My Top 20 albums from 1979 No 20

The Fine Art Of Surfacing (1979)
The Boomtown Rats
Tracklist
1 Someone's Looking At You 2 Diamond Smiles
3 Wind Chill Factor (Minus Zero) 4 Having My Picture Taken
5 Sleep (Fingers' Lullaby) 6 I Don't Like Mondays
7 Nothing Happened Today 8 Keep It Up
9 Nice 'N' Neat 10 When The Night Comes
Thematically, paranoia rears its nasty head an awful lot here: in "Someone's Looking at You," "Nothing Happened Today" and the schizophrenic exhibitionism of "Having My Picture Taken." This is especially true in "I Don't Like Mondays," the Boomtown Rats' controversial British smash in which the ostentatious wash of violins strikes a soap-operatic contrast with the unsettling notion of a young girl shooting people and blaming it on a day of the week.

A certain artistic paranoia also permeates The Fine Art of Surfacing, this Irish band's third album. Having mastered the finer art of making postpunk hits on A Tonic for the Troops by perpetrating a mockery of various pop icons, disguising perversely simple hooks in a flurry of rowdy R&B riffs and spotlighting Bob Geldof's vocal looning, the Rats now try to prove they're made of more serious stuff, only to take a few lumps for their hubris.

In "Wind Chill Factor (Minus Zero)," these guys are so busy displaying their trump cards (the snap of drummer Simon Crowe's percussive undertow, the crackle of Garry Roberts' and Gerry Cott's guitars, the exuberant pop of the vocal harmonies) that the song is left eating the dust of its own hyperkinetic arrangement. Geldof even has the cheek to rewrite "Rat Trap." A Tonic for the Troops' backalley scenario, as "When the Night Comes." Here, the unaffecting tale of an office romance is loaded down with Spanish-sounding guitar breaks and street-corner finger snapping that are completely inappropriate to the subject matter.

But there's no denying the spirit with which Geldof and the Boomtown Rats go about their Bowieesque business. Striking a variety of poses somewhere between the manic overacting of Sparks and the jock-rock cool of Thin Lizzy, the Rats pull every trick they know: reggae-dub sound effects, Shangri-Las choruses and, at the end of "Sleep (Fingers' Lullaby)," the Gothic vocal riff from the Beatles' "Blue Jay Way." Then they dare you to spot the influences while tapping a foot to the frantic beat of "Nice 'n' Neat" or "Nothing Happened Today." As a lyricist, Geldof may be glib, but he can deploy a potentially horrific couplet like "We'd take a recipe for religion And bring it to the theological kitchen" with such self-parodying panache that the usual charges of insincerity don't quite hold water.

In fact, much of the Boomtown Rats' smarmy charm comes from an elusiveness that defies categorization because it draws from dozens of sources but embraces none. Indeed, there's so much going on during The Fine Art of Surfacing that you have to come up for air more than once. Yet as an adventure in pop art, it's always worth another plunge. (RS 311)

Featured Tracks
Someone's looking At You
I Don't Like Mondays