What’s that fetid stench? A-ha! It’s this album! It smells like sixty pounds of rotting porbeagle! Fumigate the damn thing! Then fumigate the stereo! Hell, fumigate the whole house! And while you’re doing it, ask yourself this—what have we ever done to Norway to deserve this?
Hailing from beautiful Oslo, the capital of the Lake of the Midnight Sun, this frigid synthpop trio did the seemingly impossible—made fellow Scandinavians ABBA look like an R&B act. But A-Ha’s lack of human warmth wasn’t their biggest problem As their 1985 debut LP Hunting High and Low demonstrates, the band’s music was generic and could have been produced by any number of synthpop bands whose songs sound the same to me. Put them in a police line-up with their synthpop contemporaries and you’d be out of luck. Flock of Seagulls, different story—that stupid haircut would give them away.
But to kids coming of age in the mid-’80s—especially those of the female demographic—Scandinavia’s favorite sons were more than synthesizer knob twiddlers and drum and bass programmers—they had personality. Sex symbols in fact, due to their good looks and vocalist Morten Harket’s ability to sound like someone whose big romantic heart has just been shattered into a million pieces. They were also real clothes horses and had that mid-’80s pretty boy look down flat. They owned that damn look.
Look, I lied when I said they have less soul than ABBA. Actually, the opposite is true. You can detect a smidgeon of soul in Harket’s yearning vocals, though I suspect he has to be injected with a drop or two of Marvin Gaye’s blood before he opens his mouth. What Harket produces, the more I think about it, is a plastic reproduction of David Bowie’s plastic soul, which puts you at two moves from the real thing. Whether that’s fascinating or cause for mass panic is yours to decide.
The songs? The bulk of them are annoyingly chipper, and work variations on the theme of frosty romanticism. Most will find the upbeat songs on Hunting High and Low infectious. And by most I’m not referring to those who fall into the subspecies of the human animal who love the programmed drum wing of New Wave. I’m talking lots of people. Even I find some of the songs on Hunting High and Low infectious, although I hope they come up with a vaccine. What bothers me most about A-Ha is their earnestness. The Let’s Dance David Bowie of the mid-’80s appalled me, but I never got the idea he bought into his own shtick. He was, as always, wearing a mask. A-Ha weren’t wearing a mask—they meant what they were singing.
What strikes out to as I listen to Hunting High and Low are the touches that differentiated A-Ha from their 125 clones. The pathetic pleading opening lines (“Please don’t hurt me…”) that make “And You Tell Me” so hilarious. The mock Gregorian chant that opens “Here I Stand and Face the Rain.” The crossword puzzle symbolism of “Train of Thought,” which is a protest against conformity from a band of crass conformists. The fascinating lyrics (“Please don’t ask me to defend/The shameful lowland/Of the way I’m drifting/Gloomily through time”) of “The Sun Always Shines on T.V.” The impossibly high notes Harket hits on the Morrissey-school “Living a Boy’s Adventure Life.” But what strikes me most is the way every single song on Hunting High and Low is a potential hit single I would hate, which is a remarkable achievement when you think about it. They hate me for some reason and it’s personal.
1985 was probably the worst year of my lifetime in terms of music. There was a reason I subsisted almost totally on a diet of the Minutemen, the Meat Puppets, Hüsker Dü, and X. New wave—and synthpop in particular—seemed to have conquered the world. David Bowie had gone over to the dark side, Goth rock and its offshoots frightened me, and the haircuts were advertisements for baldness. The Hindus believe we live in the age of Kali Yuga, the worst of all ages, and that it will last a disheartening 420,000 years. If you could press those 420,000 years down to one year, you’d have 1985. And A-Ha is as good a representative of 1985 as anyone.
GRADED ON A CURVE:
D-
