DRAMARAMA - Cinéma Vérité

LP New Rose Records / Chameleon Records 1985
CD reissue Rhino Records 1995 with (lots of) bonus tracks



"Grounded in the timeless twin aesthetics of pop art and power pop, Dramarama was nevertheless a star-crossed combo, out of synch with both the mainstream rock audience and the music business throughout its career. Formed in the basement of a collectors' record shop in Wayne, New Jersey, at the turn of the '80s, the band applied the brash energy of '70s punk and glitter-rock to the glamorous propulsion and romantic irony of David Bowie and the Velvet Underground. With the exception of the 1985 track Anything, Anything (I'll Give You), a modern-rock radio fave in LA for years, Dramarama never escaped the critical-acclaim ghetto. But it is a tribute to a potent sound and enthusiastic vision that Dramarama still sounds as fresh and sharp now as when it first emerged during the corporate-rock bloat of the mid-'80s. (...) Produced by bassist Chris Carter and singer/songwriter John Easdale, Cinéma Vérité is an album of drawn-out vintage. Five tracks originally appeared on the Comedy EP, issued in 1984 on the band's own Questionmark label. One of those five numbers, a beautiful-loser's reading of the Velvets' Femme Fatale, had first surfaced on Dramarama's '83 independent debut single. The other six songs were recorded after the French label New Rose commissioned a full-length album. For all its mixed parentage, though, Cinéma Vérité is an assured statement of refined style and desperate purpose. While Easdale's burnt-heart romanticism in songs like Some Crazy Dame and Questions? suggest Jonathan Richman by way of Raymond Chandler, the Britpop gleam and Jersey bar-band crackle in the guitars of Peter Wood and Mark Englert (aka Mr. E Boy) evoke the power-chord thrills of Mott the Hoople and the New York Dolls. And in Anything, Anything (I'll Give You), Dramarama bottle that contagious tension with car-radio finesse.
(David Fricke, Trouser Press)

ENJOY


Anything, Anything (I'll Give You)