Lizzy Mercier Descloux, Richard Hell.
THE KILLS WISH THEY LOOKED LIKE THIS
The Top 35 Or So Songs of the 80’s
#09: Lizzy Mercier Descloux - Funky Stuff
The Talking Heads took a similar route: Nervous punks hook up with Brian Eno, learn to groove, and eventually record worldbeat-inspired masterpiece (Remain In Light). Lizzy cut her teeth in the New York no wave scene, but she always had a more cosmopolitan presence than Byrne’s outsider journalism and dramatic monologues. Lizzy also has a more generous spirit: Press Color contains a goofy cover of the Mission Impossible theme, not for any geopolitical or ironic statement but simply because it’s a killer groove. Her masterpiece, Mambo Nassau, is organic, worldly and gleeful, and “Funky Stuff” is a testament to Lizzy’s boundless enthusiasm. In her hands, Kool & The Gang’s limp original is galvanized and transformed into a celebration about loving music, and her joy is positively infectious. “It’s so much fun,” she shouts with such honesty that the sentiment is liberating: Forget social divisions and genre boundaries—celebrate music.
Lizzy Mercier Descloux - Slipped Disc
“Lizzie Mercier Descloux is a cunning naif, an aware waif, an experienced virgin, a tipsy teetotaller and a star in the shoddy, shady niche of obscurism… These songs are the current number ones in Heaven… Mambo Nassau is an album to be cherished, to be over played, left alone and then returned to. It is the tastiest sweet in the shop. It embodies the heavy thudding of a heart in love.”—“Sex with Style” (1981), Sounds magazine via Pitchfork.
