For brevity, I'm going to refer to the rhythm tracks of this album as the machine. This will alleviate having to repeat the description of the beds of almost every song on this record. So one song gives way to another and the machine is already working. That kind of thing.
Airlane
A slight wisp high on the synthesiser and the machine starts with a clanking rhythm track with the wisp becoming an industrial scream overhead. The motif is altered here and there and several gear shifts and turns but the process keeps working. This is tinned Gary Numan and is as luscious as it is cold. Not just emotionally static, physically cold, as though the aircon has been turned a degree too low. It's an instrumental but with this artist there is no tokenism to it as there would be with any other rock artist. Well, maybe that should read any other rock artist before him. This album opener from the last year of the '70s, released on the brink of the term post punk gaining currency in the consumer base, is of a time when the demarcation between mainstream and alternative was essential. Here is an instrumental told in bold strokes by an artist that, be the stadium ever so big, was not going to ask his audience if they felt alright, or if they could clap their hands (mind you, some of these tracks almost force you to do that). If you are not with this record by the end of its few minutes' duration, you might as well take it off and try something else. When this asks you in, it will lock the door behind you.
Metal
The machine kicks into operation. A hammering synth snare. Then the whole floor, bass, kit and rhythm, starts. Numan comes in as an android. It observes the ways of his engineers as they fit its circuitry and polish his outer finish. A solid synth wail rises and spread. "Picture this, if I could make the change, I'd love to pull the wires from the wall..." Perhaps his assemblers are aware of its aspirational daydreams. The song stops developing after the last line about confusing love with need. And then a solid electronic drone plays over and then through the closing rhythm. No more riffs for this operative. It's all down to the process completing. That's what this sounds like. A quick scare of a thought and then it's back to the assembly and programming. And the process just continues.
Complex
The formula is put on hold for this one. A viscous soup of electric slides and piano, the filters on the synthesiser frequently teeter into distortion. And then a mighty figure rises in the keyboards and a voice we'll hear again on the record, viola. The figure is intense, heartrending is a way difficult to define. The vocal has a familiar broken dejection with halting lines about betrayal and isolation. With the perfect blend of bowed strings and synthesised string sections, Numan's plaintive voice and the big space created around it, this remains the most beautiful and affecting track he has ever done.
Films
A drum pattern is joined by a perky bass rhythm before the scream riff enters, expanding the scale to airliner hangar size. The vocals enter with a statements of approval or disapproval about elements of cinema like the film itself, the actors etc. but reverses it with paranoid utterances about being exposed. We're not talking movies so much as living as though we move through our own or, even worse, someone else's. As the ugly beautiful synth riff soars and takes control we are yet again in a song-borne world where one change of perspective in a line will alter our own movement through a song. One of the most epically industrial of Numan tracks.
M.E.
Numan's vocal is the highest on the album or anything on Replicas or the self-titled debut. Clear, clean notes that describe arcs of melodic phrases. The lines are brief: "And M.E. I eat dust!" "I'll only fade away and I hate to fade alone." The title is an abbreviation of Mechanical Engineering. The suggested narrative is an old sci-fi staple in which a massive computer fixes humanity's problems by getting rid of the humans. The riff will be known to more recent generations as sampled by Basement Jaxx in Where's Your Head At? Here, it is one of the machine tracks, driving down as the warm lower synthesisers rise around it. And then, unexpectedly, in a reiteration after the first vocals, the riff is augmented by plucked viola strings, one of the woodiest and most human-like sounds available, adding a blunt texture but also a real fingertip on string. In a later instrumental passage the viola adds Celtic trills and melismas to the phrase adding a palpable yearning to the sound. The electronic keyboards rise to a height of modal figuring as the machine gears up again, alone, screaming over the wasteland.
Tracks
A pealing piano figure underlaid with a gurgling synth bass. Numan comes in with a few lines before the machine bursts into gear, the drums catch up and the beat assumes a chug beneath a synth wailing the opening piano figure. In full force, the vocals tell of a swap between the narrator and an older person who then can experience both the past and present. The vocal for the full band body of the song is almost as high as M.E. and just as plaintive. It sounds like the experiment was a disaster. And perhaps time itself remains to witness, ending as a trickling piano arpeggio played high and softly.
Observer
This is almost entirely instrumental as a high flying keyboard scream flies over and around the parts of the machine as it works and crunches. In this case the figure in the lower instruments is so close to the break figure in Cars that I still think it's an extended album version of that song starting up. But the synth scream flies in and it's its own number. After an intro that goes for half the track it's a surprise to hear the vocal come in. A plain lyric about people watching might, in the right context, be a sinister confession but all we have is the setting of
Conversation
The riff is built around a brief trill and feels like it's going to be the same all through. When the vocals start it is a series of clipped statements referring to the failure of communication through incapacity. Is Numan referring to his Asperger's? The lines are stubbornly brief and the breaks between them increasingly elaborate, with a deal of warmth added through the violin and viola. The music, the invention internally is busier than his verbal communication could ever be until it swamps the words with a tide of swoonable synthesis soaring above the machines. This is more an acknowledgement of the condition than a cure but its depiction is oddly glorious, controlled, owned.
Cars
People whose parents weren't born when this was released as a single know this song. It gets everywhere, movies, commercials, daytime radio, clubs and deep inside remixes. In 1979 it screamed through the airwaves with a weird grooviness built of machine perfect playing and simple but commanding motifs. If we'd been wowed into silence by Donna Summer's I Feel Love and then shivered at side two of Bowie's Low, we might have just made it past the industrial architecture of Are Friends Electric but nothing prepared us for this hymn to the car as a place to isolate oneself from everyone else as it coursed through the night with lights as white as the elongated keyboards howling above the machine. If it came on the radio as you were getting yourself to a party, your night immediately felt important, not just fun.
Engineers
A theatrical snare roll settles into a locomotive rattle as the machine grunts and clunks. Numan sings high of his and his colleagues' lot as they maintain the lifestyle of the world from a system of conveyor belts underground. "All that we know is hate and machinery. We're engineers." It's the final track and ends as uniform as the opening instrumental. The main riff is more complex than usual and thickens over the top of the machine until that continues to a finish on the snare drum and a wet, electronic sprinkler. End.
The cover art is of its time but out of time. A reimagined Magritte painting replaces the glowing head of the suited man at the table with Numan's own, eye makeup intact but now in a 1930s style double breasted suit. He sits looking with a worried face at a small pyramid that glows from the top down. The album is one of exploration of the theme of humans and technology dealing with each other in the world to come already beginning as he recorded. Taking inspiration from cinema, Phillip K. Dick and industrial advertising, he filtered his inspirations through his first year of fame with Asperger's. The title is Freud's concept of the Id's drive for self gratification and the forces (largely internal) that seek to prevent its expression.
This record took me a long time to really fold myself into. I picked out the more melodically pleasing tracks and let the others fade into disuse, at first. But then, all I had was a cassette copy so I'd put it on for study and it worked its way. I came to a few conclusions about it, especially in light of knowing it's Tubeway Army predecessor, Replicas.
If you are unused to these sounds and find them quaint and samey you should pause for thought. Yes, this album finds a formula and sticks to it as though the system that it supports would collapse without perfect observance. And you might think, that's not much to build a creative project on. Then, all you will need to do is find an album by an old blues master. It's not the difference between those classic guitar tones and chord progressions played organically that you should be hearing, it's the adherence to a grammar that must be maintained for the music to be blues. Same thing.
Gary Numan did not emerge from Kraftwerk. Even the cinematic soundscapes of Tangerine Dream could not claim him. Gary Numan came from punk. The self-titled Tubeway Army debut features sparse synthesisers, usually helping out around the rhythm guitars and bass as texture. By the time Replicas was released the guitars were ditched and the approach sealed. Icy screams of synthesis screamed in flight overhead as a factory filled with perfectly maintained automation clanked, hummed and manufactured on the floor below, in a wash of blinding antiseptic fluorescence. Gary Numan made this setting and walked through it, comfortably at home.
Here and there he daydreams like any assembly worker, of being a machine himself, just cognisant enough to know he is a robot, or someone altogether more fleshly who prefers the protection of a synthesised skin. Stepping from the thick barre chord riffs of the first album through to this muscular and industrially tooled world building Gary Numan made himself instantly recognisable to the decades to come, needing only know that adventurous listeners of the future would pause and understand.
Listening notes: I listened to the superb hi-res flac downloaded from a online retail outlet. No loudness war compression, here, just the big airy white light soundscapes of the original vision. However, I got a lot of background from the booklet in the 1998 rerelease from Beggar's Banquet. I've found out that the mix on all CD releases of this album are unsullied by loudness mixing so, any you can find will sound very good.
