Ultravox!

Sound DNA

• Electronic
• Synth-Pop / New Wave

• synthetic
• anxious
• art school

About

If the languid “I Want to Be a Machine” and the androgynously confused “My Sex” didn’t foreshadow early-’80s electronic music and the techno that would later motor out of Detroit, then the world is flat. In fact, this 1977 debut takes us on an early pop-art cross-cultural drive worthy of David Bowie, from the low roads of William Burroughs and The New York Dolls (“Wide Boys”) to rocksteady ganja by way of Carson McCullers (“The Lonely Hunter”) to the high road of <i>Metropolis</i> (“Saturday Night in the City of the Dead”) and F. Scott Fitzgerald (“The Wild, the Beautiful & the Damned”). And it’s fitting that Brian Eno produced this, because Ultravox was all about the low-life/high-art glam and Roxy Music. Singer/lyricist John Foxx fronted Ultravox with his pleasing and tempered croon (with some Bryan Ferry–style diction) until 1980, when Midge Ure came aboard and the band went headlong into Europlatinum status. Many prefer the Foxx-era Ultravox, with its youthful art-school sneers and raw synths and big punk guitars and punk-hated violin.

via Apple Music

Tracklist

Credits