Absolutely the Next Something

Album: Hothouse Flowers, People, 1988

Best Track: "Hallelujah Jordan"

Lasting Memory: I received this album from my sister Clair for either my birthday or Christmas in 1988. It was a well-informed choice, as I was definitely very much into the Celtic-tinged rock n' roll the Hothouse Flowers had to offer. It was also a very cool choice because, as my memory served to tell me, HHF had been tagged with the label of Greatest Unsigned Band in the World.

Two minutes of research preparatory to this post proved my memory wrong, which I suppose makes my memory a poor servant. That bastard.

The truth of the history is that HHF were signed to PolyGram in 1988, and the band had all the support it could ever want from fellow Irishman Bono. Still, I definitely appreciated getting People as a gift. The buzz around it was huge. I was cool just for holding it in my hot little hands.

With that kind of expectation, of course, how could People help but disappoint? There is nothing particularly wrong with the album, but it does manage to fail on the whole by overachieving in its parts. That is, each note played, sung, and arranged is well played, well sung, and well arranged. But when each of the notes are listened to at the same time, they create more noise than art.

I suppose it would accurate to write that People's problem is that it is overproduced. That is certainly true, but the statement fails as a global critique because it does not fully capture how the album stands as a monument to lack of imagination. Or, more specifically, how it stands as a monument to taking one good idea of how to craft a pop song -- start quiet and slow, build volume and speed through the verses, and end at the acme of a crescendo -- and beating it into the ground. To get a sense of how too much of this good thing becomes an unwelcome thing after a couple of songs, click through some of these People song samples.

The formula absolutely does work a couple of times. Apparently, HHF had a pretty big hit in Europe with "Don't Go," and the song "Hallelujah Jordan" is a great, slow-burning rafter-shaker. I just would have liked to hear some countersinking of screws, or even some tongue-and-grooving, instead of only the hammering HHF does on People.

I learned today that HHF is still a touring band. In the interest of learning whether the band had lived up to the "next big thing" label I thought they held at one time, I sampled a few of the songs from the albums that followed People. I gave HHF the benefit of the doubt. Since I'm not omniscient -- yet -- it could have happened that the band did become the next big thing without me noticing. Sadly, no.

That raises an age-old question about rock bands that peak with their first album: Was the debut the best they had to offer, or did the weight of expectations and the distractions of early success lead to repetition rather than growth? No one has ever adequately answered that question in the abstract or the particular. I'll put my mind to it once I am endowed with that omniscience. I don't know when that ill be, though. I'm not psychic, either.

Up Next: House of Freaks, Tantilla, 1989