The Daily Spin, February 5
This Heat | Deceit
Welcome back to the Daily Spin, the series in which I review 365 albums during 2023.
Each album will be given a rating on a scale from 0 to 10. You can look at the entire set here. Additionally, you can check out a list of my favorite song from each album right here.
If you want to suggest an album, good news! You can do so right here!
Album: Deceit (1981)
Artist: This Heat
Link:
Deceit is, quite simply, just not really music to me - not in the way I think of music, not in the way I’ve considered it for 25 years and change on this earth.
Sonically, it’s confusing, with the barest sentiments of sound disrupted. This feels like the joy of being allowed to tap away at the keyboard my parents had as a child - clashing instruments and notes together with nary a thought to 1) what it actually sounded like and 2) what, if anything, I was doing.
There feels an element of assumed progressivism and a sort of theme of protest around this album, but I feel that this thematic element is largely missed, in no small part because sifting through the clanking and clattering of songs like “Cenotaph” drastically reduces the eerie effect of songs like “A New Kind Of Water” or “Independence”.
The record never quite makes it to ‘good’ anywhere, settling for aggressively mediocre on Radio Prague, and falling into dreadful through most of the front half. There’s a way to navigate sampling and creative input, but this, to me, is not that way.
Rating: 1.9/10
Best Tracks: Radio Prague
Worst Tracks: Triumph; Cenotaph