Burl Veneer’s Music Blog

Rage/Ecstasy = ManBREAK

nobody@vox.com(Burl Veneer) — Sat, 12 Jul 2008 08:37:17 -0700

In my continuing quest to listen to everything, once in a while I happen upon something that I really wish I'd known about when it came out. The latest of these revelations is ManBREAK, a British group often compared to Rage Against the Machine. It's true that there are elements of RATM in their sound: rockified funk beats, distorted guitar, left-wing rapping; but their sound is not as hard, the anger not as raw, and there's a strain of the more party-oriented dance-rock of EMF in there. It all adds up to something I've listened to over and over this week, specifically their 1999 album Come and See. The set opens strongly with "Ready Or Not" from the Mortal Kombat soundtrack, then gets even better with "Kop Karma"--

02 Kop Karma

ManBREAK

Did you catch the Big Audio Dynamite reference? That's what I get out of "These are the things that drive me crazy / These are the things that drive me mad," at least. (Now there's a band that could've used a jolt of something or other: for all their hip appearance and melting-pot musical style, they sure were bland.) Working backwards, I learned that ManBREAK frontman Swindelli fronted a similar band, The Twenty Fifth of May, earlier in the 90s (as Stephen Swindelli). Their lone album, Lenin and McCarthy (haha), is even better than Come and See, or maybe I just think that because it has more fast breakbeat tracks and I'm a sucker for fast breakbeat. This is one of those albums where I have a hard time picking a single track; "Solid State Logic" won out for its "Mission: Impossible" lick, but it's just one of several excellent songs on Lenin and McCarthy--

12-Solid state logic

The 25th of May

ManBREAK's name, by the way, comes from "the after-effects of a covert action by the British government which involved the dispensing of untested drugs to unwitting soldiers during the cold war." They were active as recently as last year, when they released the "Dark Age" single; however, poor reviews of that record make it doubtful that I'll seek it out. Their 2001 album Asphalt Culture, on the other hand, seems worth tracking down.

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More Slab!

nobody@vox.com(Burl Veneer) — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 20:33:19 -0700

The online resurrection of the great Slab! that I blogged about on April 30 continues in fits and starts; the latest development is that two Slab! videos have just been posted to YouTube by Ikon Video. That means I can plug them in right here!

Slab! - People Pie

Slab! - Death's Head Soup

"People Pie" and "Death's Head Soup" were originally issued as 12" singles by Ink Records in 1988 and 1989 respectively; "People Pie" was included on the Release/Relapse CD reissue of the Descension album, while "Soup" remains uncollected. Man, I hope this ~~reunion~~ reactivation pans out, nobody put rock and sludge and great big beats together like these guys did!

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Gotta wash that snake right out of my head

nobody@vox.com(Burl Veneer) — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 17:04:00 -0700

Why oh why has Whitesnake's "Fool For Your Loving" been running through my head for the last week? It's not that I have any affinity for the lyrics: "A hard-lovin' woman like you just makes a hard-lovin' man." What the hell does that even mean, anyway? I think it's just that it's such a well-put-together song, with two great guitar riffs, David Coverdale's better-than-most blues-rock vocals, the way he plunges right into the second verse after the chorus, the guitar solo section, a good bridge; everything just clicks. Coverdale must think so too, since he's recorded it so many times. I spent Sunday evening listening to five different versions. The original studio version in on Ready an' Willing from 1980; it has the high-hat mixed really loud so that it sounds like a choo-choo train, or Squeeze's music-hall number "Cool For Cats," which kind of undermines the rock-and-roll swagger. On the other hand, Neil Murray's bass is very crisp in the mix and it really moves the song along; he has a punchy style like Boz Burrell but with more flourishes and note-bending. The definitive version is still the first one I ever heard, the live version (also from 1980) with the same band, which at that time was the classic line-up: half of Deep Purple (Coverdale, Jon Lord, and Ian Paice), Murray, and guitarists Mick Moody and Bernie Marsden:

05 - Fool for your loving

Whitesnake

That Murray's style is similar to Burrell's was probably no accident, as Whitesnake was often accused of being a Bad Company copycat band. In 1987 Coverdale retooled Whitesnake into a Led Zeppelin copycat band, prompting Robert Plant to call him "David Coverversion." Or maybe he was already calling him that, I don't know. The move paid off, though, as the Whitesnake album went multiplatinum thanks to the Zeppelinesque "Still of the Night" and a remake of the power ballad "Here I Go Again" from the 1982 Saints and Sinners album. (And did you ever notice that in the original version, he sings "Like a hobo I was born to walk alone," while on subsequent versions "hobo" has been changed to "drifter"? Sounds like the hobo lobby got to him. John Hodgman is onto something.) Coverdale loves remaking his own songs, and on the followup to Whitesnake, Slip of the Tongue, he remade "Fool For Your Loving", giving it the full 80s mushy-synth-and-sledgehammer-snare sound for what is easily the worst version of the song.* Now by this time Coverdale had disbanded the original Whitesnake band and would build a band around himself in response to what he saw as the dictates of the market. Moody, Marsden, and Murray would regroup in the 90s as Company of Snakes. In 2001 Company of Snakes put out a live album, Here They Go Again, with a new version of both "Fool For Your Loving" (and "Here I Go Again," of course) sung by Norwegian singer Jørn Lande. It's good, but a little too fast; Murray's bass still sounds great. Finally, David Coverdale and his Whitesnake-of-the-moment released a live album in 2006, Live in the Shadow of the Blues, and the update of "Fool For Your Loving" cranks up the rock even above the original, obliterating that lame 1989 version. The guitarists this time are Doug Aldrich and Reb Beach, and I've never heard of them before but they sure do energize "Fool"--

11 - Fool For Your Loving

Whitesnake

It's interesting to note that the singers Coverdale is usually compared with (usually unfavorably), Paul Rodgers and Robert Plant, have broadened their musical horizons in the post-AOR age. Plant had his retro Honeydrippers and now he's doing blues/country/bluegrass with Alison Krauss; Rodgers went back to the blues with an album of Muddy Waters covers, then did a stint fronting Queen. Coverdale, though, is still doing the same cock-rock he's always done, and it sounds like he's still doing it well. If it ain't broke...

(Vox just won't embed Skreemr widgets properly, sorry about that.)

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The Return of Skronk: Mojack

nobody@vox.com(Burl Veneer) — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 18:47:09 -0700

The posts I want to do keep getting bigger, and thus they are taking longer to prepare. Coming soon will be a post on UK Skronk, but in the meantime, Mojack brings us some brand new skronk from the US. Mojack is the current band of Greg Ginn (the guitarist from Black Flag and Gone and the founder of SST records) with Tony Atherton on sax and Mike Lopez on drums. Skronk is a "term attributed to Robert Christgau by Lester Bangs in 1981′s ‘A Reasonable Guide to Horrible Noise’ referring to music of the late ’70s art-punk movement." (from skronker.com) Meaning James Chance and the Contortions, Teenage Jesus and the Jerks, D.N.A., etc. I've been listening to lots of British skronk band The Box lately; they broke up over twenty years ago, but Mojack sounds like The Box all over again. Minus the vocals, though; Peter Hope's singing was completely over-the-top and damn near nonsensical, but it humanized the music. I like Mojack, but I think they could use a vocal focal point. That's just my opinion, though, you can judge for yourself via this handy-dandy Mojack player:

And by the way, the new Mojack album is available for free from the SST website, and it's worth every penny. And then some.

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Filling in the gaps

nobody@vox.com(Burl Veneer) — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 19:50:54 -0700

Having had access to the college radio station record library during the 80s, not to mention the constant stream of new releases that came in, and then spending all my disposable income (plus future income, once I got a credit card) on imported British records, I felt sure I must have uncovered everything I could possibly like. But the sharity blogs keep dishing up records that I somehow overlooked, and occasionally one will make me go, "Damn, I wish I'd heard that back then, I would have been totally into it!" Given my Sheffield band fandom, I was surprised to find I'd missed one: Leitmotiv. Their "Big Money" single is not quite as hard as my favorite Sheffield bands, but has a big, muscular beat that I would have loved anyway:

01 - big money

Leitmotiv

So I missed it the first time around, but at least I can dig it now! Another band I missed out on was FourWayCross, a California band who, coincidentally, also were on the same label as Drowning Pool (recently seen here). "Apologize" from their Product One album should appeal to the Killing Joke fan in anyone:

03 - Apologize

Fourwaycross

Actually, that sounds more like Play Dead than Killing Joke. That reminds me, I've got to get some Play Dead on here, I just don't know what to pick. Anyway, thanks to the sharity blogosphere for helping me fill in the gaps!

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Erasing history

nobody@vox.com(Burl Veneer) — Sun, 01 Jun 2008 08:09:02 -0700

It always galls me when a new band takes the same name as an old band; for one thing it's an annoyance to have net searches mucked up with the pretender's name, and at worst they end up overwriting the history of the original band. How infuriating that the name of transsexual rock great Wayne/Jayne County's early band, the Backstreet Boys, has been forever tainted by the boy band's appropriation. Apropos of my last post, The Prodigy's band name is now diluted by a rapper who goes by Prodigy. And the metal band Drowning Pool has taken the name of a fascinating band from the 80s. I recently dug up my copy of the original Drowning Pool's Satori double album, released on the Nate Starkman and Son label in 1987 in a gorgeous hand-printed heavy cardboard gatefold sleeve. It's a mix of studio and live recordings spanning several postpunk musical styles--drum machine workouts, renaissance madrigals, funereal dirges--while listening to it I was reminded of Dead Can Dance, but one track sounded uncannily like the Abecedarians. I swear I came up with those references before opening their MySpace page and reading their "Sounds like" list, which begins with Dead Can Dance and Abecedarians! There is a liturgical feel to some of the songs, especially the vocals, similar to music by the more recent Arcanta. Here is "Festival of Healing"--

B3 Festival of Healing

Drowning Pool

The members of Drowning Pool have resurrected their own label, Scarface Charley, to reissue their records on CD. Two have so far been produced (Green and Aphonia), with the "magnum opus" Satori still to come. This rediscovery has also opened up new avenues of musical exploration for me, returning me to the punk tribalisms of Drowning Pool labelmates Savage Republic, and introducing me to the similarly-inclined Red Temple Spirits. And all because there's a metal band called Drowning Pool!

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I'm still listening to Peter Hope (and Nine Inch Nails)

nobody@vox.com(Burl Veneer) — Wed, 28 May 2008 18:24:08 -0700

Since I've put up two songs from Peter Hope's post-Box career, I should really put up something from the band that put him on the map. (You know, my map.) The Box was formed by the original ClockDVA instrumental lineup after being fired by bandleader Adi Newton; Peter Hope won the spot as their singer, and Terry Todd was recruited on bass. They made quite the postpunk no-wave racket, summed up best by the first song on their first record, 1983's self-titled 5-song EP:

A1 No Time for Talk

The Box

And I am continuing to work my way through the Nine Inch Nails back catalog; today it's been The Fragile. Trent's never done much in the way of breakbeats, but The Fragile contains a killer breakbeat instrumental, the all-too-brief "Complication"-

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AOR addendum: New England

nobody@vox.com(Burl Veneer) — Mon, 19 May 2008 15:30:22 -0700

There was one more minor AOR hit I wanted to include in my last post, but there was no audio file to go into the Seeqpod player. "Don't Ever Want To Lose ~~You~~ Ya" by New England was one of many songs I taped off the radio in 1979, but never got the album. Their marketing angle was being "Produced by Paul Stanley of KISS," and they were a hairy bunch who looked like they might have been Kiss without the makeup. But if power pop was stealth new wave, as I contend, then New England was stealth power pop behind the hard-rock facade:

NEW ENGLAND - Don't Ever Wanna Lose Ya

Wow, it sure was windy in that studio! Don't you love how earnestly the keyboardist Jimmy Waldo sings along on the chorus? And how about drummer Hirsh Gardner's hair?! He should've been in Journey with Neal Schon and Gregg Rolie, that would have been the ultimate hair band. But getting back to the music, it's not far from bona fide power pop anthems such as "Tomorrow Night" by The Shoes:

Tomorrow Night - Shoes

But the visuals from New England's video remind me of something else... Hmmm.....

The darkness-Love is only a feeling

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Touch

nobody@vox.com(Burl Veneer) — Sat, 17 May 2008 15:27:14 -0700

The pinnacle of my used-record-store-owning career came when a guy from the next county called and said there was a song he'd been looking for for ten years, but nobody knows what it is, and the chorus goes "don't you know what love is," and-- and I stopped him right there and said, "That's by Touch, and I have their album that it's on, and the Castle Donnington Monsters of Rock album that has the live version." He showed up, eventually, and bought both records for $5.99 each. $5.99?! I could have charged more than that! That's one reason I'm out of the record-selling business. Anyway, the guy was so grateful to have the song after so many years of fruitless searching. The reason I knew the song was it was one of my favorites from the WAVA AOR years. In 1980 I taped the Monsters of Rock album off the radio when it was the 11:00 album of the night (because April Wine was on it, and I was really into them), and it was the Touch song I ended up playing over and over. I haven't heard it myself since I sold those records in 1993, but I've just found a copy to listen to again:

01 Don't You Know What Love Is

Touch

Those power chords and keyboards and chorused vocals sure sound great; I've always been a sucker for lavish production and arrangements. However, they can mask the fact that there's not much of song there; Touch's songwriter Mark Mangold would go on to write "I Found Someone," which Cher made a hit via the "if you shout it loud enough nobody will notice the melody is crap" method, a.k.a. "the power ballad" method. What a cultural bane. Oh well, I still like "Don't You Know What Love Is," and it makes me want to hear some coeval AOR hits and near-misses:

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Still wallowing in the 80s: Chrome

nobody@vox.com(Burl Veneer) — Thu, 15 May 2008 17:59:17 -0700

The big news is that my old pal Jeff has started his own music blog, at last. I've known Jeff since high school; he was into cooler music than I was, and lent me records and made me tapes to get me up to speed. All these years later (26!) we rarely listen to the same music unless upon recommendation from the other; his recommendations are always good, and now that he's blogging everyone can get them.

Since I'm reliving my high points of 80s music, I had to break out the ultimate Chrome album, 3rd from the Sun (1982). Chrome had already made great records, cyberpunk before the term was even coined, but adding the rhythm section of brothers John and Hilary Stench added a zillion volts of power to their sound. 3rd from the Sun is seven tracks of pure, throbbing sci-fi nightmare, my favorite being "Armageddon"--

Chrome - Armageddon

Chrome

I was always really impressed with Damon Edge's cover art for this album; then one day I realized all of a sudden, it's just a picture of a lion-head door knocker with larger photos of human irises cut out and pasted on! It's amazing that such a simple collage could be so transformative.

(See my previous Chrome post for another track.)

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