40 posts tagged “90s”

In 1993 a left-hand keyboard exercise I came up with evolved into a full-fledged cop show theme, which I called "Theme from Gunnerman" because that sounded suitably unsubtle for a 70s cop show. I got to play it with the band (Cafe de los Muertos), which was great--I really enjoyed hearing it all fleshed out--but we never recorded it. So that was the first thing I worked on when I started playing around with ACID and VST plugins a few years ago. It was great fun scoring all the parts, adding a horn section, cheesy sound effects, drum fills, cowbell, etc. I never got it near a professional-sounding state, but you can probably tell what I was aiming for in the last mix I did before moving on to another interest:

My favorite discovery of the last week is the San Francisco band Tussle, whose 2006 album Telescope Mind finally worked its way to my ears.  They are solidly in the vein of the great Postpunk Minimal Funk bands from New York in the 80s, Liquid Liquid and ESG, with a bit a 70s Krautrock thrown in.  Music critic Sasha Frere-Jones's band Ui, also from New York, purveyed a similar stripped down groove.  So I've assembled a little playlist that mixes up Liquid Liquid, Tussle, ESG, Ui, and some vintage British postpunk funk from 23 Skidoo and A Certain Ratio.  It all goes together quite nicely, I think.

Unexpected link with a previous post: one of Sasha Frere-Jones's great-grandfaters was Edgar Wallace, the writer whose initials were used as a song title by the Stockholm Monsters.

When I saw the Sisters of Mercy at Washington's 9:30 Club in the mid-80s, they played an unusually melodic song during the encore, which sounded something like "Emma" or "Emily" or "Emmaline."  I couldn't find it on any of their records. I bought Salvation's "Girlsoul" 12-inch single on the Sisters' Merciful Release label because there was a song called "Evelyn" on it; I thought Salvation might be the Sisters in disguise, and that "Evelyn" might be the elusive song.  They weren't, and it wasn't.  It was not until several years later when Urge Overkill put "Emmaline" on their Supersonic Storybook album that I heard the song again, and from the songwriting credits learned that the song was originally by Hot Chocolate as "Emma" ("How could he not have known that?", I hear you shouting mentally, as I have often done myself).  The ballad of an aspiring moving star is told by her childhood sweetheart; her failure to achieve stardom drives her to suicide.  That's a far cry from Hot Chocolate's perennially uplifting "Every 1's a Winner," but it's a perfect song for the Sisters of Mercy's gloomy repertoire and Urge Overkill's chic nihilism.  Here are all three versions (and I salute you if you can make it all the way through the Sisters of Mercy take, which surfaced on the "Dominion" 12-inch, several live bootlegs, and the unofficial Some Boys Wander By Mistake compilation):

As part of my search for music I liked in the 80s but don't have anymore (the second of the two threads mentioned in the headline), I have been sporadically looking for anything by the Oil Tasters.  I remember liking their sole, self-titled album on Thermidor and playing some tracks from it on my radio show, but I never got my own copy of the record.  It was reissued on CD a few years ago, but I'm no longer into accumulating and storing little plastic discs, so I passed.  Sometime in the last year it has hit emusic in digital format, so as of yesterday I have it at last!  It's glorious American skronk from Milwaukee, with drums, bass, saxophone, no guitar, and weird lyrics (prefiguring Morphine in many ways).  Drummer Guy Hoffman would join the Violent Femmes in the 90s.  But the big surprise came as I was listening through my downloaded tracks and heard the familiar riff of... Emma!

This classic Dead Girlfriend song sounds a lot less tragic in the hands of the Oil Tasters.  ;-)

Here's a quick-and-dirty tumblr-style post just to work through my backlog of songs I've been wanting to share but couldn't think of much to write about.

1. The Illusion - "Did You See Her Eyes" - Platters That Matter Records turned me on to this, a hit single by a late-60s Long Island band.  If I had known there was garage rock this beat-heavy I would have explored the genre more long ago.

2. The Edgar Broughton Band - "Out Demons Out" - First heard of this late-60s/70s British anarchist band in the new Hipgnosis book*, which includes the design team's slaughterhouse cover art for the band's self-titled album.  The call-and-response structure and repeated chanting of "Out Demons Out" are infectious; it could be an anti-government protest song in any time or place, but it will always remind me of the 2008 U.S. elections.

3. Pat Metheny - Zero Tolerance for Silence Part 4 - Super-smooth guitarist Pat Metheny made a noise album?  Yes, 1994's Zero Tolerance for Silence, five slabs of overdubbed, overdriven guitar riffs.  1994 was a busy year for me: new marriage, first child, and the start of a new job after the preceding two years of temp work and selling records.  So I missed a lot of music that year; if Brian Kaye didn't bring it over, I didn't hear it.  I like Part 4 the best: it sounds almost like King Crimson's "Discipline" near the end.  Thanks to Desination Out for posting about it!

There, I'm glad I got all that off my chest.

Cop Shoot Cop seemed like a band I would be into around 1990, but I was just becoming aware of them at the same time that my finances and free time petered out and put an end to my longtime music-buying habit.  And too bad, because I've finally gotten around to listening to them and I love it!  They sound like a cross between Morphine and Rage Against the Machine, with a little Foetus popping in from time to time.

Cop Shoot Cop left a decent-sized catalog that should keep me busy for about a week.  Singer/bassist/bandleader Tod A. went on to form Firewater (I learned), which promises to be fertile ground for further listening.  Sounds like he went in a Nick Cave-y direction.

I'll forgive that little Smash Mouth riff there, at least it's not from the heinous "All Star."  (And the ol' Wikipedia says it's lifted from a 1966 Perrey and Kingsley album anyway.)

Tod A. put Firewater on hold in January 2005 to walk the earth and blog about it, and his blog posts are quite detailed and thoughtful, but it's been nearly a year since the last one.  On the other hand, the last login date for the Firewater MySpace page is today.  I wonder what's up.

I missed seeing the Squirrel Nut Zippers during their wave of popularity in the late 90s, but lucky for me they are still together and played at Ithaca's State Theatre on Saturday night as part of the theater's 80th birthday celebration.  The climax of the show  "The Ghost of Stephen Foster", which featured the projection onto a movie screen of the animated video:

Poor Mrs. V. was under the weather and couldn't go, so I took my daughter to the show, and boy did she enjoy it!

Today, thanks to the blog Le Club De Rock, I discovered The Sir Aligator's Company, a brass band from Madrid with four trombones, two tubas, and a drummer.  Their repertoire is mostly (all?) covers, including this perfect version of "Bohemian Rhapsody":

That supplants, for the time being at least, my previous favorite interpretation, the horrendous version by Bad News (a.k.a. The Young Ones):

Not only that, I finally get to hear brass band versions of "Roxanne", "Crocodile Rock", "Bicycle Race", and many more, and for that I am thankful!

Johnny Smoke commented that No-Man reminds him of David Sylvian, and indeed, I first heard of No-Man through a David Sylvian mailing list.  There is an explicit connection as well: the other members of Sylvian's old band Japan--Mick Karn, Steve Jansen, and Richard Barbieri (but not Rob Dean, who left the band early)--collaborated on a number of tracks (at least two) with No-Man.  Here is one of them, "Sweetheart Raw" from the 1993 "dance" album Loveblows & Lovecries: A Confession--

That's the funkiest the Japan guys had gotten since, well, early in the Japan days, I think.  Love that bass Karn-age!

1976 was a very good year for me, at least: my father took a sabbatical from his University of Maryland faculty position to study at Rothamsted agricultural experimental station in Harpenden, Herts., UK [and took the family along, in case that wasn't clear in the original post].  Being steeped in a culture that shares a language but little else with my own was an exhilarating experience, and our six months in England was over all too quickly.  One of our weekly rituals was watching Top of the Pops, the costumed lipsynching extravaganza.  I've been revisiting some of those performances over the last couple weeks.  One that is particularly striking, but that I don't remember seeing, is "A Glass of Champagne" by Sailor; striking because of its obvious debt to Roxy Music's "Virginia Plain," spiced up even further with some music-hall antics (specifically, the pianist beating the bass drum):

I think "Roxy Music Hall" pretty much sums that up.  I do remember seeing Sailor "perform" "Girls, Girls, Girls," though I did not remember until browsing on YouTube just now that that's who did it:

Sailor frontman Georg Kajanus would go on to form synthpop band Data, whom I bought records by in the 80s unaware of his Sailor past. 

More recently Kajanus was half of the synthpop duo Noir with Tim Dry:

Tim Dry, now primarily a photographer, used to be better known as Tik of Tik and Tok, an 80s synthpop duo who were also a robotic mime duo!

And finally, Tik and Tok started out in Robert Pereno's synthpop music & dance troupe Shock, who had a minor hit with their cover of the Glitter Band's "Angel Face"--

That's where the video trail ends.  Pereno and Shock chanteuse LA Richards went on to form Pleasure and the Beast after Shock's breakup, for which only audio is available.  But it's been fun connecting the dots!

Wouldn't you know, as soon as I slag off indie rock in public, I find some that I absolutely love.  When Money Mark's album Push the Button came out in 1998, I read the product description to learn that he had played keyboards for the Beastie Boys (good) and that the album consisted of equal parts funky instrumentals (good) and indie-rock songs (bad).  That was back in the days when you had to actually buy a whole CD to check it out, and there was no way I was going to buy a CD that could only be half good at best, so no Money Mark music ever entered my ear canals.  But thanks to file-sharing I can hear it all now, and Mark's indie-rock songs are... really good!  Wow!  I like "Tomorrow Will Be Like Today" so much that I listened to it five times in one day:

That has kind of a Squeeze vibe, don't you think, a little like "Pulling Mussels (from the Shell)"?

But as great as his indie-rock songs are, his instrumentals are even better because they're totally badass, like "Information Contraband" from Change Is Coming:

I am a bona fide Money Mark fan now, I'm going to go friend him on MySpace.