I have been reading through some josh blog archives and I saw to my horror that Josh slipped the Divine Comedy’s milky “Generation Sex” past me at the end of a month. Now then, I came to NYLPM to praise Josh and not to diss him, but there is a lesson to be learned here and that is that if you do not listen to enough indie pop you will have no way of telling the good from the bad.
And “Generation Sex” is really very very bad – it’s a masterpiece compared to the rest of Fin De Siecle (“National Express”!!!!), but it still seems trite to me, an unimaginative take on a subject which is half-interesting (that whole ‘hypersexualised society’ thing) but half old-hat (and is he really suggesting that only poor people cared about Princess Di’s death? How metropolitan of him).
As for the music – to me it sounds like a weak retread of the band’s previous, more successful, records. The rhythmic string-driven Nyman-style stuff was done with more wit, sense of proportion, emotional resonance (not to mention better tunes) on Promenade (“Bath”, “Geronimo”, “Tonight We Fly”) – “Gen Sex” sounds, like most of Neil Hannon’s post-hit work, like a man cashing in on his schtick.