The Bubblemen – The Bubblemen Are Coming!

You wish you were a Bubbleman, you wish, you wish, you wish.

The Bubblemen Are Coming! is a 12" single put out by, well, The Bubblemen, obviously, back in 1988 on Beggars Banquet, Vertigo, and RCA. Of course, unless you are like Ygritte's version of Jon Snow and know nothing, you probably know that The Bubblemen are none other than Love and Rockets. I mean, if you've ever paid any attention to the latter, then you'll probably pick up on David J's voice pretty quickly on "The Bubblemen Are Coming!" And, given that this release is, as of this writing, twenty-six years old, well, I don't think it's any big secret anymore that this little ditty was a side project of Love And Rockets--if it ever even was a secret in the first place.

The A-side begins, oddly enough, with an echoing, hollow, bubbly sounding synth that sort of seems like it could be approaching the listener--are the Bubblemen really coming? Watch out! After a bit of wishful choral thinking, the fun begins. This song is obviously Love and Rockets goofing around a bit for sure, but it's a snazzy little snappy number--fans of Love and Rockets can sort of understand, I'd reckon, how the group might not have felt this song would fit into their typical releases.

Not really synth-pop, even with the blippy snippets of arcade sounding synth bits (or maybe they're processed percussion samples--or a bit of both), this is more what I'd probably want to call "alternative pop-rock" with a playful edge. I mean, we've got a jazzy sounding bass line, some swinging percussion, and Daniel Ash's right rippin' guitar parts. How this ended up classified as "hip hop" and "electronic" on Discogs I'll never know. But, hey, go for a whirl.

The costumes that Love and Rockets don in order to become their Bubblemen alter egos get likened to bees--although, they are the happiest looking bees I've ever seen, but I bet it's probably the stripes and antennae--and this might go some way to explaining the B-side of this record, which probably gets played only slightly more often than the "Absolute Elsewhere" B-side of Coil's How To Destroy Angels. It's called, oddly enough, "B Side" and is three minutes and forty-seven seconds of the sound of bees buzzing around. Those clever punters.

The Bubblemen Are Coming! is a fun little release, bees and all, sure, that I'm glad Love and Rockets took the time to put out: it never fails to bring a smile to my face or put a little groove in my move. I give it a solid seven and a half ears out of ten.

This release on Discogs.

Interested listeners can find the actual video for The Bubblemen Are Coming on YouTube and can hear the full length version on Grooveshark.