Why don’t you welcome the new soul vision?
Remember Come on Eileen? That was pretty good, right? And the video with the band all dressed like hobos and that one girl wearing the overalls minus a shirt? That was some catchy, English oddness. But if, like me, you grew up in America you missed the band responsible’s highlight. Dexys Midnight Runners cycled through styles with the regularity of a revolvers chamber, each one worse than the last; from northern soul to celtic soulman music (I didn’t make that up, they did) to some kind of art pop bullshit (that one I coined myself). We missed their highpoint, which was their first joint,” Searching For The Young Soul Rebels”.
Kevin Rowland, Dexys singer, seems to have been a big-idea type guy. One of these people who decides whatever they do has to have a unifying vision. Like lyrics should match overalls, and your voice should match your body odor. These people tend to be full of shit but for this first album everything seemed to work. “Young Soul Rebels” is 12 songs long of Trotskyite, Irish Repulican undertoned literate jams. Yup. Sounds pretentious as hell, and it is. But they are some serious jams. Dressed all in donkey jackets and watch caps (cuz they were working class, y’all. For the moment.) Dexys managed to take all this art school bullshit and make it rock like a mother fucker.
Like another critic mentioned way back when this came out, this is not soul music. None of it is about fucking, most of it isn’t even about dancing. Mostly it’s about politics and books and general clever pantsness, stuff that Rowland was into at the moment, just before he felt the band should be into dressing like farmers. This album is not soul, not even northern soul, it is some kind communist art project soul. It is pretentious and entirely premeditated. But for all that it’s also fucking brilliant as hell.
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