THE MOTORS : TENEMENTS STEPS [VIRGIN - ESP 1980]

The Motors  "Tenements Steps"  LP

(Virgin)  1980  made in Spain

cat. num. I-201861

#new wave  #power pop

After the release of their second album, Approved by the Motors, the Motors were reduced to a duo after the departure of drummer Rick Slaughter Wernham and guitarist Bram Tchaikovsky. As most casual power pop and new wave fans know, Bram went on to slightly bigger and better things as a solo artist, taking the Motors' guitar-driven sound with him. Although the band had introduced keyboards on their second album, fans were not prepared for the synth sounds that dominated Tenement Steps, their third and final album. Although an enjoyable, if not entirely consistent, release, the duo of Nick Garvey(guitar/keyboards/vocals) and Andy McMaster (bass/guitar/keyboard/vocals) overextended their talents, creating an ambitiously over-produced album that sounded -- ambitiously overproduced! Garvey and McMaster were still great songwriters, but the songs got lost in a synthesized Spector-like wall of '80s sound. In other words, the Motors one-hit machine was running low on fuel. Keyboards seemed to drive the songs, with guitars added to the mix almost as an afterthought. For a debut album this would have been a fairly impressive feat, but for the Motors, it was step backwards while they were trying to make that crucial stop forwards. The triumphant "Love and Loneliness," the album's opener, remains one of the band's finest moments, although its chorus sounds suspiciously similar to Stephen Stills' "Love the One You're With." "That's What John Said," another of the album's three singles, is a standard rock & roll number dressed up in slick '80s production, and is one chord away from being fantastic. "Metropolis" (another single) and "Slum People" are average songs with overactive imaginations, awash in huge, swooping production trickery. "Here Comes the Hustler" would have been more welcome on this album had it not been released a year before as a B-side (with a slightly different mix). "Modern Man" is nearly unlistenable, sounding like a bad Flash and the Pan B-side and should be avoided at all costs. The title track is a huge success, both dramatic and melodic, with all the right bells and whistles in all the right places. Perhaps this should have been the formula that the album should have stuck with. With only eight songs, the album's batting average is far lower than it should have been.