Thomas Dolby - The Flat Earth (1984)

 Capitol Records ■ ST-12309

Released February, 1984

Produced by Thomas Dolby

Engineered by Dan Lacksman
Mixed by Mike Shipley ("Hyperactive!" mixed by Alan Douglas)

Side One:	Side Two:
Dissidents The Flat Earth Screen Kiss	White City Mulu the Rain Forest I Scare Myself Hyperactive!

Oddly, I'd never really heard "She Blinded Me with Science", nor have I (really) even now, though it was a big hit in the decade I've spent my life unabashedly enjoying the resulting pop music from. I bought this LP as well as the Blinded by Science 12" EP/mini-album simply because I saw them for a low enough price. I'm honestly not sure at this point if they pre-dated or followed my father stuffing a copy of 1992's Astronauts and Heretics on CD into my hand while visiting a used music store. It's entirely possible they followed it--"I Love You Goodbye" is a stupendous song, on a really great album. I'd still only heard the clips of that biggest of singles though, on the commercials for 80s compilations, or on any show that was referencing it as indicative of the decade.

When I had the poll up (due to the absence of votes, I simply removed it), a single vote appeared and then disappeared, for the Blinded by Science mini-album, which I decided to sit down and listen to first. While I naturally couldn't recognize the original, I strongly suspected the version of "She Blinded Me with Science" was a 12" extended mix, and I later confirmed it was just that. Those things are difficult to pull off and it rarely happened with much success. The hooks are either beaten into the ground or so severely cropped or inverted as to become thoroughly un-catchy. This wasn't much an exception, so I didn't feel much like trying to write about not only a mini-album that was an attempt to capitalize on the now rather confused release history Dolby had built up (in his native U.K., The Golden Age of Wireless did not contain that enormous single, though the original U.S. did not either--it was initially released, instead, with tracks omitted and replaced with b-sides, in typical U.S. fashion for U.K. releases--though I still don't much understand a lot of the reasons this was and is done) but one that contained one of those mixes.