Real Life Look for Another Angel, 3 Out of 5 Stars
Australian new wavers had their one moment of brilliance when "Send Me An Angel
" broke into the top 40 in 1983, and have spent the last two decades chasing the elusive follow-up. "Lifetime" shows why Real Life just didn't have the legs to make it. "Send Me An Angel" is such a terrific song that it actually had a revival in 1989 and recharted. Real Life got a new contract and released "Send Me An Angel 89
" and then rushed back into the studio to record and release "Lifetime
" in 1990."Lifetime" is a great EP stretched into 10 songs. Crushing Depeche Mode, New Order and INXS into terraformed bytes, "God Tonight" and "Kiss The Ground" managed to become modern-rock dance hits, but there is not much here by way of substance. Add that their label, Curb records, was putting all their priorities behind establishing themselves as a country label and "Lifetime" fell by the wayside quickly. Real Life is - in my opinion - a band that cut two great albums (their Heartland debut and the follow-up Flame, both out of print), and by the time of this album were flailing at anything to reconnect.
That's evident by the over-dependence on synthpop gimmicks like vocodors on almost every song and the near indistinguishable mechanical beats. There's also a sense of production cloning because, well, "all the cool kids are doing this." "Torture To Me" is a direct lift of house-styled Pet Shop Boys and "God Tonight" is the best Depeche Mode song they never wrote. "Lifetime" is an average album of late new wave that fans of 80's tunes will enjoy. The rest of us will cock an eye at the period-sound of it all.
(As a post-script, Real Life leader David Sterry is still making Real Life albums and they still sound like this.)
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