Music Arcades: A.R. Kane: New Clear Child

The idea was always that Music Arcades would somehow by the Last Hurrah of my record collection; that, by the end, the idea of a collection and of collecting would have changed. But my collecting is only slowly slowing to zero — I've got three new CDs in the last eight days, for example (all of them were "off the grid" of the post-collecting services like Spotify, We7 and emusic, so CD was the only means to get the music).

Another hazard I knew I'd be faced with was that of rediscovering artists that loved and being prompted to buy more of their stuff. I think I've bought more A.R. Kane-related material since I started Music Arcades than any other artist. Life's Rising is one example. New Clear Child is another. It wasn't until I started looking up A.R. Kane discographies for their previous entries here (1, 2, 3, 4) that I even knew New Clear Child existed. £8.99 from Amazon in August 2006.

It's a lot cheaper now, and I know why. Unfortunately, as with Life's Rising, the creative juice has gone, errr, off the boil… You can hear that it's still A.R. Kane, but they've lost their nerve, their boldness, their interesting cover art … and all their innuendo about oral sex. Instead they've set off down the coffee shop path. Did they think this might make them more popular, more rich? If so, I guess they were wrong. I'm not surprised I hadn't heard of it.