuddered at the time the anxious and yet irresistible accents Such a Shame, perhaps the only song that reconciles the sound power the "P Machinery 'of Propaganda with the sensitivity of the highlights of Smiths, Cure and Depeche Mode other? What a great song, remains the apex of the disc, but still in good company: "Dum Dum Girl", "It's My Life" (so much better than the recovery bavée infects many years later by the moron in Chief among No Doubt) and "It's You" dig a trench adjacent to that of "... Shame"; "Renée" and "Tomorrow Started" are also strong in the ballad genre suicidophile the first David Sylvian; only "Call in the Night Boy" and "The Last Time" feel a little filling, while "Does Caroline Know?" sees its melody marred by a production-fact way UB40-of-the-new-wave which is spot on an album otherwise excellent consistency. Tim Friese-Greene illuminated unique voice, both fragile and unstoppable, the brilliant Mark Hollis, blows of atmospheric synths to surreal and chilling effect, enriches the percussion Lee Harris (and Morris Pert) often of electronic Discreet (shakers and other toms out of a Roland TR 808), and highlights the actual incredible bass lines of Paul Webb, who mostly act as lead and counterpoint to the voice usually reserved for guitars (the bass "It's My Life" itself worth it erects a statue to the man, one of the most moving and original bass players in the history of pop, and unfortunately also underestimated her group). These - this is one of the most biases swollen disc - are relegated to the role of texture when they are acoustic, atmosphere when they are electric (solo "Such a Shame" summit abstraction - already). More so than in Tears For Fears or foals ZTT as Propaganda, who they side by side in the standings at the time, the merger between rock and electronic instruments, emotion and looking for some form of sound perfection works wonders on this record - where only some soft electronic drum sounds knee generically Rick Hunter, do occasionally get his head in the shoulders with a "Snap! have" embarrassed but forgiving.

"It's My Life" is not, far from it, the masterpiece of Talk Talk. Rid of the awkwardness of the first album, it remains "of his time," and his melancholy pop with New waveux accents weighs necessarily face the light dazzling albums that, thereafter, made the legend of the group. But, without being as essential as "The Color of Spring," "Spirit of Eden" and "Laughing Stock" (or indeed the only solo album by Mark Hollis, a sixth album Talk Talk that does not speak its name ), it remains one of the great intelligent pop record of the 80s, and deserves better than being summarily set aside as a gadget so Duran Duran (who?).