I was thinking about reviewing some Chrome, and behold, Ur puts up a wonderful discussion of _Alien Soundtracks_! Not to mention Marc Almond’s wonderfully poisonous _Torment and Toreros_, but that’s another story. 😉 So I’ll just add that those wanting to investigate some Chrome and in particular that album could do worse than to find the _Chrome Box_. This originally was a six-LP collection released in the early eighties containing _Alien Soundtracks_, _Half Machine Lip Moves_, _Blood on the Moon_, _No Humans Allowed_ and the two volumes of _Chronicles_. These just about cover the best years of Chrome before Helios Creed departed, and are as unnerving and strange as Ur said. This collection has happily since been rereleased by Cleopatra as a 3‑CD set in America, though I don’t know about overseas availability. In the early 90’s, American label Touch and Go put out an excellent _Alien Soundtracks_/_Half Machine Lip Moves_ CD which, if you can still find it, is a good bargain way into things Chromelike.

As a word of warning, be *very* careful of the terrible Chrome albums that came out when Helios Creed left the band. Damon Edge used the name throughout the remainder of the eighties into the nineties, but his material is essentially corporate new wave/hard rock crunt that makes the Fixx seem like, I don’t know, John Coltrane or something. A number of two-albums-on-one-disc reissues popped up on Dossier, a German label, about ten years ago — unfortunately these package one Chrome album from the good era with one from the bad one in equal measure, for the most part.