Week 18 - When Good Vocoders Go Bad

Firstly, an apology. As you can probably tell, I didn't get round to doing a New Year blog and, as the one I had in mind was various, exotic versions of Auld Lang Syne, I thought I'd better leave it for another time. Like August.

But anyway, onwards into a new decade.

As the season of goodwill is far behind us, I thought I'd serve up an abhoration of a blog. Yes, that's right, it's this blog's version of When Animals Attack, but more terrifying.

I was listening to an album recently, Bossa N Ramones, and was overwhelmed by how good it was. In general. Even some of the Ramones songs I'm not massively keen on work well, and there's a beautiful version of The KKK Took My Baby Away (if you can get past the weirdness of it!). However there was one that made me pull a face usually associated with a pungent whiff. But more on that later and onwards to the vocoders.

Let's get this straight, the vocoder isn't totally evil. Air, Daft Punk, Super Furry Animals and (ahem) even Peter Frampton use it well. But some people take a bone and run with it. However, like kindly dogs, they don't bury it away from human eyes/ears, these musicians decide it's the best thing in the world and they must make an entire song with it.

First up is the obvious one, but I'll just do a YouTube link to it as I don't want the police to find it on my hard drive! Hello Cherilyn Sarkisian, aka Cher. She say she believes in life after love, but she also believes in murdering the hell out of the poor vocoder that some lackey probably found while looking in the bins trying to find clothes for Cher. Yes, it's that travesty from 1998, Believe.

God, I hate that more than I remember.

Anyhoo, next up is another trip back in time, further on this occassion. There's no worse recipe than a dash of funk added to a modicum of R&B, sprinkled too liberally with vocoder and served up in the cracked bowl of the 1980s. This didn't stop Larry Blackmon and co. In 1986, Cameo slapped their culinary abortion onto our plates and we, amazingly, lapped it up. There's still some leftovers available for the chav-tastic 80s clubs. Prepare to screech 'Aw' like a cat suffering from diarrhea: here's Cameo with Word Up.

And finally, the song that inspired me to hurt your ears. Remember I was saying about Bossa N Ramones? There's a version of Pet Semetary on there. It's kind of charming, but there's no escaping the vocoder (or it might be a custom made dsumi, apparently. Either way it's an overused vocal enhancer).The perpetrator of this is Yasmin Gate and I wish her no ill, but...well, oof.

So, I'll leave you with Yasmin Gate doing the Ramones' Pet Semetary.