A few years ago, when tracking down anything…and I mean anything that Cristina Monet might have done in the interminable slog following her 1983 “Sleep It Off” opus, I came across the Ursula 1000 album “Here Comes Tomorrow” ca. 2005, with a track actually featuring our heroine. It went on my want list for several years, and when in Amoeba Hollywood, looking for the second Wrangler album that was not in the “electronica” section, I found a cheap copy. What’s it like?

Eighteenth Street Lounge Music ‎| US | CD | 2006 | ESL091

# 26 • Ursula 1000: Here Comes Tomorrow US CD [2005]

1. Kaboom!
2. Hello! Let’s Go To A Disco
3. Got Cha
4. Electrik Boogie
5. Two Tone Rocka
6. Boop
7. Mirkin The Mystic
8. Urgent/Anxious
9. Descarga En El Discoteca
10. Arrastão
11. Ragnarock
12. Here Comes Tomorrow

“Kaboom!” got me off to a bad start. This was going to be one of those sampladelic kitch big beat extravaganzas. I was an early adopter of Dee-Lite and Pizzicato 5 but the likes of those were hardly my main musical dish. I was listening to this in my car growing very impatient as the goofy, E-Z breakbeat track tested me… and found me hitting the FF button. The next cut was an exercise in Gary Glitter pastiche. It seemed to drag on.

“Elektrik Boogie” was a cut in the vein of the sleazy electro of Laid Back’s “White Horse” with a falsetto Prince style vocal from Lukasz Gottwald. It didn’t make me forget Prince or even Laid Back. The female backing vocals [sound bites, really] didn’t help a bit. It wasn’t until the zippy rocksteady of “Two Tone Rocka” that I actually found myself enjoying this. The trombone of J. Walter Hawkes helped to make this one a winner.

Then came the interminable “Boop,” which featured goo-goo girl style scatting in the manner the title suggested by Barbara De Dominicis. This was like water on the oil of my soul. Thankfully, Cristina was next. “Urgent/Anxious” was a fairly nondescript backing track ennobled by her still undimmed delivery. Too bad the lyrics [not by Cristina, sadly] only begin to approximate the venom-dipped pearls I’ve become accustomed to have dropping from her glossy lips.

The rest of the program dipped more vividly into Latin sounds with Los Amigos Invisiblés creating a tropical mixture with a jarring [but welcome] funk middle eight on “Descarga En La Discoteca.” The title track was long at 6:05 [but still seemed shorter than “Boop”] but it ended the album on a sort of dignified plane, and it had begun so modestly.

This type of album is not typically my thing, but a few more plays have revealed subtle charms with most of the music. I was just making a three-bean salad in my kitchen while listening to this and it actually inspired a bit of mambo dancing, so this one won’t be the abject disaster I was thinking right off the top. And kudos to Ursula 1000 for digging up Cristina Monet to put her back in front of the mic, where she belongs, for the first time in 22 years. It’s no “What’s A Girl To Do” but “Urgent Anxious” was better than nothing. In the “Artist I’ve Waited Decades For A New Generation to Reintroduce” sweepstakes, it’s a poor second to Gina X and Austra’s “Mayan Drums” single, but better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick by far. I need that 12″ with the Ladytron remix!!!!

CONCLUSION: enjoy…sort of