Tandem Newspaper March 21, 2004
Chris Twomey

The little-known saga of French punk rockers Metal Urbain continues with this reissue of their 1980 release as the Metal Boys. The punk scene in France had collapsed in 1978 and their singer quit. Founder Eric Debris moved to London where they enjoyed the most acceptance and had a label (Rough Trade) who would support them. At this time the new wave of electronic music was well underway after the Human League, and even rock entities as disparate as Siouxsie & the Banshees and Hawkwind were getting into the cold wave synth pop sounds. Metal Urbain took on these influences and transformed into the Metal Boys, as Debris worked with Hawkwind's Robert Calvert on recordings that were lost or stolen. Later with new English collaborator Charlie Hurbier and "mystery" vocalist China, the wide-ranging Tokio Airport album was put together, that in retrospect was very contemporary to the new English electronic scene but perhaps overlooked for it's variety. In addition to their unique combination of rock guitars and electronic beats these guys made interesting OMD-influenced synth-pop, Soft Cell style lounge music and Cabaret Voltaire type electro-dub. Now remixed and remastered these tracks and the never-before-released bonus cuts should put the Metal Boys back in the historical frame, which is especially relevant to the search for obscure synth-pop in the wake of "electroclash."

Other Music March 30, 2004
Lisa Garrett

An odd and purely coincidental timing with the current (re)release of Suicide's 1980 Live album from Max's Kansas City, this Metal Urbain spin-off shares much more than the re-issue release dates. By this time, Suicide's stateside antics paralleled Metal Urbain's own alarmist art sound. Manipulating keyboards to sound dark, minimal and/or robotic were tactics of the first wash of new wave to which both bands adhered. While Vega and Rev were dodging bottles, the Metal Boys (Metal Urbain sans vocalist Clode Panik) explored their own wall of sound-processed electronics and rhythm machine mayhem.

Comparatively, the Metal Boys went for a far more dry, deep and cacophonous sound. And when it came to political themes, at the time no one else laid it all out icy female vocal style like the "mysterious" China, as they call her. On the title track she plays a Tokyo tour guide while Debris inserts his gravelly French narrative in between her prim British accented spiel. At one point, his brashness rubs off when she yells, "You're lost in the fucking airport you stupid sod!" If that doesn't sound sexy enough, back up to "Suspenders in the Park," a disturbing rant with growling, Grace Jones-esque vocals ruminating on the effects of napalm over a thick pulsating, yet minimal bursts. Another song of note is the homage to (parody of?) Gainsbourg's jazz/lounge shtick, "Parlez-Moi D'Argent."

Fans of the Metal Urbain release may turn their nose up at the more new wave pop tendencies of this record; dissenters should find some excuse to revisit it. Despite the similarities, you don't necessarily have to love or hate Suicide to warm up to Metal Boys - just German new wave, synth pop and minimalist noise.

The Stranger April 8, 2004
Dave Segal

The synth-rock offshoot of seminal French post-punks Mˆ©tal Urbain (Steve Albini and Jesus & Mary Chain worship 'em), Metal Boys dropped this oddity to zero acclaim in 1980. Alternately quirkily tuneful and jaggedly ominous, Tokio Airport sounds like an amalgam of Suicide, early Cabaret Voltaire, and Italian legend Franco Battiato. It's as crucial an '80s electronic album as anything by DAF or Liaisons Dangereuses. This reissue comes with nine bonus cuts.

Aquarius Records March 2004

After wowing fans of underground music a few months back with a long-awaited cd reissue of material by pioneering French punk-industrial act Metal Urbain, the Acute label is back with a sequel - the 1980 album from Metal Boys, the band that Metal Urbain morphed into after their '78 break-up. After a few years of failed studio sessions and line-up shake-ups and random gigging, that is. But in 1980 leader Eric Debris and co. returned under the guise of Metal Boys with this album. What with the rise of New Wave, perhaps it seemed the the scene had caught up with them, but not entirely - their music is way more twisted and dissonant and experimental than most New Wave pop that's for sure! And their new incarnation still retained the fuzzed guitars, sci-fi synths, and tick-tock drum programming that made Metal Urbain so great. The biggest difference was their new singer, a woman named China who sang in English not French (which makes some of this sound just a bit sillier than Anglophones might have thought about Metal Urbain). There's 19 tracks here, including 9 previously unreleased bonus tracks, incorporating hints of everything from rockabilly to proto-house to Devo-isms to industrial noise-scapes. Perhaps of special note are the two seven-minute bonus tracks from what was supposed to be an Eric Debris 12" release, truly spaced-out slices of minimalist Geiger-counter disco entitled "Disco Future" and "Outer Space". And maybe they did know something about disco future - as we said before in our review of Metal Urbain's Anarchy In Paris!, this reissue couldn't be more timely. What these guys were doing 25 years ago is definitely the in sound, now. Sooooo retro-hip. Definitely don't buy any more Liars or Chicks On Speed or The Faint or DFA stuff, or anything like that until you've checked out these originators.

Tokion
Saheer Umar

While the Metal Boys are the band that formed after Metal Urbain broke up, many of these songs are actually older than M.U.'s recently unearthed tracks. Featured here is the mysterious China, an icy female vocalist whose past and personality are unclear to the listener and supposedly the band themselves. With 19 sheets of synth-metal sand paper flossing your ears, pain has never sounded so pleasurable.

Rockpile April 2004
Allan Kemler

On the other side of the Atlantic...Just as ZE, a French label, has een busy documenting the experimental scene in New York in the late ’Äì'70s and early '80s, Acute Records have conspired to document France's contribution to punk-and-dance-inspired miscegenation with the release of two records by Metal Urbain and the Metal Boys.

Inspired by Robert Fripp, Hawkwind, and Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music, Metal Urbain were composed of a coterie of French punks who paired blistering guitars with an early drum machine and ended up creating some of the most influential electro-punk never heard. Though they only managed to release four singles during their brief existence, they did manage to inspire the Jesus and Mary Chain and Big Black with their cacophonic hybrid sound. By early '79, after just three years, Metal Urbain dissolved in a fit of anonymity. Almost immediately, three-quarters of Metal Urbain regrouped as the Metal Boys and recorded Tokio Airport, a visionary mˆ©lange of rockabilly, Beat jazz, French chanson, cabaret, synth-pop, and '60s psych sounds. While Metal Urbain's trashy-guitars/primitive-drum-machine formula and the Metal Boys avant-garde, synth-pop technique sound amazingly prescient today, truth be told, neither bands' songs are as immediately classic as they were influential. That said, "Panik," "Lady Coca Cola" and "Suspenders in the Park" all make excellent mix tape diversions.

Dusted Magazine April 30, 2004
Jon Dale

The Acute label is dedicating itself to two channels of reissue forum: the Glenn Branca axis, and French punk/new-wave. Following the label's Mˆ©tal Urbain reissue of late last year is post-Urbain outfit Metal Boys' Tokio Airport album from 1980. Eric Dˆ©bris and Charlie Hurbier form the nexus of the outfit, fleshed out by mysterious English vocalist China. The sound on the recordings shares headspace with Mˆ©tal Urbain's machine-rock, though it trades in the single-minded purpose of Urbain's music for a more inclusive sphere of activity, which proves to be both its strength and its downfall.

Tokio Airport stumbles at the first hurdle: lyrics and vocals. As with a lot of post-punk, or 'avant new-wave', the Metal Boys' occasional lapses into lyrical dogmatism are hardly becoming: it's not the content/context of the lyrics, but the way they're rendered. Large parts of Tokio Airport are rather gauche, evoking the 'just-out-of-college' clumsiness that hamstrung a lot of post-punk artists. You can find a similar cringe-worthiness in the Gang of Four's well-intentioned-but-slightly-trite class struggle polemic, The Pop Group's Nietzschean abandon, and the declamatory surface-intent politics of some of the Rough Trade label crew. Sometimes it's hard to decide whether that light, broth-of-language political rhetoric is, at least, easier to swallow than lyric-as-personal-indulgence, but tracks like "X-Mas Day" or "Suspenders in the Park" lose out on text.

But the Metal Boys generally win out on sound. There's something obdurate about their songs, a completely unyielding fascination with the analog sound processing and the eternal endless pulse of Teutonic technology. "Carbone 14" sounds as future-perfect, yet completely of its age, as the early works of Severed Heads, or the Human League's The Dignity of Labour EP; in these recordings you can hear DIY tactic grappling with then-modern electronics. The final bonus tracks, "Disco Future" and "Outer Space", stretch things further - manic, streamlined gushes of sound breached by China's mantric repetitions. The liner notes here want you to believe that songs like "Carbone 14" and "Suspenders in the Park" could be dropped in some electro-clash club without anyone batting an eyelid, but drawing that parallel skips the rock/punk part of the equation. The Metal Boys, like their predecessors Mˆ©tal Urbain, were never rigid about 'opposing all rock'n'roll'. If their relationship with the Rough Trade label contextualized the band within the feverish non-/anti-rock action of the post-punk collective, Debris and Hurbier were never shy of throwing a monstrous riff into their songs, roughed-up through tinny, overdriven production. The Ramones meets Cabaret Voltaire? Perhaps only for a few songs, like the opening "Colt 45", but they make for nice jolts of energy among Tokio Airport's more ruminative instrumentals, and the side-glances at warped pop, cabaret, and various other forms. If the record fails at any point, it's thanks to the neo-new-wave stumbling of songs like "Wah Lee Bomp Dee Bomp".

Were the Metal Boys prescient? That depends on how you view the tributaries that have run from the late 1970s and early 1980s. Electronic/industrial exploration has been taken up again by acts like Wolf Eyes, the post-punk/disco micro-revolution is being revisited by The Rapture, the itchy guitar non-pop by Erase Errata. But the Metal Boys' aesthetic was too combinatory to be mimicked or followed, and modern practitioners of this music are too caught up following only one path to interpolate other genres into their constructs. And even if Tokio Airport is much less than perfect, if it falls and loses its way, doesn't manage to fully transcend its era, it still sounds like little else.

(Oh, and the soon-come reissue of Eric Dˆ©bris' Dr Mix and the Remix's Greatest Hits album, I'd queue in torrential rain for that.)

Village Voice May 11, 2004
Don Allred

Doubt ye? Consider this: "The rain won't let my tits grow. Napalm you're so good in bed. How many flies ate you today? Let's get hungry tonight." That's China whinin', like a siren, on "Suspenders in the Dark." She sings for Metal Boys (recombinant shards of Parisian punk pioneers Metal Urbain) on 1980's Tokio Airport. Now unearthed, and still flying together/apart on every track, Metal Boys' sexelectric dragon's teeth gnaw and gnash at China's objet d'amour-hate, "Tokio Airport." "Technofasceest," she hisses, and drives desperate, new unforgivable-synth stinky toys through "the anti-climax of X-mas Day," leaving them stuck inside a harmon-ically ravenous mobile in "Carbone 14." Later, in penance and/or celebration, China dances barefoot for a "Paranoia Carnival," on tone-nails of gilded Pong. (That's un certain game, kiddies. I hear it's coming baaack.)

slate.com June 29, 2004
Philip Sherburne

No Wave, Reissued - Songs you should have listened to the first time around.
Parisian punks Metal Urbain answered punk's egalitarian challenge by giving a drum machine the privileged seat usually reserved for incompetent tub-thumpers (possibly at great risk of offending the French musicians' union). In their second incarnation, as Metal Boys, they also demoted the guitars, favoring squirrelly synthesizer squawks and space-age circus organs. Where Metal Urbain were faithful to punk's three-chord format, 1980's Tokio Airport flirts with lounge jazz, intergalactic hymns, and electronic fugues (the psychological state, not the Baroque form). Even the "rock" songs here are puzzling, inspiring questions like, "How did all those bees get in my speakers, and where did they get such small guitars?" It's tempting to call this retrieved artifact more curio than classic, a Rosetta Stone for French punk. But the English singer China's lyrics’Äîlike "The rain it stops my tits from growing/ Napalm you're so good in bed," showcased on "Suspenders in the Park"’Äîare more opaque than illuminating.

Sup Mag Summer 2004
Paul Menchaca

Go form a band, write songs with lyrics like: "Fuck my ass in World War III," and "Napalm, you're so good in bed," and "I saw mamma fucking a nuclear missile." Then come talk to me. The Metal Boys did, and their bizarre, new wave, electro, synth pop 1980 album Tokio Airport has now been re-released.

By now, a lot of people have probably heard of Metal Urbain, the Parisian synth-punk band, whoe album Anarchy in Paris! was re-released last year. Metal Boys was a spin-off band featuring a couple of members of Metal Urbain, and formed after the latter broke up in 1978.

The majority of the songs on this album (plus unreleased bonus tracks) feature a woman named China singing in French, giving some of it a sort of foreshadowing of Stereolab to come. A lot of it, unfortunately, also foreshadows that sort of Chicks on Speed-like electro that you want to like because it is so stylish, but know that it's more of an "art project" than actually anything tangible to listen to more than once. Tokio Airport has that feel of having been recorded, for better or worse, under the influence of copious amounts of downers. In other words, it's slow, meanders and can sometimes be painfully repetitive, like the song "Disco Future", which loops China saying "Disco Future" over and over and over again for almost eight minutes atop a minimal electronic beat.

Anyone who has ever done drugs, and has either played music or hung out with people who played music, knows those nights when music would be made after swallowing a few pills and drinking booze. At the time it sounded awesome because any sort of stimulation was kind of a cool way of keeping you from passing out and slipping into a coma. But then the next day you would listen to it and realize that all those sounds that seemed cool at the time really didn't add up to much. This album is like that next day.

Boston Phoenix June 2, 2004
Franklin Bruno

French fried - The electroclash punk of Robotnika and Metal Urbain.
’Ä®...But then, so did Metal Urbain, and they still do they just completed the US leg of a reunion tour. Formed by singer Clode Panik and electronic music buff Eric Debris in 1976, the group are generally considered Frances first punks, since they hurled blocks of overdriven guitar against programmed rhythms. Their early releases amounted to an instruction manual for what Big Black would become. Last years Anarchy in Paris! (Acute) collected their classic 7779 material ("Panik," "Lady Coca-Cola"). Now, Acutes Tokio Airport, credited to Metal Boys, continues the story: after Panik split in 1980, Debris and guitarist Charlie H. regrouped under the new name to record the full-length that the original incarnation never managed. (A third volume, compiling Debriss solo work as "Dr Mix," is due later this year.)

Everything on Tokio Airport has been digitally remixed and remastered, which is something like using silver polish on shrapnel. The material isnt so aggressive in the context of Metal Urbains ceaseless jackhammering, but the sonic choices are harsh and confrontational, with synths and guitars sounding less like instruments than like tape damage. Similarities to Martin Hannetts work with Joy Division are hard to miss: "Hes Shaken Up" resembles "Shes Lost Control" in more than title. The original albums apex of alienation is "Suspenders in the Park," a staticky loop over which a male voice the credits are vague stage-whispers a paean to apocalyptic sex: "Ooh . . . napalm, youre so good in bed."

The tracks that cohere best do so around the warm-leatherette vocals of one China, a female Metal Boy whom even the well-researched liner notes simply call "mysterious." As far as expressiveness is concerned, she makes Black Box Recorders Sara Nixey sound like Edith Piaf, but shes well equipped to recite Japanese on the title track (backed by keyboard kotos), or to intone the denatured rockabilly of "Wah Lee Bomp Dee Bomp." Its thanks to her that the never-before-issued "Disco Future" is both the purest track here and the hardest to tolerate: a virtual heartbeat, various layers of sine-wave torture, and the title, repeated without discernible variation for seven and a half minutes. Its just the sort of music the objects that Robotnika sing about might make, especially when you take into account the spoken introduction that kicks it off: "This is your future speaking."

Allmusic.com March 2004
Thom Jurek

Issued as a companion piece to Acute's glorious reissue of the entire Metal Urbain catalog, it should have remained in the vault. What made Metal Urbain great was their completely unselfconscious disregard for convention and anything that rock & roll had to offer. They might have been conceptual, but they were wonderfully misdirected, and compensated with pure shambolic energy and requisite teen-angst anger. The Metal Boys, on the other hand, were a "rebel" cache made up of Eric Dˆ©bris and Charlie Hurbier, pushing 30-something's, from Metal Urbain with English vocalist China. The first incarnation of the Metal Boys ’Äî really the classic lineup of Metal Urbain ’Äî issued no recordings. After two years slogging it out under a number of different monikers, the final incarnation, fueled by crummy synths and toy rhythm machines, recorded some one-off efforts, and the album (under the moniker Mˆ©tal Urbain, Tokyo Airport, a collection of anarchic-cum-"serious" political and social commentaries that are laughable for their pretensions and lack of anything remotely compelling. The apologetics that constitute Jacques Amsellem's liner notes attempt to make the music featured here seem visionary, in contrast to what's going on at the beginning of the 21st century, but what isn't? His testament to the band's variety of styles (these included ridiculous attempts at rockabilly and synth pop) is merely another way of saying that the Metal Boys couldn't make up their collective mind about what they wanted to be ’Äî except for "weird," man. (Tuxedomoon, Cabaret Voltaire, Chrome, and a dozen other bands did it a lot better without worrying about either their "punk" cred, or whether or not they were "revolutionary" or absurd enough.) What this music, with its hilarious schizophrenic megalomania and the accompanying textual screed do accomplish, is to offer a tawdry and classic example of why most French rock (underground or otherwise) sucked so bad in the aftermath of punk. It simply took itself far more seriously than it had the vision or ability to pull off. First check out Mˆ©tal Urbain's Anarchy in Paris sides, then, be amazed at how such an awesome band could fall so far so fast. In the process, you'll realize quickly why punk rock had to self-destruct so quickly ’Äî that is, if you didn't already know.