Simple Man in Bloomington, MN

Coming off such a left-field debut, it was up in the air as to what
Klaus Nomi
would do for a follow-up. That second album was
Simple Man
, and if listeners were unsure if the first album was a put-on, this one certainly didn't do much to clear things up. While the album starts out promisingly with an atmospheric fade-in followed by a hard dance number with the occasional
Birthday Party
-style guitar thrown in, the rest of the album did its damnedest to move the album's overall tone to one of self-parody. Could one really think any differently listening to the hyper-sugary cover of
"Just One Look,"
the faux-
country
disco
number
"Rubberband Lazer,"
or the version of
"Ding Dong the Witch Is Dead"
? As with the debut album,
Nomi
's true capabilities are shown off by his versions of
classical
works -- in this case,
"Death"
(taken from
Henry Purcell
's
"Dido and Aeneas"
) and
"Return"
(which is based on a choral number by
John Dowland
). The thing is, those pieces are right at the end of the album and the listeners who would enjoy them the most will probably already have been long shaken off by all of the kitsch leading up to it. ~ Sean Carruthers