Dexys, One Day I’m Going to Soar

So many of my favorite bands from the ‘70s, ‘80s and ‘90s (Real Kids, Faust, Gravel Pit) have returned after long absences that I’m a little worried that it’s a portent of doom. But considering how strong all these albums are—remarkable returns to form, after years in the wilderness—it’s more of a portent that space and time will come to lack meaning and the future is uncommonly bright.

This Dexys album has been out in the UK since 2012, but wasn’t available for US download for ages after its overseas release. Unable to get it at first, I forgot all about it and only this month was reminded of its existence.

One Day I’m Going to Soar represents the first Dexys (or Dexys Midnight Runners) album in something like 27 years. Strangely though, it begins right where the last album, Don’t Stand Me Down, left off, with long conversational songs about romantic confusion and bitter break-ups. Stranger still, Don’t Stand Me Down was a record that basically destroyed the band, taking them in a leisurely, reflective direction that the hordes of peppy, stepdancing “C’mon Eileen” fans could not fathom.

Me, I was a fan of all Dexy Midnight Runners albums, from their high-energy early experiments blending punk, trad folk and soul (“Dance Stance,” “Geno”) to their later soul-searching (“This is What She’s Like”). I was enraptured with Don’t Stand Me Down, played it endlessly, forced it upon friends. proclaimed it the best thing I’d heard in 1985 and felt validated when many of the British music journals which had lambasted it upon its initial release did complete about-faces and sang its praises highly when it was reissued on CD in 1997 and again (“the director’s cut”) in 2002.

One Day I’m Going to Soar has the same mawkish inward-turning sentimentality as Don’t Stand Me Down, and yes it’s no surprise that it may be a turn-off for many listeners. But both albums have sustained drama that I find riveting even it when it gets flip or melodramatic. Midway through One Day I’m Going to Soar is a mini-musical called “I’m Always Going to Love You,” in which Kevin Rowland (Dexys leader and only sustaining member) tells a woman (Madeleine Hyland) he loves her, gets her to confess her love for him, then abruptly has second thoughts and dumps her. It all takes place in one four and a half minute song, but what’s truly distinctive is the torrents of abuse hurled at Rowland by the aggrieved Hyland. “Kevin! Don’t talk to me!,” she wails in Aretha Franklinesque female soul-furor. It all happens over an old-school Philly-soul beat, with the vocal interplay sounding improvised even though it’s obviously tightly scripted. There’s little you can compare this song to. And it’s matched by much of the rest of the One Day I’m Going to Soar album. Mixing soul swagger with insecurities, antagonisms and oafish insolence is something Dexys has done for years, and it’s still unsettling and disarming and bizarre and brilliant.

Faust, Just Us

I think Faust is one of the most important bands of the 20th century—progressive but not indulgent, virtuosic yet still basic and earthy, experimental yet accessible, unpredictable yet trustworthy.

I was turned on to them in the late ‘70s when I asked the great avant-garde percussionist Chris Cutler, after an Art Bears concert in a chemistry lecture hall at Tufts University, what I should be listening. He wrote “Faust” and an address in Germany on a slip of paper and handed it to me. I found Faust So Far first (in the stacks at the college radio station) and never looked back.

Faust’s main moment was a brilliant four-album salvo in the early ‘70s, but they resurfaced 20 years later. They later splintered into two separate Fausts, both with founding members. One of these Fausts, led by Werner Diermaier and Jean-Herve Peron, has been rather prolific; the other, led by Hans Joachim Irmler, not so much. I’d say I prefer the Irmler variant, whose album Faust is Last is up there with the original band’s best work. But the Diermaier/Peron Faust has done seven decent albums to Irmler’s one great one, and has toured extensively. So they’re the ones really keeping the Faust flame alive.

And Just Us (spelled on the album cover thus: “j US t”) has the high concept, sheer bravado and clammering, clanging candor of vintage Faust. The album comes with a thesis. According to the official description of the record, “Founder members Jean-Hervé Peron and Zappi Diermaier have laid down twelve musical foundations, inviting the whole world to use them as a base on which to build their own music. The tracks presented by Peron and Diermaier are clearly, intrinsically typical of Faust in their own right, yet offer enough space for completely different works to develop. Which is exactly what they hope will happen.”

Yes, you could certainly sample these tracks, many of which are made up of repetitive beats, chords and machine noises. Or you could be suspicious of that come-on, as some critics have been. Personally, I’ve been too worshipful of Faust for too long to consider that I could have anything of substance to add to their music. I find the simplicity of Just Us ideal for breaking up all the melodic pop on my iPhone playlist. These are ear-opening pulses of neo-Futurist noodling, amalgams of quivering humanity and invasive industrial effects. I find it dark and compelling and imaginative and rhythmic and dreamy and evocative. It may be a lightweight effort for the oft-denser Faust. It may be like a great painter showing you their palette and asking you to consider it as conceptual art. But, hell, it’s got a good beat and I don’t dance and I like it.