The third album is often where a band makes a great leap forward, and so it is with Madness' Seven. Although they're still clearly the same nutty band that tore it up with One Step Beyond, Seven finds the group expanding its horizons considerably, ratcheting up the melodious pop quotient in their songwriting, as well as the distinctly English character sketches. Much of the album comes across as a blend of the Kinks and Ian Dury backed by a propulsive ska beat, and the production is a appropriately just as imaginative, ...
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The third album is often where a band makes a great leap forward, and so it is with Madness' Seven. Although they're still clearly the same nutty band that tore it up with One Step Beyond, Seven finds the group expanding its horizons considerably, ratcheting up the melodious pop quotient in their songwriting, as well as the distinctly English character sketches. Much of the album comes across as a blend of the Kinks and Ian Dury backed by a propulsive ska beat, and the production is a appropriately just as imaginative, colored by the odd sitar, finding new carnivalesque flourishes for the horns, and expanding the rhythmic palette considerably. Sometimes, the group still gets ridiculously silly -- "Benny Bullfrog" is a novelty by any other name -- but the genius of Madness is that they would toss off these frivolous numbers as easily as they would throw out something as elegiac "Grey Day," while finding the sweet spot between those two extremes on singles like "Cardiac Arrest." Not every band possesses such a light touch, and while they certainly got more refined just an album later with The Rise & Fall, Seven is where they revealed the full potential of their talents. [The 2010 deluxe edition of Seven is expanded considerably. The first disc has promo videos of "Grey Day," "Shut Up," "It Must Be Love," and "Cardiac Arrest" in a multimedia section, but it's the second disc that contains a treasure trove of rarities. It opens with a three-song Richard Skinner Session for the BBC, then there are eight bonus tracks: "Memories," the B-side of "Grey Day"; "A Town with No Name," the B-side of the "Shut Up" 7"; "Never Ask Twice," the B-side of the 12" "Shut Up"; the single version of "It Must Be Love"; the B-side of "It Must Be Love," "Shadow on the House"; "In the City," the B-side of the "Cardiac Arrest" 7"; an extended 12" version of "Cardiac Arrest"; and a live version of "Grey Day" from the NME Racket Packet Cassette.] ~ Stephen Thomas Erlewine, Rovi
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