NYC 1978-1979

Album review

Model Citizens were a new wave band formed in 1978 by four students from Columbia University who were studying fine art, and if there ever was a prototypical new wave art students band, it was these folks. Aggressively angular and eccentric at every turn, Model Citizens' songs were full of choppy, turn-on-a-dime rhythms, instrumentation that jumped back and forth between melodic and atonal, male vocals (from guitarist Tomek Lamprecht and multi-instrumentalist Steven Alexander) that were theatrical and mannered, and female vocals (from violinist and keyboard player Eugenie Diserio and percussionist Gloria Richards) that were theatrical and over the top, suggesting the Yoko Ono influence the B-52's embraced and taking it to the next level. The group's blend of new wave pop, serialism, minimalism, and weirdness for its own sake was brilliantly executed, and it's not hard to see why they made fans of Philip Glass (they appeared on a bill with him at Carnegie Hall) and John Cale (who signed them to his Spy label and produced their sole release during their run, a four song 7-inch called Shift the Blame). After many years out of print, the Shift the Blame material has been reissued as part of NYC 1978-1979, a 2023 anthology that presents the studio material along with twelve live tracks from their frequent New York club gigs during the band's two-year lifespan. Heard from a remove of more than 40 years, Model Citizens sound like they borrowed a lot of ideas from Talking Heads and the B-52's, as well as anticipating the noisy experiments of the nascent No Wave scene, and while the band's skill and ambition is commendable, they're the kind of group that will either strike you as bold and creative or unfortunately pretentious, depending on your tastes, though there are moments here that make clear those things are not mutually exclusive. (The group also had the wisdom to add a rock rhythm section by the time they started gigging seriously, and bassist Billy Robertson and drummer Robert Medici give the music an excellent foundation that holds the many conflicting elements in place.) The members of Model Citizens went on to other better-known bands, including Polyrock and the Dance, and even when the artier conceits of this music are a bit hard to take, they were a group with no fear of taking chances and taking the musical road not taken. NYC 1978-1979 contains plenty of clever, powefully original music that deserved to be rescued from the dustbin of history.

© Mark Deming /TiVo