*** Welcome to piglix ***

The Looks or the Lifestyle?

The Looks or the Lifestyle?
The Looks or the Lifestyle? (Pop Will Eat Itself album - cover art).jpg
Studio album by Pop Will Eat Itself
Released 7 September 1992
Recorded 1991
Studio Rockfield Studios, Monmouthshire
Genre
Length 46.10
Label RCA
Producer Boilerhouse
Pop Will Eat Itself chronology
Cure for Sanity
(1990)Cure for Sanity1990
The Looks or the Lifestyle?
(1992)
Dos Dedos Mis Amigos
(1994)Dos Dedos Mis Amigos1994
Singles from The Looks or the Lifestyle?
  1. "Karmadrome/Eat Me Drink Me Love Me Kill Me"
    Released: 26 May 1992
  2. "Bulletproof!"
    Released: 17 August 1992
  3. "Get the Girl, Kill the Baddies"
    Released: 1 January 1993
Professional ratings
Review scores
Source Rating
Allmusic 2/5 stars

The Looks or the Lifestyle? is the fourth album by UK based Grebo band, Pop Will Eat Itself released 7 September 1992.

During the Cure for Sanity-era the band were scheduled to play "Dance of the Mad Bastards" on Top of the Pops and recruited Fuzz Townshend to mime the drums although they then never did play the song on Top of the Pops. In 1991 the band recruited Townshend as the band's drummer and he agreed. The album was produced by London DJ's Ben Wolff and Andy Dean (also known as Boilerhouse) and the band recorded the album in Rockfield Studios in the Welsh countryside and was mixed in London. The first single to be released was "Karmadrome" (originally called "The Scottish Song", but then changed to "Karmadrome"), with B-side "Eat Me Drink Me Love Kill Me", which went to number #17 in the UK Charts in June '92. They released "Bulletproof", the second single from the album, on 17 August 1992, which didn't do as well as they had hoped but still managed to go to number #24 in the charts and a video was also made. On 7 September 1992 they released the album in UK and Japan and they then released it worldwide in October 1992. On 1 January 1993 they released the "Get the Girl, Kill the Baddies" single which was a massive hit and was their highest charting single going at number #9 in the charts and the album itself went at number #15.

The Looks or the Lifestyle? shows the band working in a dancier style that began to surface on Cure for Sanity, whilst the harsher, industrial rock sound that characterised the band's later work would appear on some songs such as "Eat Me, Drink Me, Love Me, Kill Me" and "Urban Futuristic". The album stirs the band in a less commercial direction, a result of the band ignoring RCA's press for them to in fact head into a more commercial direction.

The Looks or the Lifestyle? is not considered the band's best album. Josh Landau of Allmusic rated it two stars out of five and said it was "certainly not their best effort," whilst Trouser Press said the album sounds "factory-built, underwritten and overproduced."

Pop Will Eat Itself

Additional Musicians


...
Wikipedia

...