List | B | Bronski Beat | 'Age Of Consent' CD 1984

Track:	Name:	Time:
1.	Why?	4:04
2.	Ain't Necessarily So	4:43
3.	Screaming	4:16
4.	No More War	4:00
5.	Love And Money	5:11
6.	Smalltown Boy	5:03
7.	Heatwave	2:40
8.	Junk	4:19
9.	Need A Man Blues	4:19
10.	I Feel Love	6:01
11.	I Feel Love Medley With Marc Almond	8:21
12.	Run From Love Re-mix From 'Hundreds And Thousands'	8:15
13.	Hard Rain Re-mix From 'Hundreds And Thousands'	7:56
14.	Memories	2:57
15.	Puit D'Amour	1:42
16.	Heatwave Re-mix From 'Hundreds And Thousands'	5:46
	Total	79:33

Comments:

Classic synth pop; this is what synth pop was like when I grew up. Of course, I hated it at the time, being into heavy metal. It took me quite some time and effort to track down this album several years after it was released, but fortunately they re-released it in 1996 and a friend of mine could track it down somewhere across the big pond in the great big country in the west (and I don't mean Norway). Thanks for your trouble, Mike :-)

What I had no idea about back in '84 was that this was very much a political album, mostly about gay rights but also other issues, like war and super-consumption. Jimmy Somerville in particular has always (to my knowledge) been very outspoken regarding gay rights and homosexuality, which has probably helped synth pop in general getting a 'gay' labelling by people disliking it ("faggot-music"), something that deterred me when I was at that age. Now I can listen to and enjoy good music whether it's 'gay' or not.

The music is, apart from being very nicely arranged synth pop, benefitting a great deal from Jimmy's very characteristic voice. I'm not normally very fond of men singing in falsetto (my favourite male voices include Andrew Eldritch, Freddie Wadling, Jean-Luc DeMeyer and E Graham Lewis), but in this case it sounds really good. Jimmy left the band after this album (and eventually formed The Communards, who were to be more commercially successful than Bronski Beat), and while still rather good (what little I've heard) it was very much unlike this album since Jimmy's voice carries the music so well.

A few of the extra tracks of this re-release were taken from the remix album 'Hundreds And Thousands', which was infinitely much easier to find than this album, most likely since it's not nearly as good. Some of the remixes are OK (like those present on this album), but the mixes of 'Why' and 'Smalltown Boy' were just not what I'd call good remixes. I didn't want to waste my money on some half-good ones when I could find the real thing.

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