Formica Blues - Critical Reception

Critical Reception

Melody Maker, in an overwhelmingly positive review, calls Formica Blues "unutterably gorgeous", praising it for evoking the era when "London was about to swing". The album was subsequently rated number 49 on the newspaper's top albums of the year list (Portishead's Portishead was rated number 18 on the same list).

The Melody Maker album review opened with the phrase "A case study in post-modern ennui", which became a theme in some analyses of the album. Nicholson, in interpreting "Hello Cleveland!", calls the song a pastiche of musical "quotations", comparable to Berio's Simfonia in its referencing of past musical works. In addition, since the samples are not identified, Nicholson points out that, for the majority of listeners, they become simulacra — the postmodern concept developed by Jean Baudrillard, meaning imitations that can't be ascribed to an original object — referring to, in this case, the fact that most listeners, including professional reviewers, do not recognize them as being anything beyond generic compositions reminiscent of classical music. From the perspective of a listener familiar with the source material, however, Nicholson suggests that Virgo seems to even use the placement of the samples to parallel the musical references found in the original works.

Nevertheless, Nicholson concludes that the song "collapses", becoming an "aggregation of elements", which is applied to both groups of listeners: "amateur" listeners hear a collection of sounds with no particular significance, while "connoisseur" listeners are unable to construct a "narrative" out of the sounds as there are "too many elements". This effect, however, is tied back to Virgo's description of his musical influences, to suggest that it is exactly the "kaleidoscopic" effect of Phil Spector's Wall of Sound technique. Virgo, in his statements, in fact says that even though it "isn't music that tends to rear its head in a lot of popular music", the Klangfarbenmelodie (tone-colour-melody) approach to melody pioneered by the Second Viennese School was comparable to a style of popular music production "where there are so many things going on at once but the overall sound doesn't seem complicated" — which Virgo credits Phil Spector for originating; Nicholson makes the reasonable connection that this is referring to the Wall of Sound.

The Spanish radio program Viaje a los Sueños Polares (on Los 40 Principales) awarded the album Best International LP in its 1997 staff poll.

BBC broadcaster Mark Radcliffe listed Formica Blues among his top three albums of 1997, calling it "Atmospheric soundtracks for films that haven't been made yet" (prior to the 1998 release of Great Expectations).