Pop Trash

About

Pop Trash is Duran Duran's tenth album, released in 2000. The album marked their first release not under Capitol Records/EMI, with whom they had been signed since 1981. It was also the last to feature the trio of Simon Le Bon, Nick Rhodes and Warren Cuccurullo. The CD album went out of print in 2001. It was the only album the band released under their new agreement with Hollywood Record. After the album's poor sale, the agreement was terminated, and they would not release an album until 2004's Astronaut. The album artwork features a rhinestone-encrusted car which belonged to Liberace. Since July 2008, the album is available for sale digitally through the iTunes Store in the US and Europe, along with Medazzaland. The band left Capitol in 1998 and signed with Hollywood Record, a subsidiary of The Walt Disney Company. Vocalist and lyricist Le Bon, increasingly unhappy with the band's situation and the departure of bassist John Taylor, was suffering from a severe case of writer's block during the making of this album. In his stead, keyboard player Rhodes and guitarist Cuccurullo took on more of the songwriting than usual, reworking some of their TV Mania material into some of the songs on the album. Pop Trash continues where Medazzaland (1997) left off; elements of rock, synthpop and electronica fused together, with many layers of production. The album is probably one of Duran Duran's most diverse, with songs like "Lava Lamp" including flanged drums and intricate guitar, the catty "Mars Meets Venus" and bizarre "Hallucinating Elvis" full of manufactured bounce, while gentle pop ballad "Someone Else, Not Me" featured few effects at all. Heavy guitar pieces like "Last Day on Earth" and "Playing With Uranium" are juxtaposed with softer songs filled with delicate melancholy, like "Lady Xanax" and "The Sun Doesn't Shine Forever". This album was poorly promoted and did not sell well, although the supporting concert tour sold out at almost all venue, including a week-long stint at the House of Blues in Los Angele. In March 2001, the band announced they had parted ways with Hollywood Records; Nick Rhodes said "Never was there a place that felt less like a record company: Seven giant dwarves hold up the building. You're listening to these people, and finally I had to say, 'How funny that your corporate logo is a large pair of ear, yet not one of you in here happens to have any.' " Nick Rhodes later said that Pop Trash was the most difficult album for the band to make: "Things felt very different without John, although he departed during Medazzaland, he had been part of the initial writing sessions and played on several tracks of that album. Our writing process became very different for Pop Trash, also Simon was having difficulty with some of the lyrics at this time, so I ended up writing more of them than I would have anticipated. We had a new label, Hollywood Record, which proved to be, at best, exasperating. As we did not use a producer either, it resulted in Simon, Warren and I having to focus all of our ideas whilst not having a clear vision of what we were trying to achieve with the album. Given that background, we actually think the record turned out well and closed that era." At the conclusion of the supporting tour for this album, Cuccurullo was dismissed, and the band reunited with its original five member. Duran Duran went without a record deal for a couple of year, while recording their next album and doing extensive touring. They finally signed with Epic Record, and released Astronaut in 2004, with greater success due to the reunion and promotion. .

via Last.fm

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