Revanche
Music Man (Atlantic 19245)

This Village People knockoff was released in 1979 and isn't nearly as bad as it should be. I bought it for the cover, which features three navy men standing in front of a chain-link fence behind which, another sailor is making out with a prostitute.

Anytime an album features "the pier" as its main image I'll plunk down my fifty cents. Toss in titles like "You Get High in N.Y.C." and "1979 It's Dancing Time," and it sounds to me like a real winner.

Revanche means "revenge" in French and I can only assume someone was trying to get revenge at Jacques Morali for raking in all that money on gimmicky disco. "We'll show him!" scream the Italian producers in Italian. "We make gimmicky disco too!" Well, they showed him, alright.

"You Get High in N.Y.C." is a ripoff of the Village People's "San Francisco (You Got Me)," but don't let that stop you from breathing the pungent amyl nitrate that wafts from your turntable as soon as the needle hits the groove. Not a bad song, actually, in terms of utterly forgotten disco non-classics.

"Revenge" fares quite a bit less well, trying to fuse "extreme" distorted guitars with TV sportscast synthesizers. The music is so bland that you can't remember the song even as you're listening to it. Nine minutes later, it's over and so is side 1. (Gotta love "albums" that have four 9-minute songs. I mean, the Grateful Dead have guitar solos longer than this whole album.)

Side 2 opens with "Music Man," which continues to unleash the synths. I'm not entirely sure it's not the same song as "Revenge," since I can't remember either one, and I'm listening to the former as I'm writing. Oh OK, this one has a bad sax solo, so they are different.

The album closes with the best track, "1979 It's Dancing Time." (I should point out here that I could probably written this exact same review without actually hearing the album.) The session vocalists get to belt out lines like "It's 1979, we're supermen," "Let's get all these mothers on the floor," and "It's 1979, you're doing your best."

You can almost see the producers grabbing at the one Italian-English dictionary in the studio, desperately trying to piece together lyrics so they can finish the album and go back to making counterfeit necklaces.

This is filler from beginning to end. Perfect for those "filler parties" everyone seems to be having these days. Man, what a waste of 36 minutes this was … I could have been working on my supposed novel.

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Review by Louis Purvis