Tag Archive for 'creepy'

Yes that’s Gary Numan looking like a thug there. There’s always been this slightly off-putting vibe about Gary Numan. Am I right, or am I wrong? Maybe thug fits the guy a little bit. Before I talk about Numan, unfortunately, I feel the need to complain about Pandora.

I’ve been using Pandora for a couple of months to try and track down new music. Whenever I get some time in my coffin, or have a serious period of digging to get through, I put Pandora on my iPhone and dial up some tunes. The most annoying thing about Pandora? They only play the hits, and often they’ll only play one song from any given artist. So you might get excited that Pandora is playing an obscure artist, but don’t get THAT excited, because you’re only going to hear the one song by that artist. That’s really annoying. Can we talk? Pandora isn’t supposed to be a music regurgitation service, it’s supposed to be a music discovery service. I can’t seem to get it to change its ways. Anybody with some advice can chime in on the comments, please.

OK back to Gary Numan and Jagged. As I was saying, Pandora has this bad habit of only playing the hits. On Jagged, that song is Halo. It’s a cool song, and when Gary Numan popped up on Pandora with a song off of an album released in 2006, I was kind of excited. I’ve been a Numan fan for a long time. But mostly his first handful of albums: Tubeway Army, Replicas, The Pleasure Principle, and Dance. I have to confess that in the intervening years I had lost track of Numan, and he was releasing albums the whole time.

Some fan I am.

So let’s talk about the album. The rest of the album is interesting, but I have mixed feeling about it. For one thing, fans of Gary Numan will know that his lyrics are legendary for being overwrought and melodramatic. With Jagged, Numan has turned that up to 11. I think that the only artist alive who I want to hear singing about his black heart is Robert Smith. OK so we got that out of the way. The other problem I have with this album is that it sounds like what would happen if Peter Gabriel did The Downward Spiral by Nine Inch Nails. It’s got the atmospheric industrial sound of Downward Spiral with the world beat thing that Gabriel is known for. Throw in some death metal guitar chops here and there and you’ve got Jagged. OK OK I’m generalizing in a criminal way here, but…

Am I the only one who remembers reading that Numan got arrested for menacing people on a subway with a baseball bat or something? All I can come up with is him being arrested in India. Googling for this arrest brought up a page that claims Numan was diagnosed with Aspergers in 2001.

Back to the album. I’m still a big fan of Halo, but found the rest of the album disappointing. I think that one of the things a person looks for in new music is NEW. And there is something distinctly old about Jagged. It hits a sweet spot that I was really into in the middle of the ’90s, and maybe hits it too well. Someone with different tastes in music might think differently, but once I started hearing the Peter Gabriel and Nine Inch Nails thing, it became almost impossible for me to hear Numan, which is too bad.

Buy Jagged on Amazon

Gary Numan stuff on eBay