Gary Numan – Sacrifice – 1994
This is not your father’s Gary Numan Record. Forget all that you know or knew of the former Mr. Webb. The saxophoniness? Gone. The futuro-electro-funk? Swept away.
Gary’s got inspiration and it’s from God and that dark sludge we call the 90s.
What I am actually listening to is not the release that you can hear on Lala (see below). I’ve got the extended Numa release. Every song is longer and none of them suffer for it.
We haven’t heard Gary’s spoken word despair since, well, Are ‘Friends’ Electric? and here they are on “Deadliner” mining the same aural tapestry that Marilyn Manson and Trent Reznor would be making popular just around the corner. Was Gary forward thinking (again?) or was he following the trend of the day? No matter. He’s not interested in selling to the masses. Been there, done that. He’s got bigger fish to fry. God, for one. From what I understand, Numan’s atheism will take a much larger presence on fothcoming releases but here it’s only touched on with songs like, “Pray” and “A Question of Faith”. The nuclear winter industrial backdrop is really a perfect setting for Gary’s paranoid vision and worldview.
The industrial rhythms and cold, depressed vitriol really drives this record. Sure, I can hear how Gary would have fucked these songs up a few years back with Saxophones and overly sexualized R&B backup singers, but without them to drag the proceedings into some weirdo gotta-get-on-the-radio belief system they stand starkly and remind me why Numan was so successful in the first place. His asperger’s which rendered him open to interpretation as arrogant or diffident only serves by the music. In fact, I wonder if he could have made this record, or the Machine Trilogy or even New Anger without it. And when he tried to reach out and incorporate soul music to his repertoire he could only fail since connection is probably the hardest thing for him.
“This is not love, this is not even worth a point of view” Numan once sang on “I Die, You Die”. He was right. Because what he was really singing about is that “Love” is really just perspective and if you can’t connect, for whatever reason but especially if you aren’t wired that way, then “love” truly is just a point of view.
Sad? No. Because that’s perspective as well.
I’m just glad to have Gary Numan back.
There is actually a love song on this album. “You Walk in My Soul” was written for Gemma, who started off as a fan and later became his wife. It’s as pretty as anything Numan’s done; he does seem to have a knack for those sweeping electro-ballads, if it is a little rote.
Sacrifice is overblown, overdone and very self-conscious but for me it works on every level and is a connector back to the original Numan style and worldview and the very reason he is looked at as an innovator rather than a relic.
I notice that Gary plays all the instruments himself on Sacrifice (save a guitar or bass on a couple tracks) and I think that serves him well. Again, I’m not sure he’s the best collaborator. When he’s in total control (or working with drug addicts like Paul Gardiner) he’s able to get to his core. And he can rock again, like on “Love and Napalm”, he isn’t afraid of it anymore. The marriage of machine/soul never worked. The marriage of metal/machine has always worked. It’s a welcome rediscover, even if it does run out steam by the end.
Grade: B
ASide: Love & Napalm, You Walk in My Soul
BlindSide: Pray, Deadliner, Desire
DownSide:
