Talk Talk – The Party's Over

Not sure if this is the best pressing of this album because I'm sure it's not but this is something to definitely test your system out with. There's so much going on in this album!

With all of the songs that encom the album The Party’s Over, it’s interesting to note that Mark Hollis had penned those tracks for his previous band The Reaction, leaving me wondering if one should consider this to be a post-Reaction review or a Talk Talk review. Regardless, this is one of those albums that climbed the charts during the 80’s, at a time when most music fans found the musical landscape quite formidable, where I for one felt rather lost, even with the rock n’ roll that was coming out during those years.

Synth-Pop was the name of the game at the time, gone were actual instruments, with musicians feeling that electronic obsession was either the wave of the future, or that fans wouldn’t notice the difference. The Party’s Over was a rather interesting album for a moment, though how the band, even when shifting to a more Roxy Music style, managed to string five albums together over then years, all laced with their similar thematic take on surreal atmospheric album art is a bit beyond me. The record for all intent and purposes traveled down a rather dark path with its somberness, a reflection of modern society, where like the album’s artwork, wholly embraces a minimalist environment that for the most part held listeners at arms length, making the music sound rather inaccessible, sounding more like art from a picture frame come to life. Even so, while they weren’t alone in this aspect, Talk Talk’s songs were filled with torment and anxiety, to the point where over time the music became entirely too uncomfortable for most people.

Others will imply that Talk Talk were the masters of sophisticated synth rhythms, compelling minimalist musical structures and had a penchant for clever lyrics that today sound far too calculatedly clever … cleverness for the sake of cleverness, where they spirited themselves into a solitary dimension of all craft and no substance. One never gets the feeling of actual depth when it comes to this style of music, because for all intent and purposes, it’s rather flat and un-engaging, even with their attempts at being dramatic, what Talk Talk manage to deliver here is challenging, with no reward at the end of the journey for solving a puzzle no one was really interested in solving. But then I got the same feeling from bands like Spandau Ballet and Duran Duran. Without a doubt, many of these comparisons come from Colin Thurston (whom the band did not get along with very well), who not only produced this album, he was the sound engineer for David Bowie on Heroes, also producing the first two Duran Duran albums, along with a host of other bands from the time who sound remarkably alike.

The album is a total sell out of 80’s cheesiness, complete with a deep analog bass, plucky synth chords that are often unnecessarily large, along with an actual drummer, who also comes off larger than life, who seems not to know how to respond to this sort of musical presentation, being all over the record, seemingly without a comfortable place to live.

Synth-Pop should have fallen into obscurity, with the genre forgotten, but with the legacy, for whatever reason, of Talk Talk and other bands of its ilk, this synth-pop fashion seems to be taking root again, as if over the years it’s gained come credibility, with new bands rising, though I can’t help but think that these duos and combos are lacking something instrumentally, feeling the need to so heavily rely on synthesizers. In short, yes, I own this album, yet in the same breath, I’ve not played it since 1982, where I was never more glad to have the obsession run its course and be finished with.

*** The Fun Facts: The band’s name was taken from the song “Talk Talk Talk Talk,” records by Mark Hollis when he was with the band The Reaction.

Review by Jenell Kesler