Thursday, December 02, 2021

Eschewing modesty for exuberant pop, The Modesty Blaise returned in 2021!


As we head into December and I am finally fully caught up on listening to all the 2021 releases that have come my way, I'm revisiting music I listened to waaaaaaay back at the beginning of the year to see how it holds up without any recency bias. Which brings us to Modesty Blaise's fist album in over 20 years, The Modesty Blaise, released last March. 

Fist of all, this is all very 1998 Britpop-sounding, which is oddly comforting but hardly surprising given the two decades of down time between LPs.* 

And the songs on The Modesty Blaise are exquisite, whether featuring whirring mixes of bass, horns, and whizzing synths on something like "Catwalk Queens," or getting downright glittery retro on something like "Rollerdisco." But overall this is a work of pristinely produced pop, much of it the jangly variety but with plenty of fuzz thrown in to keep things rockin'.

So does it still hold up? Hell yeah!



*And, you know, they are British.

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