Founding members, Pete Byrne and Rob Fisher, would first work together in the band Neon with future members of Tears For Fears before breaking off and forming their own group, Naked Eyes. However, despite this rich pop history, and having four top forty singles, very little is published about the band's overall roots. Rather, their biography seems to cut straight to the chase of them recording their debut album, Burning Bridges between 1982 and 1983, releasing it the latter year, and their final album before a long hiatus, 1984's Fuel For The Fire.
We'll go ahead and pause right here and now for today's Retro Spin of their debut.
If you're looking for synthpop, then Burning Bridges is going to deliver you a hearty helping of it. Its heavy use of the Fairlight CMI sampling synthesizer gives it a very familiar sound, though attached to the wrong performer(s). For those of you unfamiliar with the Fairlight synthesizer, think Prince and the Revolution in the 80's. It's what (t)he(y) used to get those crunchy snare sounds for a majority of the hits.
Despite this overall familiarity, what Naked Eyes lacks over Prince is the ability to craft masterpieces. The tracks on their debut are generic at best, making the hits, Always Something There To Remind Me, and Promises Promises, seem out of place. It's like you're serenaded with mundane songs, losing interest in the process, only to be slapped in the face with such a massive hit just as you're dozing off.
The fact that these two tracks are so amazing only serves to make the album feel all the more weak. Because now you know the duo had it in them, they just didn't deliver. With that said, I'm not going to sit here and say that I didn't grab additional tunes for my shuffle list. Fortune & Fame, and Could Be, were decent songs, and made the cut.
I do want to touch on the CD release for a moment. Burning Bridges didn't get a CD release until 2012, and being in the digital age, is so over amplified that some songs are almost painful to the ear to hear. Everything is smashed together in a wall of sound, with no subtle blending of instruments as they would have been heard on the original vinyl pressing. A perfect example of this is the beginning of Always Something There To Remind Me, where the opening notes sound like a pile of pans being dropped on a concrete floor. This is a perfect example of why I hate remasters. Too many studios think louder equals better, and that's just not the case.
After releasing their 1984 follow up, Naked Eyes disbanded. While Byrne would form a touring band under the groups name in 2007, and even release additional studio albums, unfortunately Fisher passed away in 1999. If the two ever got the opportunity to reunite, I wasn't able to find any information on it.
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| THIS WEEK ON THE CHARTS March 29, 1980 |
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| THIS WEEK ON THE CHARTS March 29, 1986 |
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