'Polaroid', a drain-circling song that never properly starts, sounds like the fumbling lovechild of Nine Inch Nails and Duran Duran, 'Heart Like Chernobyl' has a tacky, half-heartedly bouncy beat that ho-hums around for three-and-a-half minutes that feel like ten, 'Light Sleepers' ruins a theoretically-great blend of synthesizers, saxophones, and drum machines with a flatfooted beat that refuses to adapt or evolve for almost five minutes, and 'I'm Not A Friend Of God' sounds like it's straight-up missing instruments, although maybe that's because the drums are actually way too quiet, barely identifiable in the mix. Most of the songs featured on Happiness Not Included have a tendency to never go anywhere over the course of their runtimes. The rest of the album that tumbles out over the course of an (agonizingly-long) 55 minutes is a wild mess of bad songwriting and abysmal production value.

Every single element of this track is dead-on-arrival from the word 'go', and it's as frustrating as it is hilarious. And that's not even getting into the limp-wristed songwriting - there's a big drop right before the chorus, but the intensity doesn't rise in the slightest - or the garbage 'happy-happy-happy' hook or the asinine lyrics.

Right away, the absolutely rank production hits you like an unpleasant, cringe-inducing odor - Marc Almond's vocals are way too present in the mix (to the point where it's difficult to listen to this with headphones), the instruments bleed together into a muffled, murky pool of synthesizers, and the EQ is turned up so high that all of the sharp, ringing tones and Marc Almond's consonants are always on full display, puncturing your ears. 'Happy Happy Happy' is the perfect microcosm of the album's overall ***tiness. Well, I'm happy to report that the latter statement has been completely & utterly validated by Soft Cell's Happiness Not Included, the band's first studio record in twenty years and an album so f*cking bad the worst track on the record legitimately made me burst out laughing in disbelief. When your claim to fame is a whitewashed cover that's substantially worse than the original (because there are instances where this can be done well, like Natalie Imbruglia's cover of 'Torn' or Hardline's take on 'Hot Cherie'), you've either been treated unfairly by a consumerist world or you're just not that special to begin with. Their greatest hit and most identifiable song, 'Tainted Love', is a marginally less-interesting cover of a peppier, catchier track by Gloria Jones & Ed Cobb back in the 60's.

Look, Soft Cell was never exactly 'great'. Review Summary: hahaha wow this is REALLY bad!

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