The Teardrop Explodes - Everybody Wants To Shag... The Teardrop Explodes (1990)

The title was originally intended for the band's debut, but attaching it to the long-unreleased third and final Teardrops album, an expansion of the four-track You Disappear From View EP, is as good a use as any. Cope trashed these sessions shortly after they were completed, but admitted years later that it wasn't all that bad. While this is a Balfe album more than anything else (he's credited with all the arrangements) with Cope on vocals, the rapidly collapsing band, augmented by a variety of other players, still manages to get in some good work. Cope certainly sounds like he's not entirely there at points particularly on the lengthy opening number "Ouch Monkeys," where his voice is mixed in the background while Balfe's lounge-styled lead keyboards play against spectral choir sounds and echoed drums. Much of the percussion is a combination of Dwyer's suddenly arena-scaled pounding and rhythm box pulses, which, combined with the lack of guitars on all but two songs oftens transforms the Teardrops into something approaching New Romantic synth rock! "You Disappear From View" sounds like a reject from Spandau Ballet's early days. Often cuts sound like demos for fuller arrangements, which turned out to be the case for two of the songs, "Metranil Vavin" and "Sex (Pussyface)," which Cope recut on his solo debut World Shut Your Mouth. When Cope is fully engaged in the material, like on the charging "Count to Ten and Run For Cover," or the gently mysterious flow of "Soft Enough For You," it's a gentle revelation. A ringer concludes things "Strange House in the Snow," an off-kilter, wiggy 1980-era cut with Gill on guitar.