150 posts tagged “80s”

Bernard Sumner is not looking so great lately, but his musical talents are undiminished, possibly even better than ever.  "Sink Or Swim" by his new band Bad Lieutenant has been lodged in my brain for a week now:

That is ten different kinds of catchy!  Sumner's reappearance set me off on a New Order listening binge, in which I was reacquainted with my favorite New Order song of all, the non-single "This Time of Night" from Low Life:

Perhaps you remember listening to Styx's Pieces Of Eight album, scratching your head at "Aku-Aku", the mellow instrumental at the end of the album, and writing it off as filler.  But I posit that young Robin Guthrie took it as divine inspiration, forming the basis of his guitar and composition style that would come to fruition in the Cocteau Twins.  Compare "Aku-Aku" with a representative track from Blue Bell Knoll:

Is the Former Ghosts song "Mother" a shameless ripoff of New Order's "Leave Me Alone", an homage, or sheer coincidence?  You be the judge (scroll way down for New Order, Vox has a real problem sizing widgets):

And is it also a coincidence that Former Ghosts named their album Fleurs?

What better song for a dreary First of October than "October Already" by melancholy 80s minimal-wave band A Popular History of Signs?  "October already and where has it got us?"

Jeff didn't think "Painted Moon" by the Silencers was good enough to include in his Fingerprintz post (the Silencers being essentially the second incarnation of Fingerprintz), but I think it's a great song, with one of those soaring choruses full of optimism and free of triteness that is all too rare:

Now that I've got tuned percussion in 80s music on the brain, I keep thinking of more examples, such as "Love My Way" by the Psychedelic Furs and "Change" by Tears For Fears.  I was beginning to think it was just a UK thing, but then I remembered "Gone Daddy Gone" by the Violent Femmes.  So here is a playlist of that batch:

Somehow it entered my mind this evening that the pre-chorus marimba ostinato in Japan's "Methods of Dance" sounds a lot like the background ostinato in Peter Gabriel's "No Self Control", then I started thinking about tuned percussion (marimba, xylophone, balafon, vibraphone, or their synthesized equivalents) in Japan's music in general, and how they often used tuned percussion for melodic motifs, and how Peter Murphy used nearly identical licks in some of his songs.  So I made a playlist to convey my point, but regardless of my point, they are all great songs to listen to:

I could write about the just-deceased Jim Carroll, or the Beatles remasters, or New Model Army's imminent US tour, but I won't, because tonight I want to present one of my favorite musical novelty groups, The Promenaders.  Their sole album was recorded as a busking session on Brighton Beach in 1981 (and one track at an "Exclusive Brighton Discotheque").  Loxhawn Rondeaux, Stuart Barefoot, Steve Topp, and company zip through an eclectic selection of oldies (including some really old oldies) on saxophone, euphonium, one-string violin, cello, and percussion, concluding with their great ethnomusical experiment, a medley of "(Won't You Play A) Simple Melody", "Tibetan Promenade", and "Nellie The Elephant":

The Tibetan section never fails to crack me up.  If those names seem suspect, it is because they are pseudonyms for merry musical anarchists Lol Coxhill, Steve Beresford, and David Toop; The Promenaders can be seen as a forerunner of Coxhill's Melody Four project.

It occurred to me today that "I'm So Glad" by Cream and "I'm Unsatisfied" by the Godfathers sum up the entirety of rock and roll; everything else is just mixtures and variations of those two themes.

As an addendum to yesterday's post of C Cat Trance's cover of The Tymes' "Hypnotized", here is the other cover from their first EP, the Chairmen of the Board's "Dangling On a String".  CCT added a hard edge to "Hypnotized", but they change the tenor of "Dangling" entirely, transforming a rather average uptempo Motownesque number into a charging locomotive of desperation with angry outbursts of sax:

(This version included on the 1988 CD release of Play Masenko Combo restores about three minutes that were excised from the original EP with an abrupt fadeout.)