Humanizing The Vacuum

Give EMF credit: “Unbelievable” doesn’t turn my stomach like ubiquitous wedding classics like Kool and the Gang’s “Celebration.” One of my earliest club memories was dancing to “Unbelievable” months before it hit number one at the now-defunct Red Room on Lenox Avenue (during spring break, come to think of it). Its parent album Schubert Dip floundered whenever the post-Manchester buzzsaw guitar/sampler ethos, atoning for its hedonism, tries to embrace Serious Issues, but relistening to it last weekend wasn’t one of those dispiriting experiences thanks to which you question the sanity of your adolescent taste. Schubert Dip actually sounds like a record teenagers would have recorded: the breathy, out of tune vocals, the channeling of energy into tracks whose rickety structures need all the help they could get, the songs about girls that are petulant instead of enraged — give the Jonas Brothers a Fairlight and backwards baseball caps and they’ll come up with something just as fetching. Forgotten second single “Lies” drapes house-influenced keyboards all over a limp chorus, while “When You’re Mine” might have been a spectacular Black Box moment had Martha Wash sung its chorus.

So I was one of those suckers who bought the Unexplained EP in the summer of ’92, convinced that James Atkin could do more with his vocals than imitate a man receiving oral sex for the first time. Resident mastermind Ian Dench, who’s credited with guitars and keyboards but if we believe the interviews did much more, sculpts reasonable climaxes around Atkin’s explosions of pique, especially around “Getting Through.” The problem: the hooks are decent, but not car-commercial-historic like the ones in “Unbelievable.” So what we get is a buzzing, rather frantic guitar-centered Inspiral Carpets record. And yet: let’s give Dench-Atkins credit for “Search and Destroy,” a completely convincing cover of the Stooges classic. Maybe I’m soft because EMF’s is the first version I heard, but kudos for reminding us that it’s a song written by and for pissed-off teens. Is it as good as Iggy’s? Oh yes it is. Its genius: anyone with half a brain’s worth of guitar licks and breathy vocals can convey its angst.

I may have been the only man in America to buy EMF’s official Schubert Dip followup, Stigma. A depressing record: much better than its predecessor, yet refusing to concede one millimeter to the wedding/bar mitzvah crowd that made “Unbelievable” unbelievable. “They’re Here” actually samples the KLF’s “3 AM Eternal,” surely some kind of post-modern miracle, and “It’s You (That Leaves Me Dry)” uses those orchestral synths in ways that an Emilio Estevez action flick from 1992 would have respected. Give EMF credit for insouciance. Jesus Jones’ Mike Edwards considered himself an artist.