Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 9/10
There are many times that you can listen to a new band and think if only you had been around a few years earlier, you would have been massive. Regardless of what you think of the groups, musicians, boy bands, girl singers, the sometimes baffling and occasionally downright insulting that has graced the British pop charts since 1988, at times you find a nugget so good that you can but hold it close and hope they do well.
If only F.O.X. had been around at the same time as their Essex cohorts Depeche Mode and Yazoo, then the pop world would have quaked with even more pleasure at the sound of what was coming out of that English county in the same way that Yorkshire held the nation captive with the likes of Heaven 17 and the Human League. However what the 80’s lost out on, at least the second decade of the 21st Century has a band filling the pop genre with a muttering disquiet that they need to raise their own personal game lest left behind.
F.O.X.’s album Chimera is up there with the great 80’s pop albums such as Dare, Upstairs At Eric’s and The Luxury Gap. It grabs the attention right from the start as there is more than the biggest hint that they paying the biggest dedication to the era, a time in which pretty much everything was wrong with the world except for the very good pop music that came out. Throughout the album the sound is electrifying, it has guts, loud but sensual , meaningful but also the right side of quality driven and above all it really gets under the skin and makes you pang for the music of the period in such a way that you only thought possible if you attended a reunion with an 80’s theme.
There is nothing wrong with nostalgia when it does in the right way and for the right reasons and in Mitzi Fox, Patrick Monahan and Darren Barker, the reason’s multiply and bridge a gap between 1988 when the charts seemed to be either amusing or relevant and 2014. Everything comes back for a reason and whilst it might be glib to suggest that pop has come back with the type of addiction because of the grey, humourless and downright evil times we find ourselves in, it is no coincidence that the age the band are writing in mirror those of thirty years ago.
With great tracks such as I Am Electric, the tremendous 52, Start A Revolution, Heart Full Of Sharp Stone, To Lose My Life and London Town, Chimera is a fantasy come true, a great pop band with great pop tracks. It is like 1984 never went away.
Ian D. Hall