As Bananarama\u2019s breakthrough here in the States, Bananarama <\/i>is a thought provoking album about life that manages to share some insights about fame in the process. Tony Swain and Steve Jolley are much improved in their production abilities this time around, so much so that it is hard believe this came only one year after Bananarama\u2019s clunky debut album, Deep Sea Skiving<\/i>. While that effort may have had its charming moments, it\u2019s nothing compared to this sophomore release. <\/p>\n
The fan favorite \u201cCruel Summer\u201d starts off the album on an all-too-familiar note. It holds up as a single, but it just isn\u2019t representative of the other material to follow. If anything, it is the Bananarama sound of old. \u201cRough Justice\u201d is the sound of Bananarama being totally revamped; as the first Bananarama song that really made me drop everything, sit up and listen, \u201cRough Justice\u201d finds the female trio getting serious for a change. It has an important message about child abuse, features great instrumentation and ends up being the best track on the album. The child theme continues with the magical closing ballad, \u201cThrough A Child\u2019s Eyes.\u201d <\/p>\n
Recently re-released after being out of print for far too long, Bananarama <\/i>now includes the forgotten single \u201cThe Wild Life\u201d from the movie of the same name. This is an added bonus to an already superlative package. Also to be found is the passable yet overlong song about drug abuse, \u201cHot Line To Heaven,\u201d and the single about meeting their matinee idol Robert DeNiro for the first time, \u201cRobert DeNiro\u2019s Waiting.\u201d Another favorite of mine is the peppy throwback tribute to the girl groups of a bygone era, \u201cDream Baby.\u201d <\/p>\n
The two songs that could possibly be labeled as filler are the primitive sounding \u201cKing Of The Jungle\u201d and the over-the-top \u201cState I\u2019m In,\u201d which can only be described as the theme to Girls Gone Wild<\/i>. It\u2019s no wonder that one of the girls, Siobhan Fahey, would grow tired of performing such lightweight and forgettable pop fare and move on to bigger and better things in forming the far more substantial duo Shakespeare\u2019s Sister. It also didn\u2019t hurt when she married musical genius, David A. Stewart of Eurythmics fame. <\/p>\n
After Siobhan left, Keren and Sarah would attempt to continue on without her, but things went pretty much downhill from that point on. With the possible exception of their No. 1 hit \u201cVenus\u201d in 1986, this is as good as it ever got for Bananarama. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":57,"featured_media":28705,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"tags":[],"artist":[7852],"rating":[5613],"class_list":["post-40197","review","type-review","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","artist-bananarama","rating-rating-a-minus"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/40197","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/review"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/57"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=40197"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/40197\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/28705"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=40197"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=40197"},{"taxonomy":"artist","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/artist?post=40197"},{"taxonomy":"rating","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/rating?post=40197"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}