Gary Numan – Warriors – 1983
Wow is this bad. What happens if you’re Gary Numan and you just made an album with a terrific fretless bassist (The Underwhelming I, Assassin featuring Pino Palladino) but you don’t have that brilliant musician for your next record? You make another one just like but with less focus.
You look at that cover and you think, okay, Gary’s gonna bring us back to that post-apocalyptic wasteland that we knew him for and loved. And the first track, “Warriors” starts off just that way. Then that bass comes back in…and it might as well be U, Assassin, too.
Worse is that for the first time Numan actually sounds like he’s BEHIND the times. Other synth based New Wave pre-post-industrial bands are making music better than this and far more interesting (Flock of Seagulls for example. Trust me. Depeche Mode. Others.)
The damned sax is back to undercut just about anything good on this record. And by the time it ends I realized that there was nothing for me to grab hold of. It’s just a series of pseudo-songs laid end to end and committed to plastic.
Warriors is as bad as it gets. Nu-electro-jazz be damned.
While there are some tracks worth listening to, the Dance-length “Sister Surprise”, “The Tick Tock Man” and to some extent “Love is Like Clock Law” it’s just so hard to listen to that voice pine and whine and beg not to be left alone. Gary’s nasal-robot singing worked so well on those dystopian records of the late 70s but here it’s just annoying.
Grade: D
ASide:
BlindSide: Sister Surprise, The Tick Tock Man,
DownSide: Everything else.
