Review Summary: hahaha wow this is REALLY bad!
Look, Soft Cell was never exactly 'great'. Their greatest hit and most identifiable song, "Tainted Love", is a marginally less-interesting cover of a peppier, catchier track by Gloria Jones & Ed Cobb back in the 60's. When your claim to fame is a whitewashed cover that's substantially worse than the original (because there are instances where this can be done well, like Natalie Imbruglia's cover of "Torn" or Hardline's take on "Hot Cherie"), you've either been treated unfairly by a consumerist world or you're just not that special to begin with. Well, I'm happy to report that the latter statement has been completely & utterly validated by Soft Cell's
Happiness Not Included, the band's first studio record in twenty years and an album so f*cking bad the worst track on the record legitimately made me burst out laughing in disbelief.
"Happy Happy Happy" is the perfect microcosm of the album's overall ***tiness. Right away, the absolutely
rank production hits you like an unpleasant, cringe-inducing odor - Marc Almond's vocals are
way too present in the mix (to the point where it's difficult to listen to this with headphones), the instruments bleed together into a muffled, murky pool of synthesizers, and the EQ is turned up so high that all of the sharp, ringing tones and Marc Almond's consonants are always on full display, puncturing your ears. And that's not even getting into the limp-wristed songwriting - there's a big drop right before the chorus, but the intensity doesn't rise in the slightest - or the garbage 'happy-happy-happy' hook or the asinine lyrics. Every single element of this track is dead-on-arrival from the word 'go', and it's as frustrating as it is hilarious.
The rest of the album that tumbles out over the course of an (agonizingly-long) 55 minutes is a wild mess of bad songwriting and
abysmal production value. Most of the songs featured on
Happiness Not Included have a tendency to never go
anywhere over the course of their runtimes. "Polaroid", a drain-circling song that never properly starts, sounds like the fumbling lovechild of Nine Inch Nails and Duran Duran, "Heart Like Chernobyl" has a tacky, half-heartedly bouncy beat that ho-hums around for three-and-a-half minutes that feel like ten, "Light Sleepers" ruins a theoretically-great blend of synthesizers, saxophones, and drum machines with a flatfooted beat that refuses to adapt or evolve for almost five minutes, and "I'm Not A Friend Of God" sounds like it's straight-up missing instruments, although maybe that's because the drums are actually
way too quiet, barely identifiable in the mix. Half of this album was so f*cking boring that there was an ad on YouTube about Ekster wallets that interested me far more than anything Soft Cell had to provide.
The other half of the album, thankfully, is quite a bit more entertaining, featuring songs so derivative and tacky one has to wonder if this entire project is a joke record. The title track crams together a drum track dominated by these garbage-sounding, processed toms and a silly harpsichord-sounding synth, a mixture that already didn't work before Almond's off-tempo, out-of-breath vocals act as the gaudy cherry on top. "Nostalgia Machine" tries so hard to be "Blue Monday" that it's actually kind of cute, "Bruises On All My Illusions" is a tryhard, 'haunting' New Wave ditty, and the nadir of the album, "Nighthawks", might actually be
legendarily terrible. Nasally, gross vocals, over-the-top crude lyrics, a goofy, relentless staccato beat, overblown and overmodulated production: "Nighthawks" is such a strong contender for the worst song of the year, if not one of the worst songs of the
decade so far, that I can't help but admire just
how bizarrely deranged and monstrously annoying it actually is. It winds up being both the best and worst song on the record, because at least it's
memorably awful.
There's so much wrong with
Happiness Not Included that I think it might be a
holistically bad album. Everything is terrible, from the garish, lazy Photoshop-filter album cover to the flimsy, incomplete songwriting to Marc Almond's wince-inducing vocals to the unholy catastrophe that is this record's production value. Half of it is utterly boring, with sludgey songs that never truly begin and never truly end so much as they just fizzle out of existence, and half of it is a f*cking farrago of bad ideas and off-putting stupidity.
Happiness Not Included is vile, and just calling it a bad record actually undersells the overall awfulness of the project: it's a bad
everything, so mindless and out-of-touch and tacky that the only reason worth checking it out is plain-old morbid curiosity.
