If
Orange Juice
famously wanted to sound like a combination of
Chic
and
the Velvet Underground
, then
Haircut One Hundred
must have wanted to sound like a combination of
. On their debut and only album with band founder
Nick Heyward
,
Pelican West
, the group display all the skittery beats, deep-voiced crooning, and pop smarts of
OJ
, while adding more funk and saxophone than
Edwyn Collins
and co. probably ever imagined. That
scored a bigger hit than the band they so clearly idolized must have rubbed the lads in
the worst way, but it's clear from even one listen through
that
Haircut 100
were more than just mere copycats. "Love Plus One" is that aforementioned mega hit and it deserved to be a timeless classic.
knew how to write pop hooks and the band fills it in with brilliant subtlety. There are siblings to that song scattered across the record. "Favourite Shirts (Boy Meets Girl)," "Marine Boy," and the ecstatic "Fantastic Day" all have wonderfully snappy melodies and huge choruses, "Milk Film," "Surprise Me Again," and "Snow Girl" have a refined pop sound that skews a little less gleeful and a little more melancholy. Sure, they are all prone to sax breakdowns and horn section crescendos that sound like
Chicago
happened by the studio, but the bulk of the album is first-rate '80s sophisti-pop. The few tracks that cast aside the traditional song structure and jump over to the
side of the equation are fun, though very much of their time. "Love's Got Me in Triangles" and "Calling Captain Autumn" are both quite British, with a sort of awkward kind of funk almost quaint in its unfunkiness.
Heyward
's attempts at rapping on the latter achieve beat poet-meets-
Captain Sensible
levels of uncoolness that circle back around to coolness in the end somehow. The entire record is a little like that. From their corny outfits to their lighter-than-air sound,
were never going to be dangerous or sexy. The best they could hope for was escapist, but never mindless fun, and on
they bury their arrows dead center in the middle of that target. ~ Tim Sendra