The Fixx’s Beautiful Friction became a richer experience the longer it played – and the longer it stayed.
There weren’t enough of the hooky stickiness of familiars like “One Thing Leads to Another” or “Saved by Zero” to be found from the twin openers of “Anyone Else” and “Just Before Dawn,” both of which were quickly installed as Fixx concert staples. And I was stuck right there, for a time.
Eventually, though, I came to appreciate this album’s smart modernity – its of-the-moment instrumentation (which plays down Rupert Greenall’s familiar keyboards, but doesn’t completely abandon him), its deftly understated production and its this-just-in Occupy-minded themes. In short, its refusal to pander.
My belated realization grew out of a love for the album’s final four-song sequence. From the first, I felt that this was the heart of Beautiful Friction, which arrived on July 17, 2012. This was when the Fixx reestablished their core synthesis of new wave and prog – even as Cy Curnin continued to explore with a writerly eye the space between our soaring hopes for a better world and the devastating echoes left after dreams crash to earth.
That eventually led to a wholesale reevaluation of Beautiful Friction itself, from the swirling psychedelia of “Just Before Dawn” to the Killers-style propulsion of the Jamie West-Oram guitar showcase “Take a Risk,” from the Greenall soundscapes on the title track (there’s a whisper of Pink Floyd in there, right?) to the nervy funk of “Girl With No Ceiling.”
Screw radio, MTV, and the rest. This was the sound of band unafraid to follow its muse. Even when it ramped up into a feisty groove, Beautiful Friction was rarely confused with a record trying to connect with the lowest common denominator. And yet the Fixx could, in a moment’s notice, again sound nothing so much like themselves through the textured bliss of “Shaman.”
Sure, some things don’t click, even now. I haven’t stopped skipping past “Follow that Cab,” which tries to rock but instead feels rote. Over time, however, I’ve come to think of this as one of the Fixx’s most intriguing albums – and for all the same reasons that I loved uncommercial works like Talk Talk’s all-but-forgotten 1991 masterpiece Laughing Stock.
It would have been easy enough for the Fixx to fall back into the comfort of nostalgia, just in time for their 30th anniversary tour. And certainly, the return of bassist Dan K. Brown and that cover art in the instantly recognizable style of George Underwood hinted that the focus might have been on recapturing long-ago triumphs like Reach the Beach and Phantoms. Beautiful Friction goes one better, however, deftly avoiding that corporate-minded misstep even as its varied tempo improved upon their then most-recent recording – 2003’s too-often-downbeat Want That Life.
What we have instead is a complexity that might at first seem a bit impenetrable. Upon repeated listens, however, Beautiful Friction shows how sticking together for all of these years – and refusing to double back for the sake of cashing in – has made the Fixx so very much more interesting, if necessarily less bankable on the pop charts. By the time Beautiful Friction draws to a close with the completely immersive “Small Thoughts,” it becomes clear that the Fixx has matured in the same way as Cy Curnin’s voice: A little darker, but still remarkably resilient – and, until the end, its very own thing.
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