Dexys Midnight Runners

You needn't be as convinced of Kevin Rowland's tortured genius as he clearly is to enjoy his band's odd, exuberant debut. Some songs drag a bit, since he won't sing until he feels it, man, and others are weighed down by an insistence that every word mean something important. But none of that matters when everything clicks, as on the blissful chorus of "Seven Days Too Long" ("without you / bay-bee / come on back to me").

Old clothes do not make a tortured artist" claim the liner notes on Searching for the Young
Soul Rebels. Then why do Dexy's Midnight Runners, a punky British R&B band with Stax-Volt
pretensions, go to such melodramatic extremes to wear their Sixties-style soul on so
tattered an aesthetic sleeve? These guys are simply too busy hitting you with their rhythm
shtick about a lost tribe of English youth to produce a sound as punchy as their r... More >

Perhaps it will clear something up to specify that this is not a soul record. It is a weird record. Never have soul horns sounded remotely as sour, and Kevin Rowland can't carry a tune to the next note. There are horn interjections that make me laugh out loud at their perfectly timed wrong rightness, and with Kevin Rowland quavering through his deeply felt poesy and everybody else blaring away, I enjoy it in much the same way I enjoy a no-wave band on a good night--DNA, say. But DNA I understand. (Grade - B)