With honking saxophone and a sharp voice similar to Poly
Styrene's, Essential Logic come off as a matured version of X-Ray Spex. With
Blondie guitarist Gary Valentine, ex-Bad Manners bassist Dave Jones and
drummer Nick Pretzell, it's natural that they have a tight, catchy Post-Punk
sound.
- © Listen.com
Mini - Bio:
Susan Whitby was 15 years old and had been playing saxophone for a little more than six months
when she joined her friend Marion Elliot (aka Poly Styrene) and formed the great English punk band
X-Ray Spex. At this juncture, Whitby renamed herself Lora Logic and brought her honking and
squawking to X-Ray Spex's guitar-propelled punk rock, staying long enough to record the seminal
feminist-punk single "Oh Bondage, Up Yours!"
Prior to the recording of their debut album, Logic
abruptly left the band to follow her own quirky songwriting muse and formed the wonderfully named
Essential Logic. Eschewing fast and loud guitars for off-kilter rhythms, "bluesy" sax playing and
forays into dissonance and atonality, Essential Logic created some of the most liberating, exciting
music of the early post-punk era. Along with her primitive, exhilarating sax playing, Logic displayed
a wildly imaginative vocal style that conflated the subtle eroticism of Patti Smith with the epiglottal
spasms of Yoko Ono. Singing, braying and screeching her implicitly (at times explicitly) feminist
lyrics while her backing band crashed and bashed in the background, this was almost a punk
version of that most despised of genres, art-rock. And while the subjects of most of her songs were
serious (alienation, sexism, poverty, urban isolation) there was a bratty tongue-wagging raffishness
to Logic (and band) that placed them a cut above the rest.
After one album as Essential Logic, Lora
Logic disbanded the group to go solo. After one great solo record, Logic left music to join a
London-based Hare Krishna sect with old pal Poly Styrene. Recently, Styrene issued some music in
England, and it was rumored that Logic played sax on the recording. But regardless of her current
activities, Lora Logic's short recording career will always be marked by its intelligence, creativity
and fun.
- by John Dougan, All Music Guide
© 1999 AEC One Stop Group, Inc.
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