Crash – Ava Vox (reviewed by Dave Franklin)

Crash! Wow, it’s like someone has gone back and remixed everything great about the eighties. Or, you know when film studios edit a film themselves and it is only years later that the director gets to put out the version of the film just as they envisaged it in the first place? Well, sounds like the Director’s Cut of the 80’s just as the Gods of Music always intended it to sound.

Not that it’s derivative or plagiaristic, far from it, but I bet you could have a fair stab at what you might find in Elaine Hannon aka Ava Vox‘s record collection. Take some synth washes, a growling, Killing Joke-esque bassline and the same sort of dance-rock backbeat that they wielded better than anyone else (until now ..obvs), Souixsie’s haunting pop-goth chanson, a chorus with more hook than a Peter Pan convention and a groove so deep that you could lose a house in it, and there you have it. Epic, infectious and awesome!

People tend to look back at the eighties as some Day-Glo pop party, all shoulder pads and leg-warmers and make nostalgic TV shows about it as a veiled excuse to keep president talking heads Paul Morley and Cheryl Baker in paid work. Well, this song is more representative of my eighties than anything that such shows will suggest. Then again, I spent half the decade stood in a muddy field sporting a “Coal Not Dole” T-shirt watching New Model Army, so what would I know?