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Matt Bianco - Whose Side Are You On? [1984]
 01.Whose Side Are You On 02.More Than I Can Bear 03.No No Never 04.Half A Minute 05.Matts Mood 06.Get Out Of Your Lazy Bed 07.It's Getting Late 08.Sneaking Out The Backdoor 09.Riding With The Wind 10.Matts Mood II Matt Bianco is a UK band that was formed in 1983 and continues to exist to date. They are mainly known for their success in the mid 1980s and their jazzy, Latin-flavoured music. Popular during the mid 1980s in continental Europe, Matt Bianco epitomised the new jazz pop genre, that they shared with acts such as Working Week, Sade, Everything but the Girl, and The Style Council. The name suggests that Matt Bianco is a personal name, often referred to the main constant member, Mark Reilly, but Matt is in fact "a made up spy, a secret agent; we loved spy TV themes and film scores".Whose Side Are You On? was the first album by Matt Bianco (which featured Basia as lead vocalist on the song called "Half a Minute", one of the singles from the record).A true classic which sounds great almost twenty years after its first release. Full of the humour and fun of the earlier Matt Bianco work but much deeper and more textured, as well as more lyrically sophisticated. The title track is breezy pop, but it is the Latin inflections in "No No Never," "Half a Minute," and "Sneaking Out the Back Door" which make this album so intriguing and unique. I resist the term "fusion" in that it is a classification used to market and sell music, but I don't know how else to describe the synthesis of pop, jazz, salsa, samba, and electronic music which characterizes this work. Link |
