album of the week: 1.3

Tom Tom Club
Downtown Rockers
(2012)

Why you'll love it:  Simple and effective funk as good as their early material

Why you'll hate it:  Title track is complete garbage.  Middling to awful lyrics throughout.

One of the coolest surprises that I never got around to talking about last year was the sudden appearance of new Tom Tom Club material.  I've always enjoyed the funky Talking Heads offshoot band.  Well, honestly, just only their debut LP, but I really do have an appreciation for that one album that kind of covers up their later disappointments.  Downtown Rockers is actually the first release by them that I'd put right alongside that original release, aside from the title track.  I'm going to spend the rest of ths post complaining about that song, so let me just say up front, I otherwise like this EP a whole lot…

OK, with that out of the way, the song "Downtown Rockers" is one of the worst songs I have ever heard… EVER.  You know the song "Losing My Edge" by LCD Soundsystem?  It's an excellent rant portraying this aging hipster, clinging desperately to his glory days, and experiencing everything he built his entire persona around melt away.  Thanks to the internet, his musical knowledge is no longer interesting.  The people he is name dropping are no longer relevant.  He's watching "the scene" make the same narcissistic mistakes he made, but looking a lot better while doing it.  And his looks are slipping away, with no real interesting talent or personality to reveal underneath.  By the end of the song, he's simply rattling off bands and people he used to know, whatever sticks.  The beat is great, and the song has some hilarious lines.  There is a lot of satire and parody to enjoy, but it is truly a reflection of a sad and vain personality.

"Downtown Rockers" is "Losing My Edge" without parody.  It truly thinks its being cool by name dropping.  That's all that's going on in this song, just naming underground or counter-culture bands from the 70s-80s.  Even on the surface, it's a shallow and uninteresting song, but when I think about its intention, a suffocating depression overcomes me.  

But yeah, to reiterate, I really love the four songs that follow it.  In fact, if you get the album off Amazon download, you get instrumental versions of (almost) all the songs.  Since the lyrics are mostly filler, the instrumentals are even better than the original tracks.