For a brief period in the late eighties, Adam 'Adamski' Tinley seemed like the man from the future fallen to earth. A British Acid House pioneer, I hear a natural baton passing from the Hi NRG throb of 'I Feel Love' to the discordant frazzle of 'Killer'; to my mind it could be a PS to side two of Donna Summer's 'I Remember Yesterday' album, an example of the music we'll all be listening to in the future future. For a dance track 'Killer' is a marionette with broken strings jerking to electric pulses that arc the beat from Tesla coils unseen. As a piece of music it's interesting enough to stand alone, though the vocal from Seal (and his own lyric) adds more than a ghost of emotion to the machine. Too much emotion perhaps - "Solitary brother, is there still a part of you that wants to live?"; while Donna Summer sounded seduced enough by the future on 'I Feel Love' to fall into and become one with its cybersex promise, Seal's vocal is a gatecrasher at his own party, forced to fight against Adamski's palette of sparking electronica to get his message across.* For a number one single that shifted half a million copies, 'Killer' still sounds remarkably off-kilter and underground, a genuine starting point for both the nineties as a musical decade and a long career of invention for Adamski within it. Pity then it was killed stone dead by the sheer awfulness of follow up single 'The Space Jungle' where the man crash landed and burned to a cinder. There was no coming back from that.
* Seal's vocal rests far more comfortably on his own, jag free 1991 re-recording. But in taming the peaks and troughs of the cardiograph to more of a flatline, it also tames 'Killer's unpredictability and vitality to produce a far less interesting song.
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