Thomas Dolby | A Map of the Floating City

One-time wunderkind and one-hit wonder releases his first album in some two decades.

Most likely to: make you wonder if you’re listening to the same guy who created this.

Some say that the music you love when you’re 19 years old will likely be your favorite music for the rest of your life, and I can’t really argue with that. I’m not a youngster anymore—I turned 19 a horrifying 30 years ago, in the halcyon days of 1982. And yeah, the music that came out that year occupies a huge chunk of my rapidly calcifying heart.

However, 1982 is a particularly troublesome year to love these days, as music that was actually released that year is required to be dismissed as exemplifying the dreaded “80s production sound,” whilst simultaneously seeming to inspire 98% of all the hippest bands today. Now, there are a couple of albums from that year that it’s okay to love unreservedly: Elvis Costello’s Imperial Bedroom and Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska. But neither of those are the albums that set my heart aflutter. No, I have to go and love an album that, perhaps more than any other, typifies what makes people dismiss the 80s. This record is Thomas Dolby’s The Golden Age of Wireless—but not the version that most people who own a copy of it have in their collections.

When Dolby first arrived on the scene as a solo artist, he was considered a bit of a musical genius. Pete Townshend raved about him. He was friends with (and a peer on equal footing with) Robyn Hitchcock and XTC’s Andy Partridge. The original U.S. issue of The Golden Age of Wireless was hailed as a masterpiece, a near perfect album of rare intelligence and invention that brought a poetic, romantic human heart to UK post-punk.  Songs like “Europa and the Pirate Twins,” “Flying North,” “Leipzig” and “Cloudburst at Shingle Street” combined technology and heart in a way unmatched by anyone at the time and few since. I loved the hell out of that damn album, and continue to do so to this very day.

Then, in ‘83, Dolby released the obnoxiously ubiquitous “She Blinded Me with Science” single, which was added to a re-sequenced, reissued Golden Age of Wireless, fucking the whole thing up. It stopped being a near-perfect album and became a seriously flawed one; one where Dolby’s proven intelligence was forced to kowtow to his newfound and profitably toxic whimsy. For the remainder of the 80s, Dolby jettisoned the bulk of the intelligence from his work (although half of Wireless’ follow-up, The Flat Earth, was damn good) and pursued the cartoon-mad-scientist persona he’d crafted for himself with that song. A living avatar for everything that most think went wrong in the 80s, he transformed himself from a serious artist into a one-hit-wonder MTV jackass, until he eventually retired from music and earned himself a mint inventing the ringtone technology used in most cell phones.

So it’s with a combination of lingering affection and apprehensive resignation that I approached listening to Dolby’s first album in two decades, A Map of the Floating City. I knew the guy was capable of brilliance but equally capable of utter bullshit, and had shown a dismaying tendency to favor the latter on albums like Aliens Ate My Buick or the Howard the Duck soundtrack. It is therefore a pleasant surprise that nothing on A Map of the Floating City is particularly irritating (though the goofy “The Toad Lickers” pushes it). It’s simultaneously a damn disappointment that nothing on it is particularly brilliant (though the epic closing suite “To the Lifeboats” comes close), settling instead for being merely pretty good.

Having lived a non-musical life in Silicon Valley for the last twenty years, Dolby is now far removed from his days as a restlessly experimental whiz kid—synthesizers are conspicuous in their near-total absence from A Map of the Floating City. Dolby is instead infatuated with American roots music: harmonicas, fiddles and horn sections are more in evidence than drum machines and electronics.

However, since Dolby’s best work was always more dependent on the songwriting at its core rather than the instruments playing it, Thomas Dolby the Americana storyteller is not lightsyears removed from Thomas Dolby the post-punk technocrat. The lovers-on-the-run “Road to Rio” is cut from the same cloth as the non-reunion of childhood friends chronicled in “Europa and the Pirate Twins,” while the gorgeous soundscapes of “Oceana” and “Simone” conjure up the old ambience of “Leipzig” and “The Flat Earth.”

Mostly, A Map of the Floating City shows a born songwriter easing back into his life’s work. He may have had his biggest hit with one of his most annoying songs and then earned a fortune developing technology that annoys nearly everyone, but at heart Thomas Dolby is an artist of undeniable intelligence, and no matter how many diversions he’s taken from that path over the years, he’s come back to it. A Map of the Floating City may be nowhere near as brilliant an album as the one he put out 30 years ago, but at least it doesn’t cheapen that album’s legacy like his revisions to it at the time did. And that’s good enough for now.

Watch Mr. Dolby present Floating City track “Love Is a Loaded Pistol” at a TEDTalks Conference: