I now have both the Thomas Dolby remasters, and have listened to each a couple times. AvatarMusic originally sent me Donovan in Concert instead of The Flat Earth, but that's been sorted out. They're a good shop, and you should buy The Golden Age of Wireless from them. Maybe The Flat Earth, too. There hasn't been much to read on this blog lately, so I'll write something about these expanded albums. For more depth, you can read my two reviews here and here. You can read more about Thomas Dolby at his website and a trio of old fan sites that sometimes contradict each other, Andy J's Guide to Thomas Dolby, the Thomas Dolby Unofficial Fan Site, and the Thomas Dolby section of Lazlo's Discography Machine. I consider The Golden Age of Wireless to be a unique masterpiece. I own several hundred rock, pop, and electronic albums stretching from the mid-Sixties to the present day, and this is one of my top twenty, it not top ten. It's also one of those albums that sounds like a unified work of art rather than just a series of very good songs. That's why the world needed this release, which restores its rarely-heard original song sequence. I listened to the remaster for the first time while walking around town after midnight on the first warm night of the year. It was quite an experience. According to the sites linked above, Thomas Morgan "Dolby" Robertson was a gadget-obsessed A.V. club kid turned studio engineer turned musician. You could about guess that just from listening to his début album. This fascination with technology is evident throughout. The music is heavily electronic, of course. It has the feel of a roomful of machines working with concerted efficiency, but occasionally going haywire in exciting ways. Machinery is a constant subject of the lyrics, too, both in the surface stories and the technological metaphors Dolby seems able to apply to any aspect of life. Radio in particular is a recurring theme, figuring into the lyrics of many of the songs and frequently entering the mix in the form of samples that introduce and close several songs and even tie three of them together. When you get past all these gizmos and equations, the album is mainly about life in Thatcher-Era urban England: the tension, the isolation, and the thrills. But I suppose, in a way, almost any album is about modern life in the place where the artist lives. He varies the setting, even exploring a dystopian future at one point, but the streets and tubes of London seem to be at the hub of all his thoughts. Despite how far removed I am from all this, being born a generation after the artist and hardly ever leaving the American Midwest, the lyrics resonate with me. I feel a kinship with Thomas Dolby (or at least with the fictional protagonist of his songs). Dolby's aviophobia inspired the opening tracks of each side of the original L.P. "Flying North" is now back at the front where it belongs. It's exciting the way the drum machine and droning synth seem to fly in from the distance at the very beginning, and the lyrics and music set the tone for the album. The opening of side 2, "The Wreck of the Fairchild," was missing from all but the earliest pressings of Wireless, and had never been released on (legitimate) C.D. before this edition. The sound quality is worlds better than the one I'd been listening to, and that's vastly beneficial to a subtle semi-instrumental like "Fairchild." Between its strange musical style and its dark subject (plane crash survivors resorting to cannibalism), this song's omission from most releases of Wireless is understandable (but not excusable). The bonus tracks provide further revelations. Two of them, however, were on the earlier Wireless C.D., and these and two more were on Retrospectacle. The guitar version of "Radio Silence" is an excellent rarity. I enjoy it much more than the synth version, but that one is such a perfect fit for the album that I can't disagree with including it over this one. "Urban Tribal" and "Therapy/Growth" are two early B-sides making their C.D. début. They're both British slice-of-life songs that sound like Wireless tracks without the polish. The remaining tracks are two demos of songs on the album and one of a song Dolby wrote for the Fallout Club. They have more value as historical artifacts than actual entertainment. Most interesting are the discarded lyrics for "The Wreck of the Fairchild" from when it was titled "Sale of the Century." The Flat Earth and its set of bonus tracks sounds fundamentally different from anything on The Golden Age of Wireless or its set of bonus tracks. Here Dolby was clearly more interested in crafting complex and nuanced soundscapes than with conventional songwriting. It's a half hour of musical atmosphere where verses and spoken passages drift in and out, followed by a sudden swerve into the radio-friendly pop of "Hyperactive!" More jarring transitions ensue during a series of bonus tracks that run the gamut from the unique beauty of "Field Work" to the pop music styrofoam peanuts of "Get out of My Mix." The stylistic variety foreshadows the grab-bag of genres that would constitute his next album. "White City," "Mulu the Rain Forest," and "I Scare Myself" are the most enjoyable stretch of music on this whole release. Like the first three songs on side 2 of Wireless, they form a trilogy. "White City" is pure genius, and is the one time on the album where the music becomes really up-front without sounding completely foreign to its surroundings. The false start is a clever gimmick, though I kind of wish I could hear the "other" song. Overall, the expanded edition of The Flat Earth is a reasonably enjoyable release, and I'm glad I bought it, but it's a definite step down from Wireless. After his early success, I don't think the artist really found his muse again until the Nineties. Thomas Dolby wrote the liner notes for both albums, and they're incredible. I read them and think, "Here is a man on my wavelength." But that's always how I felt listening to his music.