ANNA OXYGEN - All Your Faded Things (Cold Crush)

I applaud the efforts of people like Anna Oxygen, Tracy + The Plastics and The Prima Donnas to create a retroactive communal hallucination of the 80s in which everything was harsh and incomprehensible but decorated in attractive colors. For one thing, I usually like the sound, and for another, it illuminates the approach of, say, Radiohead, whose fantasies about contemporary life would be harder to mistake for commentary if they were writing about, I don't know, the 1940s or Zaire.

However.

Oxygen opens one song with "One plus one in the algebra mouth", a lyric that does what it does so concisely as not to need support... I mean, start a song like that and the only reason to keep writing is so that you look like you're following through on your ideas. (Oxygen's habitually-jumpy song structures suggest that takes effort.)

Anyway, the line after that is "derivative of twenty-four". The derivative of 24 is zero; it's not that that would never come up in math, but it's not interesting. Can't help concluding that Anna Oxygen remembers the word 'derivative' but not what it means (uh, mathematically) and is just using math as a symbol of itself. Forgetting that you don't understand something which seems evocative to you is maybe the biggest danger when you go grape-stomping in history's dumpster, so since I like the project as a whole you'd think I'd be willing to give out passes on this... and yet I flinch every time I hear the line. Maybe next time.