John Foxx – Metamatic

John Foxx's debut album, synthetically speaking, is one of the truest in the genre's history - sounding so dehumanized and cold, separating itself from flesh and blood with surgeon's precision, definitely a new kind of man he sings about in one of the songs - the contents so clinical, the synthesizer is more of a scalpel.

While its sound is so 1980, 'Metamatic' offers a fine palette of childishly morbid sound experiments, observed in a pop context, crafted well ahead of its time. The involvement of producer Gareth Jones here, speaks for itself in that respect. Both, drum machine and melody proudly display their black and white sharp teeth, minimalism at its finest. The only human presence is in modest but effective bass sounds played by Jake Durant.

Each piece here is a hit single in itself - while the album's most considerable example of 'Under' still enjoys massive exposure, pieces like 'Plaza', extraordinary 'Metal Beat' standing up perfect to its title, featuring amazing 'kling-klang' sounds (in a way a necessary ode to Kraftwerk, while at the same time think Front 242 and Depeche Mode some years away from their own synthetic epiphany), equally brilliant 'He's a Liquid' and 'Blurred Girl' are just several examples in a row that provide the album's perfect synthetic geometry.

Listening to it, one can feel how frustrated Foxx might have been during his Ultravox days - during their original line up, Ultravox were flirting with futurism but their use of synthetics at that point was still too obscured by real instruments. I guess, the group's 'Hiroshima Mon Amour' was the obvious click inspiring Foxx more than others, who became obsessed with creating a purely autocratic, synthesized solo record. And being so, 'Metamatic' is the result.

'Touch and Go', the original album's closing number contains a melody line identical to the Ultravox song 'Mr. X' - it is said elsewhere, none of the two camps credit each other in any of these songs. Lyrically speaking, both seem to be unpleasant farewell notes (Warren Cann speaks coldly in 'Mr. X'; "I think I know who he is... Mr. X", the name referring to an unknown, irrelevant but intriguing character in their own story, while Foxx goes more angrily with "Just whose face is this and could we ever be friends?"

Ironically, both Foxx and Ultravox's musical stylings didn't differ much at this point. Albeit purely synthetic, Foxx still flirted with the group's typical string-slide variations into his own songs. This is especially evident in one of the CD's additions to the original album - his earlier track called 'Young Love'.

And speaking of this particular 1993 CD re-issue, some of the extra material on it doesn't fit either stylistically or chronologically. For some reason, instead of adding more relevant material that came around the time of the original 1980 release (a double 7" single 'No-One Driving' for instance) besides two lonesome examples chosen ('Film One' and '20th Century'), Virgin confusingly placed transitional pieces like 'Miles Away' and 'A Long Time' on the playlist, both conceptually drifting away from the clinical coolness of 'Metamatic' and also 'Swimmer 1', the obscure 1981 b-side to one of the singles from the following album 'The Garden'. In all these three songs, the Ultravox trademark sound is more present than anything Foxx achieved on his debut album. 'Miles Away' is the weakest song here, lost somewhere between a childishly clichéd Gary Numan wanna-be and Ure-era Ultravox.

Later 2xCD remaster by Edsel Records corrects this mistake with a far more proper presentation of bonus material. Still, no matter which edition you stumble upon, 'Metamatic' alone is worth possession, a true masterpiece, despite some tiny limitations - these limitations address mostly Foxx's vocals which can be exaggerating in order to achieve robotic perfection.