MUSIC REVIEW: Stalin Goes Pop!

Marc Almond is best known as the singer for Soft Cell, a duo that had a huge hit many moons ago with ‘Tainted Love’* although metal-oriented readers may be more familiar with the version recorded by the mediocre Alice Cooper impersonator Marilyn Manson. But whereas Manson’s interpretation was characteristically both overblown and juvenile in its attempt to conjure up an atmosphere of depravity, Soft Cell’s clinical electronic backing and smooth vocals were effortlessly decadent. 

Tainted Love was the beginning and the end of Soft Cell in the USA as far as I’m aware, although in the UK the group had a string of hits while Marc Almond acquired a reputation for mind-bending excess. After that, he went on to pursue an eccentric/eclectic solo career that saw him duet with Gene Pitney, record the songs of Jacques Brel  and join the Church of Satan, founded by tedious baldy Anton LaVey, AKA the most boring man in the world. 

And yet in spite of that last affiliation (shared with Marilyn Manson) Almond is a genuinely bold artist, willing to take great risks, even if they don’t always pay off. A few years ago he released the hardly commercial Heart on Snow, an album of English versions of popular Russian songs. Almond knew the subject matter well- he had been performing regularly in Moscow since the early 90s, perhaps attracted to the city’s atmosphere of 1920s Weimar style madness. Even so, Heart on Snow is an uneasy mix of rock, folk, pop and soviet ballads, of electronic arrangements and military choirs. As Russian music emphasizes lyrics over melody the songs also seemed a bit amorphous, even though the translations were not terrible. Heart on Snow is certainly an interesting curio, but hardly necessary.  (more…)