Gartside was still singing about radical philosophical concepts, now veiling them in a soft, wispy cadence.ġ982’s Songs to Remember found them in a liminal stage, but Cupid & Psyche 85 heard their bonafide transformation.
Scritti Politti became a hyper-refined, synth-inflected R&B troupe. In reaction, the seemingly most punk thing to do was to make un-punk music-to rebel with complexity. Gartside was irked by how these bands were complacent with writing basic chord progressions at the same tempo every song, the core motifs which make punk music accessible to inexperienced musicians in the first place yet tend to limit it to that level of amateurship. From Gartside’s perspective, his genre peers were “decadent and disengaged” and solely “arty for artiness’s sake,” according to Reynolds. “The idea is that substantial decisions about what the group is doing are made by a larger number of people than actually pick up instruments at present,” Reynolds quotes the singer as having said in a fanzine interview.Īlso during this time, Gartside was becoming more cognizant of the limitations to the group’s particular mode: post-punk. While he and two others were actually playing the music, “the total membership of the collective, which regularly gathered for formal meetings, was as high as twenty,” Simon Reynolds writes in his book Rip It Up and Start Again. Scritti began as a Marxist collective that gathered at the squat where Gartside was living in Camden, North London. Scritti’s importance in the history of pop music is made even more undeniable by Gamson’s later production credits, which include Kesha, Charli XCX and Kelly Clarkson. Then there’s member/producer David Gamson, whose instrumental contributions are not just infectious but unconscionably precise and dauntingly multi-timbral. Perhaps it’s Scritti’s synth-melodies-each one so concrete and finely carved you can sit in them like a throne-that artists have had a tough time replicating. Naturally, the descendants come short of fully capturing their predecessor’s sound. Along with Neon Indian, the permeation of Gartside and company’s influence can be heard in the 1975, Hot Chip, Carly Rae Jepsen, any artist endeavoring to make pop music at 120 BPM where every drum-beat is gated reverb and every melody is as sinewy as it is bubblegum. This could’ve been a safe assumption, except every other review of Neon Indian’s latest album turned out to be a Scritti comparison. “I don’t know if he knew who I was or anything,” he claimed in an interview. Anna Wise Gently Powerful, Live (As If It Were Forever)Īfter catching Neon Indian’s first London show around the time of their 2009 debut Psychic Chasms, Gartside introduced himself to frontman Alan Palomo to compliment him on his work.
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