Favorite New Wave Albums #7 - Replicas

Tweet

It's time to plug in today's new wave offering as I count down my favorite new wave albums, a subject very near and dear to my heart. We are at #7: the highly influential Replicas by Tubeway Army. Tubeway Army was a London-based new wave band led by Gary Numan that formed in 1976. Although the group started as a standard punk-inspired, guitar-based act, Tubeway Army quickly morphed into an electronic band after Numan stumbled across a Minimoog synthesizer during a recording session. After releasing just two albums, Numan abandoned the Tubeway Army moniker to record under his stage name (his real last name is "Webb,") although the other members of the band remained with him as his backing band. But damn, were those two albums great! I especially have a soft spot for their second, 1979's Replicas. A dystopian, sci-fi concept record based upon a book that Numan was planning to write, the album actually reached #1 and achieved gold status in the UK. (The album also contained the new wave classic, "Are 'Friends' Electric?", which was the first synthesizer-based #1 UK hit.) As great as "Are 'Friends' Electric?" happens to be, however, Replicas also offers up other fantastic electronic new wave fare. The dark, brooding "Down In the Park" is hands down my favorite piece of music that Gary Numan has ever made (so good that both Marilyn Manson and the Foo Fighters have covered it!) "Praying to the Aliens" is bloody awesome (I still remember, all these decades later, watching Numan perform the song on Saturday Night Live,) "Me! I Disconnect from You," "I Nearly Married a Human," and on and on. Damn. There ain't a bad song on this thing! Later in that same year, Gary Numan would achieve international mainstream success with his hit album, The Pleasure Principle, and it's smash hit single, "Cars." And he's still going strong, releasing new music and touring. And it was all made possible because he found a synthesizer one day and started tinkering around with it! (Info verified by Wikipedia)