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09/28/2005 Entry: ""

Will Layman ends his Popmatters review of the new Alison Moyet album with this sentence:

"And -- oh yeah -- take off the black clothes and the grimace. Your fans never liked The Smiths anyway, remember?"

That is something a reviewer might write when he doesn't know how to end a review. I was a Moyet fan back in the day (that first Yaz album was the soundtrack to my freshman year in college) and I loved the Smiths.

The first sentences of the review are even more curious:

"Alison Moyet has a big, fat, eccentric British voice that has been successfully set against dopey electronic dance beats since the 1980s. It's a wide, kooky voice -- one with odd caverns of quirk in different registers, with hiccups and strange sonorities depending on how she uses it -- and it has sold a bunch of records over the years to pop fans who will go for this kind of neo-Disco stuff without feeling they really should be listening to old Smiths records instead."

A "wide, kooky voice?" How about "powerful, where-the-hell-did-that come-from" voice. And, "dopey electronic dance beats??" You mean the ones constructed by Vince Clark who had critical and commercial success with Depeche Mode, Yaz, and Erasure? OK...