In my opinion it’s a fairly dull club filled with early 80′s drab office workers sipping on watery cocktails and performing, badly, that distinctive boppy new wave dance – you just about smell the spills of white wine spritzers on tracks like “Positive Negative.” Overall Change of Heart is sad formulaic new wave pop. Saxophones? Check! (“Waiting for the 7th Man” – actually one of the better songs on the album) Bright production? Yes! Manufactured, glossy faux-artistic sensibility? For sure! Songs like “Hanging On” and “Tension” try hard to convey a sense of urgency and drama, backed with bright and cheery keyboards, and the result is a bit eye-rolling, like a privileged teenager who bemoans just how. hard. life. is.

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I had an affinity toward Thompson Twins not just because of my love of British new wave in the early 80′s but also because I was a huge fan of Hergé’s The Adventures of Tintin. My childhood best friend had spent a year in England in the late 70′s while her father, a professor at Lawrence University, did a year’s sabbatical. She came back with a stack of Tintin books (and her last name happens to be Thompson) and we both gobbled up the cute comic boy’s travels to Nepal, South America and points beyond. The Thompson Twins are, of course, named for the two bumbling detectives in the comic series, Thomson and Thompson; they were not actually twins but looked identical, except for the shape of their mustaches.

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