"Mutt" Lange takes on vocal duties in a synth-pop band
Label: Mercury
Year of Release: 1980
Robert John Lange, aka "Mutt" Lange is something of a music business legend, having produced some of the most enduring stars of the last forty years. His close, careful and polished style has been used on albums by Def Leppard, Foreigner, Bryan Adams, Celine Dion, Shania Twain (who he was once married to) and, er, The Boomtown Rats.
He's generally associated with "serious" musicians creating mainstream rock and pop, which makes this one-off 45 a real curiosity. It would seem that Vinyl were a group led by him on vocals who were purely synth-pop, a genre he barely ever dipped his toes into before or again, and the whole effort is inevitably deeply un-Lange in its stylings. "The Nobody Men" on the A-side sounds like Al Stewart gone futuristic - so you could argue it "invented" The Pet Shop Boys if you wanted to be inaccurate and harsh. It also has enough of a Euro feel to have popped up on some Italo Disco YouTube channels since, though the connections sound borderline to me.
Over on the flip, the Lange penned "Pulse" is a jittery, Moroder-esque piece of atmospheric pleasure which is worth your time as well. Both sides feature sounds that date them very clearly on the early side of synth-pop before the New Romantic cliches and stylistic tropes took hold, but the 1980 release date means that they were actually somewhat ahead of their time.
