Don't You (Forget About Me) (Live in the City of Angels)

Album review

For six years this was a creative and interesting Scottish band that used synths in artistic ways to go with Jim Kerr's Roxy Music-like yearning, poetic vocals to forge lovely, danceable, moody soundscapes full of promise, enchantment, and sinewy shadows. So now they get to do a hit song for a bad movie, and they suddenly turn into every cliché you've ever heard, complete with Kerr doing what he said only last year he never would: singing the word "baby" in a pop song (repeatedly at that!). They didn't write this song, but it's their name on it and they recorded it, and sure enough this awful garbage is heard everywhere after no one in the U.S. ever played one of the band's great songs outside of nightclubs. Sorry Jim, this is obviously the most forgettable thing you've done so far. Hopefully the next LP will make this look as asinine as it is, a bad one-off, but experience tells us that once you open Pandora's box, you can't close it again, especially if it yields sales instead of ridicule.

© Jack Rabid, The Big Takeover /TiVo