10. Royal TruxAccelerator
I discovered this band by reading an article about them in the NME of all places! Sometimes they would review things that were interesting. I bought that record, and then bought all the other records. The thing I loved about Accelerator though, was that it was just so loud, but also full of these pop hooks. It reminded me a bit of There’s A Riot Goin’ On, being played by a rock band or something! They have big choruses and loads going on in the music and these people trying to making an original-sounding pop record. It’s also about pop music as well, and television personalities and film stars. It’s a strange record that’s interested in the process of making records. They said that they’d made an album that was a tribute to the 60s called Thank You and then one for the 70s called Sweet 16, and then this was their tribute to the 80s. It doesn’t really sound like that, but they wanted it to maybe act like a tribute to the excesses of the 80s, and it came out as this like weird, heavily compressed, raw, funk record. I liked it so much that I then got to see them live on that Accelerator tour in Brighton, and it was one of the best shows I’ve ever seen. It was really interesting watching their dynamic.
