Wednesday, January 13, 2010

An album a day, #13: Rialto, "Rialto," 1998



...or the little Britpop band that couldn't. Until earlier today, when I looked them up on AllMusic, I knew nothing about this band, though I've had and loved this CD for close to twelve years now. I found it used in some record shop (a reviewer's copy), and the cover design was close enough to Pulp's then-recently released "This is Hardcore" (one of my desert island discs) to intrigue me into listening to it. (It helped--or maybe didn't--that the title of the first song on the CD had alomost the same title as a song on "Different Class.") What I discovered was a Britpop band crafting beautiful songs, and combining the Scott Walker influence then so noticeable in Pulp or the Divine Comedy, with the more "middlebrow," perhaps, influence of the Beatles or psychedelic-era Stones, as could be heard in Oasis. In their clean, orchestral production, however, Rialto were much closer to the former than the latter. Their second album seems to have received much less press than the first (which didn't get that much to begin with), and I can hardly find anything out about the third--a sure indication of decline into oblivion. Too bad, their debut album is really worth a listen, and even more than one.



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