Various Artists - Rage In Love (Album)
All you need is love. Love is a battlefield. Love’s not a competition, but I’m winning. P.S. I love you. You’d be forgiven for thinking that every song written was about love. From falling into it, to breaking up and the comfortable convenience in-between- needless to say it seems to have all been covered. And so, it makes sense that the ABC’s Rage franchise would release a compilation containing this very style of music.
Thankfully, a quick survey of the back cover reveals that many of the “usual suspects” are missing, so we are spared the travesty of having to listen to divas like Celine, Mariah or Whitney. Nor are we subjected to crooners like Chris Isaak or Michael Buble, or the plain irritating like Rod Stewart, Tal Bachman’s She’s So High or Jennifer Paige’s Crush, amongst others. Instead, what is offered is a love mixtape with a twist – a disproportionate number of female singer-songwriters lead up a charge with many hits and a few misses (the latter of which are typically found on MIX FM’s “Love song dedications.”)
The release begins with Queen looking like the cast of Grease, where blonde-hooker-Sandy types accompany mock-rockers as they sing the rockabilly tune seemingly lifted from an Elvis Presley songbook, Crazy Little Thing Called Love. The dancing women are another prominent theme in the following song, Robert Palmer’s Addicted To Love – the ladies no doubt are the same ones who appeared in his Simply Irresistible clip.
It was with a huge sigh of relief to watch the opening moments of The Cure’s Friday I’m In Love (even if their Lovesong was a glaring omission.) It was a great respite to see an excellent song complimented by a fun but busy clip, which boasted constantly changing backdrops, props, costume changes and frosting in the form of confetti, balloons and sparklers. Ooh, shiny!
A dodgy (yet, still entertaining) eighties ballad was the next order with The Psychedelic Furs’ Love My Way. This was followed by another lo-fi clip of a comparable vintage with The Pretenders’ Message Of Love. Then Messer Cave paved the way with his Bad Seeds to find the right balance between sleazy ugliness and love as a drug in Do You Love Me?
Marvin Gaye’s mixtape favourite, Sexual Healing provided a slow dance routine performed by some pretty (yet what is now strangely considered) fully clothed ladies. This proved to be better entertainment then Air’s All I Need where we had a smug couple constantly interrupting the music to talk about how great their other half is. It was the visual equivalent of telling someone about your dreams because while they’re infinitely interesting to you, they can be nauseating for others to hear.
New Order seem a pretty unlikely choice for this type of compilation but they do a good job by giving us FAC 173 (otherwise known as Bizarre Love Triangle) complete with their artistic clip filled with heaps of colour and plenty of different shots. Moreover, the Fine Young Cannibals clip for She Drives Me Crazy almost seems like a rip-off of the aforementioned artists’ True Faith video, particularly as both share dancers in a crazy choice of sartorial garb moving in a rather odd fashion.
Moby offers a depressive, wallowing in self-pity post-break up clip with Why Does My Heart Feel So Bad? The twee animated video depicts the world as an ugly and awful place inhabited by isolated, lonely people and is a little too similar to Radiohead’s Paranoid Android for my liking.
A huge miss is offered with Joss Stone’s atrocious pop/soul cover of the Jack White-penned, White Stripes classic, Fell In Love With A Girl. Here she changes the object of affection to a boy (so as to avoid the gay connotations) and this results in a truly boring clip featuring her going through the motions while miming. In essence, it is not fit to hold a candle to the awesome Lego clip that bolstered The White Stripes’ original. Similarly, Norah Jones’ Come Away With Me is another tedious video with a clichéd concept- her driving around in a desert to a piano ballad.
Another unremarkable clip is offered for The Cardigans’ Love Fool. The song creates in some of us pure nineties nostalgia, but the visuals do it no favours and one has to wonder how the song became as big as it did. (No doubt, it was because of the flogging it received on commercial radio and its inclusion on the Romeo and Juliet soundtrack.)
Things certainly improve towards the end of this compilation as one-hit wonders, The La’s offer the sweet, There She Goes. (Plus, this song makes me think that at least this it was chosen for merit father than the fact it contains “love” in the title, something I suspect for some of the other tracks included here.)
In addition, for good measure there is also the Stone Roses’ Love Spreads and The Triffids’ Bury Me Deep In Love. Alas, there are no Go-Between songs included to cap things off, but the final clip is a redeeming factor to this error and makes the compilation completely worth its price by its mere inclusion alone. What has often been described as the best love song of all time, Joy Division’s Love Will Tear Us Apart is included in uninterrupted and uncut finery. Moreover, for a group that only has at most minutes of video archival footage it certainly holds its own as being up there with the best.
In all, Rage In Love provides a more alternative mixtape to the lovesick listener genre. While a few typical suspects are included, it is the left-of-field and unusual choices that are the most worthy. Plus, the fantastic clips that accompany the uncommon choices make this collection a much better one than the others currently available. This means that any unlucky-in-love cynic can enjoy the songs about an extremely popular topic without having to listen to the soppy dirge that usually typifies the genre.
