What is the best number on "The Pleasure Principle"?

It's gotta be "Metal", at least for me.

It's still amazing to me how so many people in the U.S. still view Numan as a novelty act, "the guy who did Cars". Even self-proclaimed music-obsessives with otherwise decent taste often have no idea that he did anything else of note.

To be fair, it was Numan's sole major US hit. Kind of like how Dexy's Midnight Runners is just the band that did "Come On Eileen."

yeah i didn't know anything outside of "eileen" til i found ilx. i figured most music nerds were at least somewhat familiar with tubeway army.

Tracks - the desolated emotional core of the whole autistic experience.

another great album that i'm surprised hasn't been polled until now.

i voted for "m.e." -- there's something oddly touching about this story of the last machine left on earth and in its death throes. not to mention that it has an absolutely killer motorik beat, synth riffs, and muffled morse-code synth bursts.

I didn't like "Complex" before, but I love it now. My vote for that one, although there are other great tracks here too.

Metal

Tracks - the desolated emotional core of the whole autistic experience.

― moley, Monday, March 2, 2009 10:54 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark

^^^^^^^

I thought this album was dull and insular coming after the gaudy and sensationally dystopian 'Replicas.' Quite parallel to the sickening progression from 'Aja' to 'Gaucho.' But I loved 'Telekon' and much of 'Dance.' The album cover is splendid, it still makes me laugh out loud. It's perfectly autistic, the very same tableau seen on 'Presence,' with something missing - but what was it? Oh right, those other people... wait, don't tell me - MY FAMILY! Never mind, I love this red illuminated pyramid thing. Maybe I'll marry it.

There's a brilliant line by UK critic David Quantick about that cover: "All the usual pop obsessions are her: sex (the title), loss of identity (the reflective table), restrcition (say, there's no door here!). But it's Gary's gaze that makes the whole thing so miraculously corny, so resplendent with true British pretension. Gary's looking at the pyramid like he's half in love with it. He's making a Statement About Technology - like: it's alluring, sure, but it might take me over!"

That's a sharp suit he's wearing though. Nice.

It's hard to beat "Cars," but "Complex" maybe does it. Remarkable that "Cars" is the 2nd-to-last track on the album - in my experience labels are keen to put the single early in the sequence.

METAL

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

I cast my lot with "Cars", a justified hit if I ever heard one. Numan is a strange, tragic figure. Genre-defining stuff in the early 80s (the double-reissue of Replicas / The Plan would be on my short list for the single most definitive New Wave document), but then years of declining inspiration, to the point where I think he bought his last new drum loop in 1993, and his real-album-to-comp/live/reissue/etc. ratio has dwindled deep into the fractions. Somehow Scott Walker stole Numan's middle-age.

I saw him live when this record came out, and he opened the show by driving onstage in a little pyramid car with his head poking out the top!...(I figured that was his response to Rob Halford and his Harley)...

oh, and "Engineers"...'cos all they know is hate and machinery...(that could be a line from a Nitzer Ebb song)...

Looking forward to seeing the man on Saturday.

Metal w Engineers a close second. And let's not forget Airlane, which is a sweet opener if there ever were one.

I agree with Glenn -- "Cars" was his one-hit-wonder hit for a really good reason. (Parody from Detroit AOR station at the time: "Here in the bars/I feel safest of all/I get drunk as a skunk/And throw up on the walls/In bars.") Still like Replicas way more than this LP, and never much cared about anything he did after this LP. Honestly had no idea more than a tiny devoted cult did care about him after that, until I saw all his fans on ILM.

I've rarely been as dumbfounded as when I saw the crowd (both its size and its composition) outside the venue he played in Cambridge 4 or 5 years ago. How do people younger than me find out about him? In such numbers?

know what's weird? I can't remember if I saw a documentary about numan's career or was just reading his wiki article and watching youtube clips and my brane converted this into a memory... but his story is pretty interesting.

I have almost all his albums. All of them are interesting and several of them are awesome.

Numan has Asperger syndrome, an autism spectrum disorder which causes restricted social and communication skills. In a 2001 interview, he said: "Polite conversation has never been one of my strong points. Just recently I actually found out that I'd got a mild form of Asperger's syndrome which basically means I have trouble interacting with people. For years, I couldn't understand why people thought I was arrogant, but now it all makes more sense."

"Cars" was his one-hit-wonder hit for a really good reason.

He wasn't a one-hit wonder in the UK though. He had quite a few hits over several years.

Can't believe I've never heard this album, and I know some Numan freaks.

'Metal' is the best track here, no question.

M.E.

Really tricky but I'm going to vote 'Films' because no-one else is and I just love the beginning (and the rest of it but especially the beginning).
Second would be 'Metal' - third 'Cars'.

Numan was a one-hit wonder in the states in the same sense that John Cougar was a one-hit wonder in the UK. Some things just don't translate too well across the seas. But he's had about 20 top 40 hits in the UK, the most recent one about five years ago with Rico.

The thing that always stuck out for me about 'Complex' was that bizarre glide upwards to the wrong note on the viola (or is it a violin?) after each verse. The music rises up to resolve the dissonance after one very odd bar, and then the viola does a little flourish the first time around as if to say either 'move on people, nothing to see here' or maybe 'I mean to do that, ha!'. Now it's only a dissonance relative to the simple quasi-Indian scale Numan liked to use almost exclusively right up to about 1984, but it's there and boy, does it stick out.

There's more viola weirdness on a later track, 'She's Got Claws' from 1981. He must like his string parts to yowl a bit.

i still think telekon is the best thing numan has ever done.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

I voted for 'Tracks,' but now I feel bad for 'Cars.' (sobs despondently into fluffy red stuffed pyramid).

Don't feel bad for "Cars". Great song, but it gets enough love.

Can't believe I've never heard this album, and I know some Numan freaks.

I would like to get in touch with these Numan freaks.

i feel bad for "films" (even though i didn't vote for it, either) simply b/c of that great, ominous opening.

Of the two zero vote tracks, Observer is the coldest of all the cold tracks, even colder than metal, and the apotheosis of the Asperger's position lyrically speaking. It's a great track, very brutalist on the drums and synths, as if each bar riff is a plank in an unopposable argument. The other one, 'Conversation' may be as close as he ever got to a musical journey in one track - it's long for pre-dance Gary Numan, and has a creepily fuck-off middle eight, where once again the lyrics and the riffs match each other for unopposable finality. Some Numanoids I know nominate this one as their favourite ever Numan track.

A great album in fact - but many Numanoids will agree that with this one he's looking to distill the pop essence of what he does, which contibutes to the chilliness of the whole. Replicas, Dance and I Assassin were all much warmer, even where they were at their most autistic. The nu-est Numan albums are warmer still, but the inky antichristian blackness, approaching the black spirituality of black metal, remains. But no, I'm not going to see him live. I've heard enough Gary Numan for one lifetime.

"i still think telekon is the best thing numan has ever done."

Replicas! is. the best thing. he did. then maybe this album. then maybe telekon. then maybe the tubeway army album. then i, assassin. then dance. then i stop listening. i don't think i ever even made it to the second side of the fury. though i love the cover.

The man who lost it all at Monte Carlo.

I downloaded this yesterday thanks to this thread. It's great! Pashmina's opening precis is pretty spot on.

Are the Tubeway Army albums as good?

I can't comment if they are AS good but they are worthwhile, imo.

I'll check them out once I've listened to this a few more times. He's got such an odd voice, reminiscent of Bowie at his most ridiculously affected, only Numan seems incapable of turning it off. Fittingly he sometimes sounds a bit like a malfunctioning robot.

Replicas! is. the best thing. he did. then maybe this album. then maybe telekon. then maybe the tubeway army album. then i, assassin. then dance. then i stop listening.

this is me, exactly. except i might go tubeway = telekon.

I, Assassin is my favorite, but I have a soft spot for the effortless fretless funk jams of Pino Palladino.

Telekon is probably my #2, but only if you include the single "I Die: You Die" (which is on the CD reissue).

Dance is a tough cookie--not so easy to digest, that one. But it's certainly interesting. And "She's Got Claws" has one of Mick Karn's best bass lines.

Warriors is underrated, in my opinion. Yes, it's cheesy and has lots of sax and slap bass, but it still has excellent synth sounds, as well as some Bill Nelson e-bow. The songs are there, and it's still very Numan. Things drop way off after that album, though, and, honestly, I don't think anything past 1984 is even worth hearing (I own it all...).

I haven't listened to Pleasure Principle in ages, somehow. I'll try to pull it out again so that I can participate in the poll!

ha ha moley, you out yourself so. we all do

1994 was a BOLD year to be sampling numan & I loved it

& just to chime in, everything up to 'I Assassin' is solid, I love half of 'Warriors', two songs on 'Berserker' & I love the cover of 'The Fury' and that's when I stopped paying import prices. that seems like thread consensus!

np: his cover of 'on broadway'

I love Dance a lot, maybe best. I also thought his '94 album, Sacrifice, was hugely underappreciated at the time (insofar as I didn't know anybody else who heard it or cared to) but I haven't heard it in years so I'm not sure how I'd fell about it now.

I'm with milton/the consensus too - I tailed off round about Beserker - but unlike most of you rejoined around Sacrifice. I'm one of the few fans here of Jagged - I really like the dark sandstorm of that record, and the return of extreme Numan sturctural obsessiveness, where every track follows the same principles. However if I recall correctly, there are complaints that nothing on that record really rocks out, and that is certainly true. I want more rock out Numan, for sure, and the less like NIN he sounds the better as far as my tastes are concerned. I'd rather he started taking a few hints from say Celtic Frost.

Hang on, I started listening again around Pure, not Sacrifice. A little further on into his comeback. News spreads slowly to the colonies.

i like sacrifice the best of all of numan's post-i, assassin records -- it still sounds fresh, literally like someone given a second lease on life and squeezing it for all it's worth (which is pretty much close to the truth re numan's career).