There have been a number of tribute albums to David Bowie over the years, especially since his untimely death in 2016. That very same year, an album came out by a band who had, to my mind, created one of the best covers of a Bowie track some six years previously. The band was Genuflex, the track was Soul Love, originally released on The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars.
Of course, one member of Genuflex was already known to me: Finn Vine.
In the previous decade he’d been the singer and creative catalyst in White Rose Movement, a post-punk electronic band who were constantly fêted by the music media as the ‘next big thing’ yet never managed to reach their obvious potential. While their debut, Kick, was an excellent and coherent album, they crashed and burned in 2008 with their second album incomplete and unreleased.
Perhaps it was the post-punk element that held them back? If so, it’s the (almost complete) erasure of this side of their musical style from Genuflex’s only album to date, the eponymous subject of this post. Instead, they lean heavily on the synths, while employing Vine’s vocals to great effect. It’s really only on track three, Santantango, that you get a glimpse of what came before. Now the sound owes as much to Anthony and the Johnsons as it does to that mid-noughties guitar-based electronica White Rose Movement helped to define.
The band takes its name from the act of dropping to ones knees to pray, to genuflect. While that may be so, this isn’t a new church, rather the realisation of an artist’s true intentions and committed to tape.
One of the pieces of the band’s output that really stands out was a remix of their single, The Last Gods, from the late (great) Mark Stewart of Pop Group who sadly passed away earlier this year. This remains, perhaps, the only example, of where Genuflex could have headed had they kept going. The vocals are soaring heavenwards, the music the wings. It’s astonishing – and not just because of Stewart’s work.
Genuflex was as grandiose as Vine’s previous bands, yet remains one that flies below the radar. Undeservedly, I would like to think.
If the links above have tingled your spidey sense, then you’ll be delighted to listen to their one and only album. Yet another example of one of the music world’s Unspun Heroes.
I was lucky enough to see them live supporting Peter Murphy in Oxford in October 2016. Alive and Seen was the clincher that night, but since I’ve fallen in love with Heart and Soul and Satantango. If there’s a vinyl of this I’ll ‘ave it.