Plaza begins with a thickly textured string synth riff that is far more Bernard Hermmann than Gary Numan. Beneath it a steady ticking of a drum machine and the only trad rock instrument on the record, an electric bass. Foxx starts the verses with a wail, "In the plaaazah!" and describes a series of surrealistic visions like JG Ballard describing a De Chirico painting. A more muttered verse tells of smoked glass and meeting strangers. Like much of the rest of this album the mood is agoraphobic and paranoid.
He's a Liquid opens with a sweeping string synth riff less, chromatic and severe than Plaza's and soon settles into a gentle but cold electro funk as Foxx's harsh murmur describes a strange erotic meeting between a man and a woman which might be something culty or parasitical. The ambiguity blends well with the cinematic atmosphere.
A growling rumble begins the single Underpass. A determinedly non acoustic bass kick clunks. The mighty riff wails out like a shortcircuited siren. Fragmented images. Someone can't quite finish thoughts. Memories appear like torn notepad pages. A severely flanged scrape punctuates as a bass thumps a ground that would be reggae if it weren't so gelid. A frozen but irresistible song. Doesn't matter what it means, if you don't feel it it is about you. The video for this song is a classic of its time. Foxx moves through a fluorescent-lit underpass or transport platform where lost looking children cling to each other, emotionless musicians play hi-tek keyboards, people make secret gestures to each other in the shadows and the concrete freeways encroach on the landscape. It looks like it's set in a British sci-fi show of the time with freezing video colours. YouTube it (just make sure it's the original 1980 one, he redid it but not so well).
Metal Beat rolls out like a machine-composed Latin dance ballad but, again, it's toned down to Arctic temperatures as a series of brusque commands like mechanically misinterpreted dance calls bark out. A low but distinct more human voice sings along with the chorus. It might be the programmer or just someone recalling the directions. It goes on past the point where we get it but that might itself be the point.
No One Driving is the first track that sounds like a pop song of its time with a full throated vocal and longer melodic phrases that fit together in anticipation of the chorus which repeats the title. As with the rest of the record, this is electronic plus electric but the parts sound more like they originated in traditional rock parts like rhythm guitar, piano, drums etc. As an exercise, I imagined a dull success story band from the '70s (Toto, say) doing this with overworn synth sounds and that session musician overdrive sound on the guitar. It worked, except that Toto would never have imagined something as icky and unsettling as the subject matter of a slowly collapsing world.
The old side two begins with a number as strident as No One Driving but with the accessible melodism with the same kind of dissonant vocal harmonies as in Underpass. Big synth riffs and even a caterwauling solo. New Kind of Man is the strange tale of a film star who walks out of the screen. He traverses time and feels young but controlled. He reenters the frame forever changed with a kind of longing looping in the back of his mind.
Flanged scrapes and a siren-like glissando on a saw wave. A melancholy mezzo-synth weeps through the severe stacked vocals as they list details of what sounds like an intentional disappearance. Lieutenant 030 is on the case but can only find the most cryptic clues. There is a strong sense of the Phillip K. Dicks going on and this hard edged lament feels like a prelude to the film version of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, Blade Runner, that was two years into the future.
A sequenced conga beat through a ring modulator throbs beneath a chromatic synth figure. Tidal Wave progresses through a series of sketched scenarios which might be a real tidal wave or a personal cataclysm interrupting a relationship. Communication is lost but just goes by his window.
The closer Touch and Go begins with an almost jaunty bass and drum and squonking synths. Foxx is again in full voice as he takes us through a busy jumble of images that sound like they're from a European holiday resort as seen by a long serving/suffering staffer or perhaps even the resort itself. It's the observation of fun rather than the fun itself.
This is an unfriendly record. In the air of 40 years distance it sounds like it was made to fail. There's a point to all of that and it has to do with the sense of alienation in a society shedding a shrieking metal skin of industrialisation and not quite knowing what it was expected to do then. Faceless authority was stuffing the dole queues with displaced people who were installed in debt circles like hamster wheels and a great cloud of nuclear doom moved in between the sunlight and the earth for anyone who thought to change their position. The eighties began with the ideals of the sixties grown so buckled and torn it could only look like scrap metal and the voices like the searing novelists of dystopian sci-fi were reading like social science.
Gary Numan had already taken a tincture of Kraftwerk and Berlin-era Bowie to fashion a more populist science fiction and made it his own in a very short time. John Foxx emerged from a band that itself emerged from an ailing prog rock tradition and were yet to discover how to sustain it. Foxx's solo venture was a violent push away from those conventions and offer something new enough yet just barely familiar enough to be taken by the market. But while Numan made his myxolidian synth figures so identical to each other that they became signatures Foxx's more cinematic and broader melodic pallet could only sound samey by comparison. Too often a track will start that is too reminiscent of the previous one. Does this make it bad? No, but it does suggest that the more adventurous ambition that Metamatic expresses was doomed to be harder to pull off. Even the Great Bowie himself couldn't sustain the same kind of thing as the mostly stark and alienating Heroes followed Low's great landscapes and nu-pop charm.
So, no, it's not a faux Gary Numan album and it's not a replay of Heroes but very much itself. It's of its time in a deeper way that the shallow listener might consider (well, there're those synths and electric drums, y'know...) because it tries to dig into the skin of its own time and find the great grey freeze beneath the shouting hit songs, gleam-toothed game show hosts and hard-mouthed political leaders. See also, rather, The Human League, themselves pressing for the value of a long cold look. Foxx, in this context is another piece of the jigsaw but he's one with a decisive detail on it.
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