If you are an Anglophile (and, chances are, if you live in L.A., you are to some extent), you might want to check out the latest issue of Under the Radar, which documents the rise and fall of Brit Pop with interviews from members of Charlatans, Blur, Pulp, Elastica. Y'know, the biggies.
The magazine noted Elastica's sophomore effort, The Menace, as one of a number of Brit Pop albums that sort of fell flat, more or less indicating that the era ended. Yeah, The Menace did not do well, to say the least, but it is an album that I hold dear five years after the fact.
When Elastica's debut made its way to the U.S., I was a seventeen-year-old Valley girl, a high school journalist and zine-maker who could probably pass for Justine Frischmann's kid sister. When The Menace hit, I was twenty-three, living in the Valley again. I was a year out of college and had just quit my first real job as the assistant to a record industry exec to DJ most nights of the week and work part-time in a publicity firm. Needless to say, a lot of time passed between the two albums and Elastica's members had probably gone through as many, if not more, life changes than I had.
Maybe time was the real problem with Elastica. With a five year gap between two albums, it was natural for people to forget about Elastica. In order to make a full "comeback" it was necessary for the band to release an album that was similar enough to the debut to evoke a sense of familiarity, but something that spoke specifically for the year in which it was made. Essentially, the band would have to pull a Kylie.
Elastica did not do that. Instead, Frischmann and the gang recorded an album that was ahead of the crowd by miles. In 2004 and 2005, years after The Menace was released, there is little perceived to be cooler than heading to the Smell and checking out a line-up of synth-punk bands. Synth-punk is the predominant sound of The Menace, but Elastica accomplished this with far more finesse than the average band, incorporating the energetic pogo-stomp of "Mad Dog God Dam" and "How He Wrote Elastica Man" (the latter being a joint effort with the Fall's Mark E. Smith and a staple of my DJ sets at the time) with the smooth, lo-fi Spector-pop of "Nothing Stays the Same" and non-songs like the ambient instrumental piece "Miami Nice." Elastica pulled together a collection that kept the rawness of the debut with all the electronic mayhem of nights spent listening to Aphex Twin and Squarepusher. (Did Justine listen to the Warp gang when she wrote the album? )
Maybe five years from now, synth-punk will become a household word and maybe one of the bands who gets big will cite The Menace as an influence. In the meantime, keep looking in those used bins because you want it before the Elastica revival hits and the price quadruples.