Just days after discovering the recent resurfacing of a member of long-lost Way of the West, I've found another blast from the past: Slab! Slab's few records, released in the second half of the 80s, are an exhilarating mix of pounding, near-industrial rhythms, fuzzed-out-bass funk, scraping guitars, tape loops, weird lyrics, and, on the early records, a horn section. I have never met another Slab fan that I didn't introduce to Slab, and in fourteen years of web-surfing I still had never found one. Until a couple days ago, when I found this post on the Unfit for Print blog. At last, here was another human enlightened to the cacophonous joys of Slab! Not only that, the post engendered a long comment thread that was joined by actual Slab members! After so many years of silence, I've finally learned "whatever happened to Slab." Of course that means more records added to my wantlist, but isn't that what life is all about, seeking what you want, then when you find it, seeking something else? In celebration of this discovery, here's a Slab! track, selected by being the first one I could find the cover art for:
Hear more Slab! on Muxtape!
I've been spending a lot of my listening time lately back in the 80s and neglecting the funk, so I sought to remedy that today. I started listening to Brownout, the Latin funk band from Austin, and as soon as I heard "African Battle" I was hooked. Deep funk beat, extra percussion, horns, and trombone solos? Yes, please!
I've been saving up my Way of the West singles for eventual ripping; they were another English band who were a minor staple on the WHFS of the original new wave era, usually represented by their song "Don't Say That's Just For White Boys." I always thought of them as like the Police, but better: Pete Carney's vocal melodies were similar to Sting's, and the guitarist (don't know which one is on which records) plays lots of weird unresolved chords like Andy Summers, but Way of the West got a better groove going. They put out a total of five singles, but never released an album; I thought to put together a makeshift album from the records I accumulated (and mp3's of the one I never got, "See You Shake"). Once again someone has saved me the trouble, only this time it's from the artists themselves, or one of them at least. Pete Carney, now Pete Kearney, has put together a Way of the West website which includes streams of all the songs, plus unreleased tracks! He's preparing them for digital release on iTunes, which will fill in a big hole in the classic 80s reissue universe. Here's a leech of "Don't Say That's Just For White Boys"; I hope it stirs up long-forgotten memories.
As an addendum to my previous post, I've found a usable (i.e. under 20 minutes) edit of "Prelude" from Agharta, the electric-era Miles Davis tune that opened up a whole new area of music to me in 1991.
I've liked Medeski Martin and Wood ever since I first heard them on the Get Shorty soundtrack (one of the grooviest soundtracks to a mainstream movie since the 70s), but I only ever got a couple of their albums. One that I bought was their first album with guitarist John Scofield, issued under Scofield's name alone as A Go Go. That came out in 1998, and MMW dropped off my radar after that. Last week I decided to do some catching up, and got their second collaboration with Scofield, Out Louder from 2006, credited to all four of them this time. I skipped forward to "Miles Behind," which I gathered was a play on Miles Davis's Miles Ahead and may be a tribute of sorts. And it is a tribute: not to the late-50s-era Miles of Miles Ahead, but to my absolute favorite stretch of his career, the wildly creative funk-rock-jazz fusion of the early 70s, Bitches Brew through Get Up With It, so despised by jazz purists but beloved by many who, like me, approach music with rock as their baseline. I first heard Miles's 1975 live album, Agharta, at the Tower Records (remember those?) in Rockville in 1991, and I bought it even though I was broke, because it was exactly the music I needed at the time. "Miles Behind" nails the Electric Miles sound (albeit without a trumpet); it distills that entire oeuvre into less than three minutes, and reliving the rush of my initial Agharta revelation actually gave me goosebumps.
Item 1: Mrs. Veneer buys Ryuichi Sakamoto's CD of solo piano pieces, BTTB. It's quite beautiful and Sakamoto mostly avoids the New Age clichés that plague so many piano CDs. Some of the pieces are obvious homages to classical works, such as "Opus," which evokes the Gymnopédies of Erik Satie:
Item 2: I learn from Wiel's Time Capsule that Mark Stewart is preparing a new album (his first of new material since 1995!) and tour, and that he has a new video out:
Connection 1: Hey, didn't Mark Stewart include that same Gymnopédie on his 1987 album? Yep, as part of the backing track for "Stranger" (a.k.a. "Stranger Than Love"):Connection 2: I've heard some of those lyrics before: "Somewhere, there is a place for us". They're from "Somewhere," from West Side Story. David Sylvian recorded a version of that for a TIAA-CREF commercial:
Connection 3: Sylvian and Sakamoto's collaborative song "Forbidden Colours," from the movie Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence, is perhaps the best-known song by either of them in the US:
Connection 4: Hey, Mark Stewart did two versions of "Forbidden Colours" on that very same album! Here's the dub version:
It's all connected!
I'm back from a non-blogging week in the sprawl of suburban Maryland with my head full of music I want to share, only a fraction of which I'll get around to. I spent one afternoon in the planned city of Columbia; you can't go to Columbia without driving on, or seeing roadsigns for, Broken Land Parkway. And that always reminds me of "Broken Land" by The Adventures. That was one of a very few songs I heard on latter-day WHFS (i.e., late 80s) that made me go out and buy the album. I had seen The Adventures open for Tears For Fears at the Baltimore Arena in 1985, but they didn't make much of an impression. That was in support of their first album, Theodore and Friends. For their second album, The Sea of Love, they tapped into their Irish roots and came up with a beautiful album, with the outrageously hooky "Broken Land" sitting at the pinnacle:
And while I'm on defunct Irish bands of the 80s, here's another one I liked, In Tua Nua:
A couple more new-wave-leaning songs that got regular airplay on staunch AOR station WAVA were Bram Tchaikovsky's "Girl of My Dreams" (1979) and the Motors' "Love and Loneliness" (1980). I always think of those two songs together because Tchaikovsky (actually Peter Bramall) was a member of the Motors before going "solo" (in quotes because Bram Tchaikovsky was one of those "yes it's the lead singer's name but it's also the name of the band" deals), and also before the Motors recorded "Love and Loneliness". So the only link is a shared history, but that's enough for me. One of Tchaikovsky's early bands, Heroes, recorded a version of Springsteen's "Growing Up," so it's not surprising to hear Bruce's "Born To Run" motif in "Girl of My Dreams"--
Sure enough; there are plenty of worse songs to copy. But there's a double-time beat in the bass and keys (though not in the leaden drumming) that would come to define a large chunk of the New Wave sound:The chorus of the best-known track, "Love and Loneliness," sounds exactly like Steve Stills' "Love the One You're With" — and that's as good as the record gets.
For a couple years, roughly 1978-80, "new wave" music could be heard on rock (or AOR, "album-oriented rock") radio stations. Either new wave had yet to forge a distinct identity, or rock fans had yet to notice anything different and voice their displeasure, but several of my favorite WAVA songs from that era were, in retrospect, definitely of new wave pedigree. The first such song was "Yachting Type" by the Yachts, from Liverpool. I remember the first time I heard it, the DJ said "Plug your ears into this!" before playing it:
I was a fan from that very first exposure. I bought the album and listened to it over and over, and it bore the repetition: there are a lot of good songs on it. I had no idea that it was New Wave, I just liked the hooks and the organ. After that first album the Yachts changed bass players, put out a lackluster second album, and broke up. The core of the group would later resurface as It's Immaterial, whom I also liked, without even knowing about the Yachts connection, which I only learned recently. But back to the topic at hand, which is new wave music sneaking onto AOR airwaves, another favorite from those days is the anthemic "The Shape of Things To Come" by the Headboys*:
I never did get around to buying that album, but I taped the song off the radio, and that was good enough. I've now heard the whole album (thanks to the Power Pop Criminals blog), and the rest of it is more pub-rock than new wave, but still fun, and I might have gotten into it back then anyway. Belatedly, I learned that "power pop" is the category assigned to these under-the-radar new wave bands, and I have several more examples of their infiltration of AOR airwaves, but I'll start with just these two.
* Headboy keyboardist Calum Malcolm has owned Castle Sound Studios in Scotland where the Headboys lp was recorded for over 20 years and has produced records for The Blue Nile, Prefab Sprout and others. (from Lost Bands of the New Wave Era)
Do you ever get a song in your head, that maybe you haven't heard for years, but it won't go away and you just have to dig it out and listen to it again? Sure you do. I've had this symptom this week for "Beat Me 'Til I'm Blue" by Colour Me Pop, an English band from the mid-80's who put out one single (on the misnamed American Phonograph label) and a few tracks on compilation albums. The song has several of my favorite ingredients: prominent slap-bass, bongos, both male and female vocals, and a nice (but short) breakdown:
That doesn't qualify as Gothic in and of itself, but its presence on a Gothic-heavy compilation LP, Breaking the Back of Love, makes the connection. And it's not far from some of the music that bona fide Gothic bands were creating at the time, most notably The Danse Society. Now that I've brought them up in a slap-bass post I have to present their slap-bass song, "Sensimilla." It was released as a bonus 12" with the club hit "Say It Again", in a gatefold sleeve. (A double 12" in a full-color gatefold sleeve; all that packaging cost for just four songs? That couldn't have been cost-effective, what was Arista thinking?) This is bassist Tim Wright's shining moment, laying down a rubbery, funky groove that won't allow you to sit still (and by "you", I mean me), and Paul Nash's syncopated rhythm guitar does a great job to accent the flow. The lyrics are on the embarrassing side (condensed version: "I love to smoke pot"), and I could do without the toasting from "Sooty" Brown (but I guess you have to have toasting in a marijuana song); but it's the funkiest song The Danse Society ever recorded, and therefore it's my favorite.
(I was all set to rip this myself, but it just turned up on New Romantic Rules, saving me the trouble. NRR is an incredible source of 80s music; many of the obscure singles I've been holding onto have turned up in Rambul's amazing 20-volume Lost Hits compilation series. Chances are if you have any favorite "lost" 80s songs, they're in there too.)
