One thing that annoys me is when people throw around the term “80s music” when they really mean “terrible chart pop that was the antithesis of what that decade was actually all about.” The eighties, the post-punk era, the formative years of indie, and the new pop revolution coalesced to create a brand of pop-rock, for want of a better term, that, for my money, has never been beaten. And if you want to know what that decade really sounded like, you could do much worse than give “Corpus Christi,” the new single from Le Concorde a spin or two.
The product of modern-day Los Angeles but capturing everything that was great about the 80s, “Corpus Christi” echoes with the sound of a host of brilliant UK bands, bands that formed my own formative, musical learning curve – bands such as Prefab Sprout and Echo and The Bunnymen, Tears For Fears and Aztec Camera.
Having adopted the term “sophisti-pop” for the sound that he makes, Stephen Becker puts an Anglo-centric musical posse through their paces and truly lives up to the expectations that such a phrase suggests. The song grooves and shimmers and shines, is spacious enough to let the light shine through and has infectiousness in spades.
Gently nostalgic for those of us old enough to remember but also brilliantly original, so much so that with his delicious music, Becker is sure to attract no small amount of new and younger fans too. Never has the past sounded so of the moment as it does here. Brilliant.
