One of the first in a breed of fresh-faced bands who fit neatly into the UK pop charts and accompanying teenybopper trappings while retaining vague new wave credibility, the Vapors started at the top and quickly sank from view. Their first single, “Turning Japanese,” was a coy paean to masturbation and an enormous international hit; the inability to match it made the Vapors’ subsequent albums disappointing. Like the Jags (“Back of My Hand”), they were substantially better than a single single.
New Clear Days follows in the veddy British vein originated by Ray Davies and carried on by Paul Weller and Madness. Some of singer David Fenton’s songs show a talented, mature tunesmith at work; unfortunately, they all suffer in light of the awesomely catchy jingle that dominates the record, overshadowing the subtler, more thoughtful material.
Magnets also lacks a peer for “Turning Japanese,” although “Jimmie Jones” (about the suicidal massacre at Jonestown) nearly meets the challenge. Unfortunately, Fenton’s greater aspirations and budding political conscience are severely out of step with the band’s unbreakably commercial image. Had they not been doomed by their own devices from day one, the Vapors might have proven well worth following.
Those first two albums were combined on Vaporized. The Cherry Red release is a four-CD box set containing the same two LPs plus a 1979 live set and more than 40 outtakes, alternate mixes and demos.
After nearly four decades of inaction, Fenton, lead guitarist Ed Bazalgette and bassist Steve Smith led the Vapors back into the ring in 2020 with Together, an agreeable continuation both in terms of sound and direction, with songs that are alternately personal (“I Don’t Remember” and political (“Letter to Hiro (No. 11)”). “Nuclear Nights,” notwithstanding the apocalyptic title, is actually about the end of a romance. Fenton is still capable of writing and singing a great hook (“Those Tears”), but he has the tendency to repeat lines and choruses more than they deserve.
As if the group had been carefully preserved in amber since Jimmy Carter was president, Wasp in a Jar sounds straight outta 1979, with all the energy, spit and look-at-us enthusiasm great new wave records had back then. Sure, it’s a rockist prejudice to ignore everything that’s gone on since then, but chronology shouldn’t interfere with the enjoyment of a familiar sound done so well. (Curiously, the very British-sounding album was recorded in Pennsylvania.)
If you didn’t know that Fenton, a retired solicitor for the Musicians Union, must be in his mid-60s by now, you could easily imagine him to be the age of his son Dave, the band’s capable new guitarist in place of the long-serving Bazalgette. In the album-opening “Hit the Ground Running,” his strong voice keeps up easily with the speedy tempo. The songs are packed with catchy refrains and tightly coiled guitar staccato chop. Other than the inclination to sing a hook more times than needed (an endemic issue for older songwriters), Fenton is in fine form here, an OAP with gobs more spunk than he should be capable of. In a collection of consistently strong material, “The Words,” complete with a half-speed mosh segment, is the could-have-been a hit here.
In the era of streaming/podcasting (by the by, what radio station still plays “my favorite song” with “everybody singing along”?), the corny “Nonstop Radio” is still charming in its anachronistic innocence. But there’s more to WIAJ than melodic punky jizz: “Look Away Now” is a tender, rueful ballad of intimate emotions that situates Fenton closer to his actual age. (So does the defiant but old-sounding “Nothing Can Stop Us Now.”) “Proud,” handsomely built on the three eternal chords and riff of “La Bamba,” expresses family feeling (“If you could see me now / If you could follow my life somehow / Would I make you proud?”) in an unknown context.