Amongst the critical philosophical ideas introduced in the Enlightenment was that of fact-based reasoning. Whereas previously the discourse of truth had been dominated by organised religion, thinkers such as Voltaire, Rousseau and Bentham championed the discourse of science, and its reliance on analysis of facts, and deductive reasoning.
Two hundred-odd years later, and Talking Heads captured the Zeitgeist of post-modernist theory when it referred to facts as lazy, late, coming with a point of view and twisting the truth. With its own idiosyncratic take on the humble pop genre, Aleks And The Ramps appear to have some sympathy with such heretical observations.
Facts is a pop record, but it’s not really. It’s an electronic in places, but it isn’t really an electronic record. It’s a dance record, but you can’t really dance to it. It’s whimsical with a pervading sense of seriousness. It’s a circle with straight sides. It’s everything, nothing and all the little important bits in between. Crocodile jumps between kitchen knife-sharp melody and iconoclastic syncopation with ne’er a moment of contemplation; In The Snow embarks on a harmony-laden journey through romantic introspection with metaphor as obfuscating rhetorical tool. Icy Facts is cold, dramatic and enlightening, No Epiphanies does for sectarian awareness what Anthony Robbins does for corporate contemplation and Friends With The Right uses the Tom Tom Club’s Genius Of Love to ponder matters of ideological significance.
Over on side B, and Pray Tell has the orchestral wonder of a 1950’s musical directed by Jonathon Richman, Bummer is down and funky in a lithe white-kid sort of a way, the wiry melody at the heart of Here Comes Your Ghost warrants a national holiday, Finish is so beautiful it’d make Julia Gillard shed a tear and Middle Aged Unicorn On Beach With Sunset makes more sense of this crazy fucked up world every time you have the pleasure of listening to it. You can’t apply rational, scientific analysis to Facts: it is what it is, and it’s fantastic because of that.
BY PATRICK EMERY
Best Track: Crocodile
If You Like These, You’ll Like This: TALKING HEADS, MODERN LOVERS
In A Word: Fantastic
