Break my heart at the FUNPLEX! The B-52s are back!

After only 16 years the B-52s are about to release a new album called "Funplex"!
The single of the same name is donwnloadble now and can be heard on their MySpace site.

Its amazingly good and astonishingly nothing new (or vice versa).

Upon first listen you are back in B-52-land: Shopping malls, diet pills, taco-tiki-huts and wonderbras are the buzzwords. The sound harks back to their early days. There are fuzzy guitars, drum machines and the typical party-wall-of-sound in the background.

Finally, both Kate and Cindy are back together. Even a duller B-52 song gets catapulted into the ionosphere with the B-girls singing their outlandish harmonies.

As annoying "Love Shack" sounds today due to overplay and bad memories of drunken yuppie assholes at yuppie weddings, it was one of the last great pop records to emerge from the USA before grunge levelled everything. But this is really not the bands fault.

They are still one of the best bands in the world and I am happy to have them back! And don´t they look smashing these days!?
Strangely enough, my favourite 52-album is "Whammy" which is certainly not the best in their discography. But any record that begins with an ode to counterfeiting and the words "We are in the basement, learning to print" is gold in my book!

I remember seeing them live for the first time around this release. It was one of the first concerts I went to and the opening "Song for a future generation" is still one of my dearest memory of any live show I have ever seen.

To the simple riff of a drum machine the band members appeared one by one and told us what they wanted their life to be.

Anyway, its great that they are back. This could be one of the comebacks that are not doomed to fail or fall into obscurity like so many others.

The sound of today is very much the sound of the B-52s in 1979. I don´t know if this is good or bad, but hey:They wanna be the rulers of the galaxy, the first ladies of infinity and the nicest guys on earth!

Lets meet and have a baby now!

Here they are with the late Ricky who loved computers and hot tamales.