Lurking behind the scenes of loads of brilliant pop during a span that stretched from the late '70s through the mid-'90s,
Edward Ball
had his talented fingers in an impressive number of pies.
It's Kinda Lonely Where I Am
is a career-spanning overview that focuses on the bands that
Ball
led throughout the years. From the mod pop of
"O" Level
to solo works that posit
as a Britpop sage, the variety of styles he applied his talent to is breathtaking.
The Times
alone went through a myriad of changes as documented here. From their early days as situationist pop visionaries (as displayed on the classic "I Helped Patrick McGoohan Escape") and mod revivalists on through to sophisti-pop happy lads, rafter-scraping dream poppers, and dancefloor chancers, just a sampling of his work with them would be enough to leave heads spinning. Throw in tracks from his ecstasy-fueled dance-pop project
Love Corporation
, which felt like a cash-in at the time but actually turned out some classic tracks like "Palatial" and "Give Me Some Love," the oddball shoegaze group
Teenage Filmstars
, and those released under his own name -- which tend toward confessional acoustic ballads -- and it's clear that
had a wandering, almost overactive muse. His reincarnation as a sensitive balladeer was one of his more surprising turns given the snarky, sometimes not-so-serious bent of his other work. Songs like "If a Man Ever Loved a Woman" and "Never Live to Love Again" are very much in the vein of the work his old mucker
Alan McGee
was doing at the time with
Biff Bang Pow!
Not too surprising since
McGee
and a bunch of
Creation
people like
Martin Carr
and
Andy Bell
were helping out. The scattershot nature of the track list does even more to point out the maturity of these later songs, as often one of these heart-tugging acoustic tracks is followed by a goofy piss-take like
's "We Love Malcolm." Then that tune might be followed by a noise-damaged shoegaze track that's completely backwards or a French-language, smoothly Balearic version of
New Order
's "Blue Monday." This kind of approach truly highlights the anything-goes attitude
always seemed to bring to his music, and it makes for a bracing, surprising listen. He might not have been a visionary or a genius, but he knew his way around a good tune and he was always up for a lark, and that is definitely worth celebrating. ~ Tim Sendra