Berserker - Gary Numan (1984)
Gary Numan’s place in musical culture is forever anchored to his 1979 track Cars, that basically freed the forthcoming decade from the boys-with-guitars aesthetic that had ruled the previous two.
His subsequent albums in the early 80s are often thrown in the 2-stars category of “what happened here?” and that’s about all I knew of them. But Berserker has gotten reissued and there was an interesting article in The Quietus that piqued my interest.
A quick aside: I love reading Quietus, especially regarding older albums, because it’s basically fantasy literature to me: here’s an entire world that I think I might know something about, but clearly I don’t. And whoever’s writing it assumes the backstory and the supporting players and the historical context and their own opinions on it all are obvious and unassailable. So you get an experience of being dropped into a thing fully in medias res and you just have to figure it out as you go along.
So. Numan. He had started his own label, apparently because his old label had bothered him with things like sales numbers and songs that could be singles and all the usual beancounter nonsense.
He dove into his own process without outside restrictions. He turned his synth-first sound to the complex and expensive PPG Wave, which as I understand it isn’t really a sampler, but an early version of that where you could set the base wavetable of the instrument to your own recorded sound.
It’s pretty obvious why what came out of this wasn’t a commercial success. It’s slick, but almost abstract. On its surface it sounds like the soundtrack to a sci fi b-movie.
But I also agree that it’s worth listening to again in an age when we have different ideas about what makes a great record. There’s crazy array of interesting sounds. The songs are dour and spare, but have a great sense of composition holding them together. The synthy flourishes aren’t foreign to modern ears, so it doesn’t sound alien now like it might have in 1984. There’s also a lot of bristling organic funk that come from the live bass and drums and keeps it from being a slab of techno pop.
Tracks I Liked
My Dying Machine - what passed for a dystopian vision of modern society in the 80s seems quaint nowadays, but this is still a yearning, harrowing song.
Cold Warning - builds a beat around a sort of middle-eastern-sounding figure and chugs through with purpose.
The God Film - A slinky, slithering sneak attack on the senses that explodes after it gets inside your head.
