China Crisis: Flaunt The Imperfection (1985)

“If you have taste, your long neck is an asset, your small stature is an asset, that crooked smile is an asset… Elegance is innate. It has nothing to do with being well dressed. Elegance is refusal.” – Diana Vreeland (ex-editor of Vogue/Bazaar magazine). It seems highly appropriate, and better stated, to use her words to describe the music of China Crisis — to use that dignified ethos to describe their best album, the appropriately titled Flaunt The Imperfection (one that remained a personal favorite of mine for so long). Back when it was just myself sharing with my friends song suggestions on Livejournal (or was it Myspace?) it was this, first album that set me on my journey (as a writer) to get here. Today, I feel ready to revisit this album.

China Crisis have been a long running Merseyside duo led by vocalist Gary Daly and guitarist Eddie Lundon. Always tinkering on the side of most post-punk and New Wave movements, an earlier version of the group, joined by bassist Gazza Johnson and ex-Waterboys drummer Kevin Wilkinson, carved out it’s niche in those genres. Taking cues from dub and soul music, they mutated their group from dark raging punk into the murky waters inhabited by groups like Japan and Roxy Music (obvious influences on the boys). From Difficult Shapes & Passive Rhythms – Some People Think It’s Fun To Entertain and Working with Fire and Steel – Possible Pop Songs Volume Two, one could sense the shift in musicality becoming ever and ever more present in their music.

Never quite fitting the sophisticated pop roles or the New Romantic styles of the time, for a time, China Crisis had a crisis (no pun intended) of identity. Much like Paddy McAloon’s Prefab Sprout, it always seemed that China Crisis were too aware to completely absolve themselves of smarts that would have allowed them to cast a wider net. “No More Blue Horizons”, “Christian”, and “Red Sails” on their debut, or “Working With Fire and Steel”, “Wishful Thinking”, and “Tragedy and Mystery” on their sophomore release, spoke that grasp to go bigger, only to pull back at the last moment (hoping not to upset their more experimented/experimental music brethren).

1985 marked a turning point. Knocking off this need to fill a certain space or meet a certain need, they accepted who they were: some of the ’80s smartest Pop writers. Enlisting the help of Walter Becker, of Steely Dan fame, they sought to make their next album, what would be Flaunt The Imperfection, their most refined version of themselves. Finally, owning what made their music special, on this release, from every lyric to vocal to arrangement, everything was intimated with the utmost care. Melodically sophisticated, in a way that ran as a flipped argument to Paul Buchanan’s The Blue Nile, on Flaunt The Imperfection China Crisis proved that you could make upbeat music with as many layers in thought as the more vaunted, nocturnal, “heady” stuff.

I could spend all your precious time describing every track on this album, since every track perfectly makes its case for “highlight”, but I’ll spare you that. Myself, I always come back to the sound of certain tracks like “Strength of Character”, “You Did Cut Me”, and “Bigger The Punch I’m Feeling”, all seemingly bridging that multi-layered spirit of ye olde Steely Dan but updating it with a newfound movement toward a more positive horizon. One can appreciate the chrome-like sheen of the arrangements, but one always goes back to the pearl-like, organic smoothness of these songs. Try to follow the lyrics, try to go with the shifting melodicism, or try to resist the flights of powerful nostalgia propelled by their music. Much like the music of the late Mr. Becker, all of these songs have certain charms that both hide something far more cutting and alluring underneath, yet persistently offer it to you in plain view to willingly go there.

Looking back, what remains fascinating about this album is that there are certain shapes and elements that China Crisis never completely cast-off from their origins. Roots in dance music (disco, funk, and soul remain), roots in the tropics (dub and reggae technique), and the love of soft rock are now more perfectly etched in stone, as part of their DNA. The reason this album works, to this day, is because they own what could have been uneasy anchors. On Flaunt The Imperfection, China Crisis took the mantle once raised by groups like 10cc, Steely Dan, and The Residents, perhaps now raised by Scritti Politti, Prefab Sprout, The Go Betweens, and them, to make Pop music that never lost site of the plasticity behind its construction. Now to create a whole blog dedicated to other groups that many would deem unworthy of your time, would strike most as heretic, but yet here we are, uncovering new venues to champion the extraordinary. Wherever we go, at least you know our ethos behind this process. In the end, who wants perfection? Blemishes are much more human. There’s more dignity in this.

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