The Go-Go's

Fizzy and feisty, the bracingly fresh sound of Talk Show explodes like a just uncorked
bottle of cold champagne. Faced with the most critical album of their career – an LP that
will determine whether the band will be taken as a serious outfit or merely as a cute but
talent-poor pentad of ponytail rockers – the Go-Go's have shrugged off the commercial
pressure to rehash their earlier successes and have delivered instead a bold, un... More >

Pop is such a plastic concept that to call this a pop comeback just confuses things--with its clean, bold, Martin Rushent sound and confident basic chopswomanship, it shares less with Beauty and the Beat than with, oh, Sports (and less than Bananarama does, too). In other words, it's an AOR move (with top-forty goals assumed). Lyrically, it represents a retreat--no place for sly subcultural anthems among these straightforward love songs (really relationship songs), which while sensible enough are never acute or visionary (or thematically consistent/complementary). And having peeled away several layers of resistance, I find the record thrilling. Its expressive enthusiasm gives me the same good feeling I used to get from their musical godmothers in Fanny--a sense of possibility that might touch women who are turned off by more explicit politics, and that these women are strong enough to put into practice. (Grade: A-)