Equatorial Ultravox Addendum

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It's little surprise that Jonquil's Hugo Manuel, working under the Chad Valley name for his solo efforts, found himself opening for Active Child around the time of Equatorial Ultravox's release -- like that act and various others around the world in the early 2010s, there's a strong sense that Valley aims to reinterpret a kind of never-never land of angelic male singing and electronic-driven arrangements that seems to recombine a variety of impulses from the '80s into a combination that never could have existed until a later moment. Thus "Acker Bilk" finds Valley singing with a stateliness and ease that could almost be Joe Cassidy of Butterfly Child but with a calm focus that well matches the elegant music. "I Want Your Love" skates around the lush neo-Balearic/beardo disco of recent years with Valley's angelic yet very male energy -- a sense of falsetto as siren call to whoever might respond --- driving the whole. The eternal playing out of a ghostly feeling of Auto-Tuned sleek disco resonates through "Fast Challenges," steady pulse turning into Hi-NRG celebration, while "Reach Lines" warps bits of that into a slow, bass-heavy crawl with funk-tinged keyboard lines, huge echoed female backing vocals, and a sense of melancholic robots slow dancing in a sunset. "Shell Suite" brings guitar to the fore as a nice touch for a final song, but the whole is a strikingly good debut effort and a further sign of how a new pathway for solo singer/songwriters via the electronic medium continues to open up. ~ Ned Raggett