Les Fradkin – Remote Control – Single Review

Les Fradkin, the champion of artistic, orchestral, ‘60s/’70s-inspired rock and roll, returns with “Remote Control” – a track originally recorded in 1980, but recently updated due to its surprisingly timely messaging: a dystopian future filled with a distracting, perhaps controlling media. Does the latest Les Fradkin track measure up to the rest of his progressive, classic-and-classically-orchestrated rock? Let’s talk about it.

Wait. Who does what?

Les Fradkin tackles nearly everything you hear, including lead and background vocals, Mellotron, chamberlin, Starr Labs Ztar, nylon string guitar, bass, and drums.

And “nearly” means he’s not alone. His life-partner in crime, Loretta Pieper Fradkin, contributes additional lyrics and background vocals. Now, about that music….

Listening, and talking about it.

“Remote Control” begins softly, ominously, with nylon string guitar and haunting Mellotron flute. (Note: A great deal of “Remote Control” features the Mellotron and its various recorded instruments – it’s the ideal, lavishly layering, mood-setting weapon in a progressive rock artist’s musical armory.)

At about the 45-second point, the drums arrive, and so does the rushing of dark-sky-painting Mellotron strings; they remind me of mournful passages present in King Crimson’s earlier artistic excursions. And when the verse turns, briefly, to a more dispiriting key, the strings are joined by a spacey, from-the-void chorus (also courtesy of the instrumentally stacked and blissfully analog Mellotron).

Les Fradkin’s voice, low and perhaps weighted by man’s current (or future) plight, takes on a space-filling delay; he’s the only storyteller with enough clarity and persistent will to convey man’s current (or arriving) social dismay. And with a walking, descending bassline merging earth to the circuit-sparking heavens – the result of a domed, nearly atmospheric ceiling showing brief glitches in its projected skyline illusion – “Remote Control” fades quietly to a black cloud-enveloped infinity expressed by those layered, eerie Mellotron voices. Are they the final harmonies of a fading but still tenacious humanity, or perhaps a mimicking super-intelligence with enough data to sing us to sleep? One wonders….

But is it good?

Oh, yes. And unfortunately, its concerns are dangerously close to validation. Conveying feelings of defeat, of mourning, for the human race (and, of course, the human heart), and expressed with the Mellotron’s innate dramatics, “Remote Control” is mankind’s final musical lament. HIGHLY recommended.
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