Plague of Years
Label: Sub Rosa
Length: LP
Rated: NONE
Media: CD
Format: Album
WorkNameSort: Plague of Years
The music of English duo Eyeless in Gaza has been compiled before. This is at least the sixth collection of the ‘bestâ?� of Martyn Bates and Peter Becker’s dark, atmospheric pop and Plague of Years, like every comp before it, aims to rescue this underappreciated act from obscurity. It ain’t gonna happen. Spanning 25 years of creativity, from 1980 onward, Plague does an admirable job of presenting the odd cohesion of poetic lyricism and ambient pop textures EIG has mined, but the simple fact is that music like this is simply too beautiful and too smart ever to catch the ears of but a few attuned listeners. Shoehorning in a large number of EIG’s instrumental tracks along with their more structured ‘songs,â?� Plague of Years winds up sounding like some sort of collaboration between Durutti Column and Japan; in other words, it’s eminently beautiful and breathtakingly elegant, but ultimately far too indulgent to win any new converts.
This article appears in Dec 13-19, 2006.