They've been coming back for quite some time now (since 1990), of course, but now my 1980s are coming back.  Since my recent post on Slab!, band member Stephen Dray has announced their imminent reformation (in the comments on this blog post), or resumption rather, since he maintains they never officially broke up.  Woo-hoo!  And now Portion Control have announced a new album, Slug, to be released May 31.  Portion Control's early recordings, originally released on cassettes, were obviously inspired by Throbbing Gristle.  But by their first proper album, I Staggered Mentally (1982), they had settled on a more beat-oriented sound, or as they billed it, "Hard, Rhythmic Electronics."  Their 80s career peaked in 1985 with their most successful single, the industrial dancefloor staple "The Great Divide"--

Great Divide

Portion Control

There's some nice percussion in there; I'm finally learning to play a bit in a local drum circle.  It hurts after a while, but it's great to actually make the sounds I've enjoyed listening to for so long.

Portion Control ceased operations after their 1986 album, Psycho-Bod Saves the World, but returned with a new album, Wellcome, in 2002, and Filthy White Guy in 2004.  So their reactivation isn't exactly news, but Slug is, which is a good enough reason to dig out my old Portion Control records for another listen.

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Here I am saying The Slip is the best Nine Inch Nails album since the first one when I haven't really listened to any of them since Broken.  So I've been trying to catch up, going from recent to older; Year Zero and With Teeth are actually better than I thought, but neither are reach-out-and-grabby like The Slip, and both suffer from album bloat.  I am especially impressed with the opener from With Teeth, "All the Love in the World," which starts with a dub beat before morphing into a piano ballad (with falsetto, even!) and then finally an arena rocker:

Trent is relentless with his morbidly dour lyrics, though; it becomes overbearing after a while.  I think I can place them all into three categories:

1. I have low self-esteem.
2. We live in a dystopia.
3. Living in a dystopia has given me low self-esteem.

Did I miss anything?  What would Nine Inch Nails sound like if fronted by, say, Tom Waits and his morbidly gleeful lyrics?  Like this, I bet:

A1 Too Hot

Peter Hope and David Harrow

This song contains one of my all-time favorite weird couplets:

Turn the dust out, oh clear a way
When the injury swells up, it will not be contained

Yeah!  What the hell does that mean?  I don't know, but it sure is catchy!  Peter Hope first emerged in 1983 as the lead singer for The Box, a Sheffield band made up of former ClockDVA members.  Mick Fish give some details in his book about Cabaret Voltaire, Industrial Evolution:

The Box tried a number of singers, one who sort of whooped like a Red Indian chief but couldn't sing in tune. They even played two gigs with Mal [Stephen Mallinder of Cabaret Voltaire] on vocals -- a marriage of styles that was quite successful in its own way.... The Box eventually advertised for a singer. By far the best response came from Pete Hope from Hertford. Vocally somewhere between Tom Waits and Howlin' Wolf, he moved up to Sheffield with his young family.

Hope's inventive lyrics and unbridled singing style perfectly complemented The Box's no-wave skronk.  Although they released several records, The Box never broke out, and they disbanded in 1985.  Peter Hope then embarked on a series of one-off collaborations: this EP with synth whiz David Harrow (now known as James Hardway), an album with Cabaret Voltaire's Richard H. Kirk, an album with Jonathan S. Podmore (now known as Jono Podmore a.k.a. Kumo), and a 12" single with studio engineer Mark Estdale as Chain:

Chain - Chains(1)

Chain

I just adore that gothic-industrial-funk sound; if only that had caught on in the way Nine Inch Nails did.  Maybe it'll come back... Peter Hope, where are you?

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Of course I remembered even more Moldy 70s songs immediately after I posted my Moldy 70s video collection, but one of them led to an unanticipated discovery.  Looking for Starbuck's "Moonlight Feels Right" on YouTube, I found instead a live performance from 1986 of the same song by Yukihiro Takahashi, the former drummer of the Yellow Magic Orchestra, whose members (Takahashi, Ryuichi Sakamoto, and Haruomi Hosono) have a hand in just about every piece of music from Japan that I hear.  It's an impressive arrangement with the synth riffs played by a horn section, and the keyboardist even replicates the what is undoubtedly the best marimba solo ever in a pop song:

yukihiro takahashi 1986 Moonlight feels right

And for comparison purposes, here's the original:

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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:

Parallax Avenue

Slab!

Hear more Slab! on Muxtape!

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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.

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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:

04 Opus

Ryuichi Sakamoto

♫ Erik Satie - Gymnopédie No.1 [piano] ♫

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:

05 Stranger

Mark Stewart

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:

Somewhere (Orchestral Commercial Version)

David Sylvian

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:

Sylvian & Sakamoto - Forbidden Colours

Connection 4: Hey, Mark Stewart did two versions of "Forbidden Colours" on that very same album!  Here's the dub version:

07 Forbidden Dub

Mark Stewart

It's all connected!

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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:

The Adventures - Broken Land

And while I'm on defunct Irish bands of the 80s, here's another one I liked, In Tua Nua:

In Tua Nua - All I Wanted (1988)

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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"--

06 - Girl of My Dreams

Bram Tchaikovsky

"Love and Loneliness" also sounded familiar when I first heard it, but it took Ira Robbins of Trouser Press to make the connection for me:

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.

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:

Motors - Love And Loneliness

The Motors

You may recall this album cover as being die-cut, with the top left and bottom right corners cut off in alignment with the steps.  There are probably people who collection such things, but I'm not one of them (yet).

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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:

12 - yachting type

Yachts

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*:

01 The Shape Of Things To Come

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.

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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:

A5 Colour Me Pop - Beat Me Till Im Blue

Colour Me Pop

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.

3 Sensimilla

The Danse Society

(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.)

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