Description
Old Wives Tales is an eight-track CD-EP by the American synthpop band Joy Electric, released on Tooth & Nail Records in 1996. Ronnie Martin quickly followed We Are The Music Makers, his sophomore full-length album, with this EP.
‘Old Wives Tales’ comes very close to being a really great album. In style it is defiantly retro, remembering the glory days of ’80s synthesiser pop with its layers upon layers of undisguised computerisation. The overall effect though is more akin to the dreaminess of the Pet Shop Boys than to the heavy grandeur of Ultravox. Lilting melodies jar with the clinical bleeps and pings of computers, creating a sense of weirdness to match lyrics clearly influenced by the romantic surrealism of the Beatles. Songs like «The Cobbler» and «Candycane Carriage» show that their writer, Ronnie Martin, has got a very special ability to shape a song into a series of patterns without losing its integrity. My only concern with this album is that with only Ronnie and his mixing desk appearing on it, it sounds a bit too much like a demo. It lacks the breadth of production needed to make the songs complete. It may be that this is the intended effect, but I cannot help feeling it does small justice to such great material. [Jon Tulloch, Cross Rhythms, December 1997]
> Apple Music (https://music.apple.com/us/album/old-wives-tales/724650425)
CD-EP tracklist:
01. The Cobbler – 3:11
02. And It Feels Like Old Times – 3:52
03. Burgundy Years (Remix) – 4:19
04. Old Wives Tales – 3:04
05. Marigoldeness – 2:18
06. The Golden Age – 2:05
07. Candycane Carriage (Lost In The Forest) – 2:17
08. I Beam, You Beam (Remix) – 3:47
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