Dead Or Alive: Evolution: The Hits : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

Before there was electroclash, before there was Kylie, before there was Fischerspooner, there was Dead or Alive, the over-the-top New Wavers whose baritone frontman Pete Burns precisely anticipated the Lil' Kim look. Burns transformed the hi-NRG sound of mid-Eighties gay disco into proto-Total Request Live pop by jamming it full of hooks and making every word he intoned a vehicle for his freaky persona. This retrospective arrives just in time for cheeseball sequencers, slap bass, pansexual flamboyance and goth-operatic bellowing to be really cool again. The swaggering come-on "You Spin Me Round" remains one of the glittering prizes of its era, although two of the three other DOA songs anybody remembers, "Lover Come Back (to Me)" and "Turn Around and Count 2 Ten," are inexplicably replaced with awful new remakes.

DOUGLAS WOLK
(RS 927, July 24, 2003)