China Crisis – Difficult Shapes & Passive Rhythms - Some People Think It's Fun To Entertain

My favorite China Crisis album. My favorite China Crisis album. It's true!

This pressing sounds fantastic. Big improvement over the Canadian pressing it replaces.

For me worth it for the Peel session, last 4 tracks on second disc. This should have been put out on vinyl with the early Strange Fruit eps. Delicious stuff indeed.

This is another one of those cases when an album gets "remastered", and I'm left scratching my head wondering..... why?? The original CD release was already lovingly mixed, very clean and clear. CDs have a hard limit on their resolution (16 bit and 44.1K hertz), and are normally limited to stereo. That is a pretty hard ceiling, and you cannot break it, remastering cannot top perfection. You can remaster something 1,000 times, and not once end up with a better result. Technology is not magic, and it has strict limits: you cannot top the best, and those who think they can, are damn fools, the lot of them. Naive fools.

So yeah, let's put this more shortly: original CD sounds A+, this 2017 remaster is just an A. Original is better, whoop-tee-doo!

Of course, the original never came with a bonus disk full of all the b-sides and demos, so that is a big plus. I'd say if you really like China Crisis, do get this 2017 remaster for he bonus tracks alone, but also do track down the original album, and open yourself up for the possibility that humans knew how to make CDs over 30 years ago, sometimes better than we do today. Digital stereo mixing and mastering is old technology, we had it for quite a while.

The music on this record grows on you a lot. Please give it more than one play before you rate it. Mostly all the songs are pretty good!!

It's high time Virgin pull their thumbs out and remaster all the China Crisis albums. Bonus tracks too please! And for God's sake's don't let Rhino or Cherry Red anywhere near them! If Virgin can't be bothered maybe give Edsel a crack at 'em. They did a reasonably fine job with the Blancmange & Thompson Twins

One of those milestones of youth for me, which means I'll refrain from sentimental dribble ...oops! I 'think' the chorus from "African and White" is: "Life is just a fever Is-ra-el." It goes without saying that the song is about apartheid as it stood in South Africa at that time, of which Israel was a supporter: You could go further and say that the groups lyrics meant to draw parallels vis a vis Palestine...but I wouldn't want to go there (oops!) in case some knee-jerker starts taking the proverbial.

Two great reviews here and probably the best I've read on this site.
Review wise? I agree with them both.

Difficult Shapes is a great debut album from the sadly-defunct China Crisis. The main Steely Dan connection here (to me) is the vocals. Beyond that, CC are definitely their own band. There is less polish and more uptempo tracks than on a typical SD album. The lyrical content does not approach the cryptic nature of SD.

Anyway, I guess I'd regard this as something of a synthpop album, but it also contains nice jazzy undertones. It is highly melodic and pleasantly uplifting. Imagine Depeche Mode but with more propulsive rhythms, and brighter, with no drugs or clinical depression. I guess it's nothing like DM!

"African and White" is a positively infectious song and among my favourites of theirs. No one seems to know what they sing in that chorus.