Beatique

Tag: Soft Cell

  • New Hercules and Love Affair + More of What You Heard at Underground 9/25/26

    Hercules and Love Affair Danseur album cover
    Cover art for Danseur by Hercules and Love Affair

    There’s a new Hercules and Love Affair album out now. It’s called Danseur and it’s fantastic. If you were upstairs at Underground last night, you might have heard “Heaven,” which features Faris Badwan of The Horrors on vocals and is my favorite song on the album. (Read the review here) Other new releases in the set include the title track from Soft Cell’s final album, Danceteria (review) and “Exploded View” from Actors latest, Our Love Will Live Forever (review). 

    It was The Cure Nite, but, I was playing in the not-The Cure room upstairs. Got a few Fontaines D.C. songs in for those of you who came to the club after the show, and those of us who didn’t get tickets. As usual, releases from the past two years are highlighted and link back to other mentions on the blog. Thanks for dancing. 

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  • Soft Cell Returns to Danceteria for Swan Song

    Soft Cell Danceteria album cover

    On my first trip to New York, I connected with an L.A. friend who was at NYU. We were going to meet up in Times Square. “Meet me by the Disney Store,” he said. 

    The Disney Store? I don’t know if my shock and disappointment carried over the hotel lobby phone. This was the end of the 1990s, the era of Rudy Giuliani and TRL if you will, but the Times Square in my head was closer to the one Marc Almond describes on the latest Soft Cell album, with B movies playing in rundown theaters.  

    For their final album, Danceteria, Soft Cell takes listeners to the New York that inspired inspired so much of the English duo’s work. It’s the same New York that Madonna recalls on Confessions II and, if you listen to the two albums, you can hear similar perspectives that unfold in very different ways. Where Confessions II jumps back and forth through time, Danceteria maintains a narrative, and sound, that’s firmly rooted in the 1980s. You can hear the end of disco and the beginning of house in “Danceteria” and “The Space Inside,” which sit side by side on the album. 

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  • Decoder Is the Punk Sci-Fi Film, and Soundtrack, You Need in Your Life

    Christiane F. and F.M. Einheit in Decoder
    Christiane F. and F.M. Einheit in Decoder

    Sometime during lockdown, I stumbled upon a movie called Decoder via Tubi and streamed it not knowing what to expect. By the time I reached the end, I wondered, how did I not know this film existed? Released in 1984, Decoder is a German sci-fi film with serious counterculture cred. It stars F.M. Einheit, then a member of Einsturzende Neubauten, and Christiane F. and also features appearances from Genesis P-Orridge and William Burroughs. P-Orridge composed the film’s main theme with Dave Ball of Soft Cell, whose song “Seedy Films” is featured prominently in the movie, alongside music from Neubauten, Einheit and The The.

    The Decoder soundtrack, which was just re-released on CD via U.K. label Cold Spring, is killer, which one might expect with that caliber of contributors. The movie, though, is even better. In it, Einheit plays a young man who realizes that the muzak playing in the fast food restaurant is a form of mind control and that he can manipulate the sounds to elicit a completely different response from the public. 

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