Audio CD review:
Steve Taylor - Meltdown

Steve Taylor - Meltdown

Band: Steve Taylor Title: Meltdown Rating: Release Date: 1984-01-01 Media: Audio CD Tracks: 1: Meltdown (At Madame Tussaud's) 2: We Don't Need No Colour Code 3: Am I in Sync? 4: Meat the Press 5: Over My Dead Body 6: Sin for a Season 7: Guilty by Association 8: Hero 9: Jenny 10: Baby Doe

seminal Christian New Wave album Taylor has always been a wit and a wordsmith, commanding a vocabulary and sense for rhyme matched by few. One of the seminal Christian New Wave albums, this disc (along with "Please Stand By" by Vector and the first, self-titled album by Mad At The World) will always command a special place in my heart. Here it's wedded to the synthesizers and hollow guitar which made this the beautiful product of 1984 that it was. Listen to the churning synthesizer lines of "Am I in Sync?", the crystalline ones of "Sin for a Season", and appreciate how glorious this music was. Taylor made it poignant as well. Though I'm an atheist now (and so much happier!), I still listen to this disc because it touches my heart-strings. My favorite of his catalogue. Other examples of the period I particularily enjoyed were Petra (Never say die, More power to ya, Not of this world), Rick Cua (Koo-Ah!), Daniel Amos (Horrendous disc) and then-current works by Daniel Band, Justus, Oracle and Jerusalem. In the early 80's, LONG before the Newsboys and dcTalk, good Christian rock was rare, but slowly becoming available. And I can't forget the REZ band. And Servant. I was never big on Stryper. Back to Taylor. His previous album, I want to be a clone, was groundbreaking. "Punchy" described it better than anything. Attitude. Production. It was quite raw, and this second LP fared better because of increased sophistication in production and concepts. The humour was still there, as in "Meat the Press" and "Meltdown (at Madame Tussauds)", as was the defiant attitude - "We don't need no Colour Code". But now we had a heart wrenching ballad in "Baby Doe". He was never an extremely strong vocalist, but made up for it in his quirky approach to getting his point across. It was (almost) pure entertainment. Not quite. Every song had something substantial to say. And nobody could say it the way he did. He made other efforts, both Christian and secular, seem quite lame by comparison, especially his Midwest contempories, who I also loved, such as Styx and Kansas (Were they Christian or not? No one knows for sure). Explore the rest of the discography. "On the Fritz" sure had its moments, as well as "I predict 1990". Perhaps a good place to begin is the 1994 two-disc compilation "Now the truth can be told", which includes (arguably) the better half or so of each of these four albums. Start there. Or here. You can see a complete list of all Steve Taylor discography, or go back to the Steve Taylor tabs