Deferred listening: November Group, Fools Face
Last week was a particularly good week for unearthing long-lost songs; here are the two finds I am most overjoyed about. November Group was a synthpop band from Boston fronted by singer Ann Prim. Their self-titled 5-song EP from 1982 had a striking cover photo of Prim as a Weimar cabaretician, and the song "Pictures of the Homeland" evoked a fashionable European grimness over its new wave dance beat. I played that song on my radio show many times, but I never got my own copy of the record, so it's been twenty-some years since I last heard it. Now, thanks to the Systems of Romance blog, I finally have a rip of it (yes, it was posted three months ago, that's how far behind I am on blog surfing), and I have listened to it over and over. You can too:
Then there was the serendipitous rediscovery of Missouri power pop band Fools Face on Wilfully Obscure. That jarred something loose in my mind, and I eventually remembered that they did the gorgeous piano ballad "Public Places" which was a radio favorite of mine in high school (listening rather than broadcasting in those days). I never even saw a record by them, much less bought one. Wilfully Obscure didn't have the album with "Public Places" on it, but had a link to a site that does, along with "tons" of other Fools Face material. I've listened to "Public Places" even more times than "Pictures of the Homeland" in the last few days. Here it is (not a great rip, but for now the best sound you'll get for less than the $150 the album commands):