I was in the ninth grade when I discovered the "imports" section at the local record store (Waxie Maxie's), filled with stuff that looked downright weird. Even better, though, was the discounted imports bin, and one day when I had five dollars to spend I waffled between Chrome's Red Exposure, which looked strange and interesting, and Jack-Knife's I Wish You Would, which had John Wetton, who was a known quantity to me, on bass. I opted for Jack-Knife; years later I got really into Chrome and eventually found another copy of Red Exposure to buy. Would having bought it the first time have changed the trajectory of my musical fandom? Chrome was decidedly different, and I sometimes wished I'd gotten an earlier start in alternative music. But a few tunes on the Jack-Knife album hold up well; on the title track Wetton plays one of his most kinetic basslines, and Curt Cress opens the song with the funkiest drumming you'll ever hear on a rock record. Then there's the fantastic guitar solo by Richard Palmer-James which, when it sounds like it's over, picks up again for another several bars of wah-wah ecstasy:
Jack-Knife was a one-off, Wetton getting some old bandmates together to have some fun between U.K. recording sessions in 1979. As such it's surprisingly good, and groove miners can find a lot of first-rate breaks (some with cowbell!) to sample.
Just a quickie here: last night I put up the Doors' "Peace Frog" and another song that recycled its rhythm, "The Only One I Know" by the Charlatans. I also wanted to include another of its descendants, Echo and the Bunnymen's "Bedbugs and Ballyhoo," but I couldn't find it at the time. Now I've found it, so here it is as an addendum:
The Doors were accused of a lot of things, but being funky wasn't one of them. So I am naturally surprised when I hear Doors influences in contemporary funk; who'd'a thunk it? Nicole Willis and the Soul Investigators (she's from Brooklyn, they're from Finland) play deep funk, but they stretch out into more soul and R&B styles than most other deep funk bands. Listening to their Keep Reachin' Up album on my way to work the other day, I started hearing the Doors all of a sudden: halfway through "A Perfect Kind of Love" there's an instrumental break with a bassline right out of "Light My Fire," and then Antti Maattanen lays down a Ray Manzarek-like organ solo over it. It's what the Doors would have sounded like if they'd had some rebop!
So then I thought back to another Doors-influenced song that I liked last year, which I always meant to post here but never got around to; isn't this the perfect time for it? The Doors influence in "The Witch" by The Broken Keys is in the Morrison-esque vocal (he even rhymes fire with pyre, just like Jim did), but for the life of me I can't figure out who is actually singing it. The Broken Keys are two English dudes named Nostalgia 77 and Natural Self (whose real name, apparently, is Keno-1); on their own they each make richly-layered hip-hip-flavored jazz with no male vocals (in what I've heard), so it could be either one of them singing here, or someone else altogether. This, too, is what the Doors would have sounded like if they'd had any funk:
That is heavy; with those horns it could almost be an Ides of March song. I can hear a Black Sabbath version in my head, too, and the lyrics are right up their alley.
Maybe I'm too hard on the Doors. They did get almost funky once, with "Peace Frog"--
That's a pretty good beat; it would turn up again in Echo and the Bunnymen's "Bedbugs and Ballyhoo" (can't find it right now), and the Charlatans' "The Only One I Know"--
The Charlatans are streaming from Donnaslut.com: a single page with about 300 eclectic mp3's, including many of my obscure favorites, such as Allez Allez, Jerry Harrison, Nico + the Faction, SSQ, and lots, lots more. Check it out! Make sure you have playTagger installed first, so you can stream them from the main page instead of loading each one in a new page.
I've fallen behind on my sunshine pop theme due to spending last night sorting out the dueling MySpace players problem. Solution: no more MySpace players. If they've got it set to autostart, there's not a thing you can do about it by tweaking parameters in the embed code.
In reviewing the tags on today's mp3 files, I realized that I've been conflating sunshine pop with "baroque pop." The archetype of the baroque pop song is Simon and Garfunkel's "Scarborough Fair/Canticle," but another song on the same album (Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme), "The 59th Street Bridge Song (Feelin' Groovy)," is certifiable sunshine pop, so the two subgenres are largely intertwined in style, but not mood.
Eric Matthews has been plying his baroque, and occasionally sunny, pop since 1995, when he released his first album, It's Heavy In Here, on Sub Pop, of all labels. In the present decade he has released two albums on Empyrean Records, the most recent being 2006's Foundation Sounds. The sunniest of its 17 songs is "All the Clowns"--
Neil Hannon has flitted from style to style in his enduring career as The Divine Comedy, and he is no stranger to sunshine pop. While true sunshine pop tends toward naively earnest lyrics, I don't think earnesty* has ever been a component of Hannon's songwriting. (Not his best songwriting, at least; while impeccably arranged, Absent Friends sinks under the weight of its bloated Meaningfulness.) Wryness, slyness, archness, satire, ridicule, exaggeration, swagger, irresponsibility--these are the ingredients of his finest concoctions. "Perfect Love Song" may be all sunshine on the surface, but I can hear Neil smirking all the way through:
And now there is Steve Rinaldi, performing as Rinaldi Sings (thanks to Salty Miss Jill for hipping me to him!):
And that concludes my abbreviated roundup of sunshine, or vaguely sunshiney, popsters. No, wait, it doesn't--here's a repeat of Mike Flowers's blindingly brilliant (like the sun!) "A Groovy Place" (delivered with an even bigger smirk than Neil Hannon's, I imagine):
OK, now I'm done.
* The spellchecker tells me "earnesty" isn't really a word, but I think it should be, so it stays in.
Brent Cash has swooped right up to the head of the Sunshine Pop class, pushing aside all those who have been keeping the flame alive (just) for the last decade. And most of those keepers are not really sunshiny at all, they tend toward the cloudy and morose but occasionally let some crepuscular rays of sunlight filter through. Their songcraft is rooted in Burt Bacharach and Jimmy Webb, with unexpected chord and meter changes around every corner, and arrangements that could stand on their own as instrumental lounge music. Matt Hales, a.k.a. Aqualung, is such a one, though his chord progressions reveal more of McCartney's influence than anyone else, as on the exquisite "Brighter Than Sunshine" which is the first song in his MySpace player at posting time: Argh, I can't turn off the autoplay, so here's a Seeqpod player instead:
Everything else I have in the queue just got pushed back, because I have minutes ago discovered the brand-new, phenomenal debut album by Brent Cash, How Will I know When I'm Awake. This may mark the first music out of Athens, Georgia, that I've liked since the B-52's. It's sunshine pop at its finest: Bacharachian chord changes, Carole King-ish piano rhythms, lush arrangements, and, well, sunshine galore. The press release sums it all up, you can read it on his MySpace page, or you can listen here before clicking over:
Speaking of Radio 4, as I just was, they released a new song today on the RCRD LBL netlabel. Which means it's free! Free to download, free to listen to, and free to embed as long as you use RCRD LBL's ad-supported widget:
They're jumping on the Afrobeat bandwagon too: note the kalimba in the "cover art" (in quotes because there's no physical product to cover) and the guitar figure that plays throughout the song. At the same time they've smoothed the edges of their sound; this doesn't seem like a good direction for them, but they're promising more through RCRD LBL, so I'll keep my hopes up for something a little more raucous. For comparison, here are some older Radio 4 songs that are sitting around on the web, starting with the title track from their last album:
I've been on a low-grade Hawkwind binge since watching the Hawkwind - Do Not Panic BBC 4 documentary last week, and the binge has expanded to include not just Hawkwind and Hawkwind splinter groups, but bands influenced by Hawkwind as well. Which is how I came to be listening to Electronic Mind Project, the 2001 CD by Australian band Alpha Omega; it could almost be a lost Hawkwind album. If given a task to create a fake Hawkwind song, I don't think you could do any better than "Space Pilot"--
Ooh, as of right now the whole Hawkwind documentary is on YouTube in nine parts. Here's the first:
Would Mike Oldfield's "Tubular Bells" (1973) have sounded scary without its association with The Exorcist? Would Goblin's theme for Dario Argento's "Suspiria" (1977) have sounded like that without "Tubular Bells"? (Or Pink Floyd's "One Of These Days," once you get to the middle?) Whatever the case, Italian band Goblin came to define horror movie soundtrack music for a generation. So I think it's not too far-fetched to speculate that RJD2 had Goblin in mind when he came up with "The Horror," the opener for his 2002 album Deadringer:
"The Horror" samples the theme music from Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! and First Moog Quartet's song Hey Hey. -- Wikipedia
I don't have the resources, the time, or the attention span to conduct a comprehensive dance-punk genre review, but I did find a few bands that I like; and that's what this blog is all about anyway, as it says right up there at the top, "Songs I Like." One thing about these dance-punk bands, they pretty much suck at naming themselves. Case in point: Does It Offend You, Yeah? That's the name of the band. It's a Ricky Gervais line from The Office. "No thought went into it whatsoever," they say, and it shows. According to Wikipedia they are a "British electro-rock band from Reading," "electro-rock" meaning "dance-punk with a synthesizer." Getting beyond their name, their debut album, You Have No Idea What You're Getting Yourself Into, has several noteworthy songs on it, my favorite being track two, ""With a Heavy Heart (I Regret to Inform You)"--
What's a worse band name than Does It Offend You, Yeah? How about "!!!", the band with nothing but punctuation for a name? Try Googling that--you'll get nothing! Nice strategy for getting the word out! Their MySpace page includes some pronunciation tips: "! ! ! is pronounced as any sound repeated three times. Common interpretations are chkchkchk, powpowpow, uhuhuh: unlimited possibilities." Indeed, they've even taken to writing the band name as "!!! (Chk Chk Chk)"-- if you have to explain it right up front, that's a good indicator of a bad name. But I can't fault their music. They've been at this dance-punk thing for years now (like fellow Brooklynites Radio 4, seen here earlier), and they're pretty darn good at it. Once again I've settled on track two of their latest album, Myth Takes (groan), as my favorite (though "Heart of Hearts" is more immediately gratifying, but it's way more "dance" than "punk"):
Rounding out today's trio are the tolerably-named Infadels, from London. Their first album, We Are Not The Infadels, is two years old now, but it's new to me. In keeping with the inadvertent theme of this post, the standout is track two, "Can't Get Enough," which has the wickedest beat that any of these bands have recorded. It could just be that I'm a sucker for a driving synth line, but I don't see how anyone can resist this one:
All three of these bands have stellar reputations for their live shows, and I could definitely get into spending a couple sweaty hours bopping around to their music, if any of them by some miracle actually come play in Ithaca. Eh, fat chance. I'd drive to Syracuse to see them, though. Come on, guys, how about it? Please?
