The debut album from Neon Neon (Gruff Rhys & Boom Bip). Guests include Spank Rock, Fat Lip, Har Mar Superstar, Cate Le Bon and the first official release from Yo Majesty.
Stainless Style is a genre-crossing, retro-futuristic concept album about the extraordinary life of 20th Century playboy and car maker John Delorean, the man responsible for the gull-winged stainless steel vehicle featured in the Back to the Future films.
Review:
Reduced to a cold, hard synopsis, Neon Neon's Stainless Style sounds
like a joke. A collaboration between Super Furry Animals singer/songwriter
Gruff Rhys and Los Angeles underground hip-hop/electronic producer Boom Bip,
Neon Neon sounds like an unlikely pair on paper and they've made their
partnership even stranger by creating a concept album about John DeLorean, the
automobile industry maverick who was as notorious for his futuristic designs as
for his 1982 arrest for drug trafficking, a charge he later beat yet which gave
him a stigma he couldn't shake. It's a quintessential '80s tragedy which
provides Neon Neon an opportunity to craft a quintessentially '80s tribute,
something they deliver with startling accuracy on Stainless Style. Apart from
the cuts where Spank Rock, Yo Majesty and Fatlip are brought in – their
presence dictates a harder, modern production from Boom Bip – the album is so
precise in its re-creation of the gleaming glitz of the go-go Reaganomics era
that it could be mistaken as a relic from 1983, but the remarkable thing about
Stainless Style is that there's not a sliver of irony underneath the cold
shimmer of all of its analog synths and chorused, echoed guitars. There is humor
here – sly, knowing humor, as there should be with offhand references to Star
Wars, Raquel Welch and Michael Douglas, along with deliberate allusions to early
electro and tight, tuneful new wave pop – but this isn't camp, as there's a
surprising melancholy flowing beneath the transparently shallow surfaces on
“I Told Her on Alderaan” and “Raquel.” Even with those trace elements
of sadness, Stainless Style is hardly a heavy album: there's just enough
weariness to the music to give it emotional pull, but the chief attraction of
this tight 12-track concept album is how Neon Neon has created an album that
isn't so much a straight-up replica of '80s excess as one that puts all of that
indulgence into perspective, both emotionally and musically.
All Music Guide – Stephen Thomas Erlewine