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Of the tens of thousands of new releases each year, how does an artist or label make sure theirs get listened to? Even in the digital era the cover art still plays a role. For example, I will listen to anything that has monkeys on the cover, because that's a pretty good indication that the music is at least listenable. Spacesuits and synthesizers are also positive indicators. Put together all three key elements and you've got pure gold:

Cro-Magnon are a Japanese trio that plays "club jazz", which usually means repetitive house music with a saxophone, but on "Life Traveller" they edge into soul-jazz territory which is more to my liking.

Stoner rock bands can benefit from monkeys, too; a band called Monkey3 (from Switzerland), with monkey faces on the album cover, also has to be good:

One of the more fun musical subgenres to come out of England in the late 80s was "grebo" (for "greasy bastard"), which combined riff-oriented hard rock with punk energy and over-the-top lyrics (Zodiac Mindwarp, Gaye Bikers on Acid), often with synthesized beats (Pop Will Eat Itself). The only American band (that I know of; suggestions are welcome) in a similar vein was The Wild, shortened to simply Wild for their only album release on Columbia Records in 1988. At the time I watched a lot of MTV; I'd keep it on in the background while they played music videos (remember?), and that's how I first heard of Wild. The post-apocalyptic heavy-metal imagery, crunchy guitar riffs, and near-dance beats of "Hurricane" totally hooked me:

Wild was the brainchild of Dizzy Reed, who then became the regular keyboard player for Guns'n'Roses, effectively killing off Wild. I was going to write an essay in praise of Wild, but "Sleazegrinder" has already written a far better piece than I ever could, so I'll just cherry-pick some juicy lines from it:

“Wild 1” is, quite simply, exactly what would happen if Zodiac Mindwarp joined Sigue Sigue Sputnik. It is sex-disco played by sleaze metal bikers-from-Hell. It is the thump and bleep of a cyber-erotic beatbox welded onto the back of a crazy motorcycle with a gas tank fulla blood and glitter.... The Wild not only sounded like they invented this new noise, they sounded like it ALREADY made them a million dollars. And it wasn’t just the FUTURE-NOW sound that the Wild were peddling either, it was a whole post-apocalyptic sex, drugs n’ death cyber-fantasy, complete with an over the top murder-glam look- although I’m assuming Barrone and Wildblood/Reed had live co-conspirators, the two Wild honchos had the helldesert sleazebeast look down cold, man. Leather, spikes, bulletbelts, jet-black dreadlocks down to their waists, full, Zodiac-like chest tattoos, skulls, chains, handcuffs, mirrored shades, the fuckin’ works, man. These were not just bad asses, man, they were KING HELL SUPERDADDY CADILLAC BAD ASSES FROM HELL. And I know, it’s hard to remember these days, when bands wear sweaters and corduroys, but in 1988, that meant something, man. That was a COMMITMENT to the ROCK.

I could quote the article, but just go read the whole thing here. One additional point I would like to make, though, is that when Billy Idol released his Cyberpunk album in 1993, it was doomed to failure because what he was trying to do had already been done by Wild, five years earlier. His career would have fared much better if he had simply licensed Wild 1 and released it under his own name. On the other hand, I'm pretty sure Wild were strongly influenced by Billy Idol in the first place; just listen to the intro to "Mean Dream Queen" and tell me you don't expect to hear "White Wedding" (then listen to the rest of the song, cuz it rocks):

It's that time of year when the hits take off on last year's post of 98 Rock's classic Twisted Tune, "Walkin' in an Essex Wonderland." So to save you the trouble of looking for it, here it is again; it just wouldn't be a proper Baltimore Christmas without it.

My excitement that one of my favorite bands of the 80s, Medium Medium offshoot C Cat Trance, is playing a show on December 19 is tempered by the fact that the show is in Belgium and I can't possibly be there for it. BIMFest 2009 (Belgium Independent Music Festival) is being held at Hof Ter Lo in Borgerhout, Antwerp, with 11 acts performing. Leaetherstrip is the headliner, and veteran industrial dance band Click Click is also on the bill. It's kind of like those oldies package shows that play at state fairs, except the oldies are not as old. I hope this is more than a one-off performance, and that this reunion is more successful than the Medium Medium reunion of a few years back (which resulted in a new album recorded, apparently, but never released). I've featured two of C Cat Trance's extraordinary cover versions here and here, so today I will present some of their equally extraordinary original songs, featuring their distinctive melding of postpunk funk with Middle Eastern music:

I've always been happy to learn that music I like can be described by a genre label, because that makes it easier to seek out similar music. "Breakbeat", "dream pop", "sunshine pop", "spytronica", "deep funk", "gothic funk": all those labels have helped me flesh out my listening experiences by finding other artists to whom they have been applied. So listening today to the Spiritual Jazz compilation on the Jazzman label (subtitled Esoteric Modal and Deep Jazz from the Underground 1968-77), and liking everything on it, I was given another genre label to add to my Likes. A quick Google search on "spiritual jazz" turned up a new album by California jazz collective Build An Ark, previously feautred here in December 2007. The new album is called Love Part 1 and includes a delightful paean to sunflowers:

Around 1979 I was a big fan of the Saturday night radio show on WAVA FM 105, one of the DC area's major AOR stations. The intro music was an a capella piece with a bass ostinato keeping the rhythm, and lead vocals singing "Saturday night" and "Saturday night is partyin' time" repeatedly. I never knew what it was, and just today it occurred to me to Google it. The song is "Saturday Night" from the 1972 musical Don't Play Us Cheap by Melvin Van Peebles, adapted from his novel The Party In Harlem. Here it is:

The verses were cut from the WAVA intro spot, so this is the first time I've heard the whole song (it's still little over a minute long). George McCurn's amazing bass remains the centerpiece of the song, though. I wonder how many other DC suburbanites remember this one.

(Which is worse, that I spent Saturday nights listening to the radio as a teenager, or that as an adult I'm spending a Saturday night writing about listening to the radio on Saturday nights as a teenager?)

It's been a year and a half since my last big post on soundtrack music; after gorging on Ghost Box albums last week, it's time for another one. The Ghost Box label purveys music in the style of "modern" 70s library music, a nouveau retro-futurism to succeed the old retro-futurism that looked back to the 1950s, the era of Mid-Century Modern and a zeitgeist of limitless technological possibilities. By the 1970s space travel was a reality (to the moon and back, at least); a greater cultural awareness of both the difficulties of space travel and the incredible reaches of outer space, coupled with advances in electronic music synthesis, lent "futuristic" music a new tone, both physically (synthesizers replacing big bands) and emotionally (an air of we-can-do-it determination replacing the we'll-all-go-zing-zinging-through-space giddiness of the first wave of Space Age Pop). Going back to my categories of soundtrack music as defined in that first post, here is an example of real library music from the 70s by Alan Hawkshaw, one of the giants of library music, from the 1978 Bruton Music library album Terrestrial Journey:

Vangelis' "Pulstar" from his 1976 album Albedo 0.39 was not necessarily written as soundtrack music, but it has been used numerous times as theme music for radio and television programs. Indeed, I first heard it as the intro music to the news segments on my college radio station.

Echoes of "Pulstar"'s melody can be heard in "Wildspot" by Belbury Poly, a.k.a. Ghost Box co-founder Jim Jupp, on the 2004 album The Willows. Ghost Box's interest in 70s futurism extends to their cover art as well: 

Though from 1982 and not technically the 1970s, the St. Elsewhere theme (by soundtrack hack veteran Dave Grusin) contains all the elements of 70s musical futurism and thus belongs in this survey. Would you believe I'd never heard this until my wife played it for me last week? (I wasn't much of a TV watcher in college. Nor am I now, for that matter.)

70s retro-futurism has crept into today's TV programming as well, with two series of the 70s popular-science show spoof Look Around You having been produced for BBC2 in 2002 and 2005. The theme music from the second series could be original to the period:

Interestingly, the program that was the most obvious target of Look Around You's satire, Tomorrow's World, did not use futuristic music in its 1970s opening sequences, but engaged in some retro-futurism of its own, looking back to the sunny, uptempo big band music that accompanied so many "world of tomorrow" featurettes in the 50s:

Welcome back to the future!

I onIy ever bought one hits album that was advertised on TV--it was so good I never had to buy another one! Ronco's 1974 compilation Get It On! boasted "20 ORIGINAL HITS 20 ORIGINAL ARTISTS", and it is a wonderful cross section of the popular music of the day. That was a time when different genres could still coexist on the same radio station, liking one genre did not preclude liking another, and the most negative emotion expressed was the stylized melancholia of the blues in B.B. King's "To Know You Is To Love You". Since mentioning Get It On! in yesterday's post I thought I'd see if I could recreate the album in a Grooveshark playlist; lo and behold, all the songs were available for streaming, so voila! You can listen to the album on Grooveshark here, or just play the convenient widget below. What a great bunch of songs! Just look at that track list! Don't delay, press play!

On the other hand, a lavish arrangement (i.e. with lots of instruments) can be very enjoyable, conjuring up classic soul from the 70, sunshine pop of the 60s, and bittersweet areas in between. Platters That Matter Records turned me on to Liam Hayes and Plush, whose "Take A Chance" would be right at home on Ronco's landmark Get It On! hits compilation LP:

Tom M. hipped me to Brendan Benson. I've finally figured out that he is the "other" singer of the Raconteurs, the one who isn't Jack White, the one whose lead-vocal tracks I skip over in favor of the Jack White tracks. On his own, though, he can do the retro trip quite creditably, as on "Garbage Day":

Brent Cash of Athens, Georgia, packed his debut album full of catchy pop hooks and sunny arrangements, with some Bacharachian chord changes thrown in for good measure:

And finally, while synthesized strings and flutes barely count as lavish arranging, Josh Rouse's "Come Back" closes out this set rather nicely, I think:

Spending seven hours in a car with a broken CD player on Wednesday and another seven hours today gave me plenty of time to survey the contemporary radio landscape, and what a dismal scene it is. There were a few bright spots (every one of them a college or public station), but they were emphatically not the stations playing current hits. I can't decide which is worse, Autotuned vocals (can't call it "singing") that sound like robotic mosquitoes, or country music, which has figured out how to mimic every other genre of music until the telltale plaintive twang of the singer comes in and drenches everything in bathos. But what it all has in common is that it's all overdone and overproduced; like our food, it's been overprocessed until most of the nourishment disappears. The song I happened upon that really pointed out all this excess was Free's "All Right Now." That has to be the cleanest, simplest production I've ever heard on a hit single, ample proof that you don't need 48 tracks and Autotune to make a great record:

Who is the Free of today?