11 posts tagged “synthpop”
Ghostland Observatory seem poised to be this year's Big Thing, leading to overexposure and backlash, but a month after listening to their new album, Robotique Majestique, I still have several of the melodies and choruses running through my head. Ghostland Observatory are a synth/vocal duo in the classic mold of Soft Cell, but where Soft Cell looked to 60s female soul hits for influence, G.O. starts with Queen's "Another One Bites the Dust." Case in point: the insanely catchy "Heavy Heart"--
Singer Aaron Behrens even brings rock histrionics to the stage show; can he compensate for the lack of any actual instrument-playing onstage through a whole concert? That will be insteresting to see, if I ever get a chance.
Staying with the 80s theme of the last post but traveling a couple hours up I-95 to Phildelphia, here's Pretty Poison from their 1983 4-song EP Laced:
More electronic toms, yeah! In the fall of 1982 I was a freshman in college, and somehow I quickly got "in" with the campus radio rock DJs and scored my own radio show (3-6 AM!). One weekend, at the last minute, the program director invited me to go to the 9:30 Club with him to see a band. I had never been to a nightclub before--I had just turned 17--so I jumped at the chance. The band was Pretty Poison, the PD was on the guest list and got me in free as well, he turned out to know the band from previous shows, he took me backstage to meet them, the singer was a beautiful little creature with teased hair and fishnets named Jade, and she kissed me! "Oh, what a night!", as the song goes. I remember thinking the show was spectacular, though I don't remember any details 25 years later. I became a fan, I bought their EP when it came out, played it on my radio show several times, saw one more show of theirs, and never heard of them again until the late 80s and the infamous "Catch Me, I'm Falling". The seeds of that fluffy synthpop are there in Laced, but so are the seeds of a darker sound, as heard here. They were on a cusp and could have gone either way: in a gothic, Clan of Xymox direction, or the direction they ultimately took. I would have preferred the former, but you can't have everything.
Jade Starling is now based in Las Vegas; she continues to be thin and wear skimpy clothes, and makes what can best be described as "aerobics pop." She has a MySpace page where you can hear some of it. Her bio begins:
This award winning singer/ songwriter is best known for the ..1 platinum hit "Catch Me I'm Falling" on Virgin Records. Along with co-founder, musician/producer/ arranger Whey Cooler, they are the driving force of Pretty Poison. This ground breaking late 80's pop band helped pave the way for crossover acts such as Britney Spears, Christina Agulera and Pink.
And all those years I'd been thinking it was Madonna who paved that way! Okay, she did say "helped." Still, that's a dubious honor, I don't think I'd trumpet that about. As I've said before about other bands: oh, what might have been. Here's a little reminder of how it actually turned out, from that fine Jon Cryer film Hiding Out:
Hey, that's not bad for what it is! I confess to tapping my toes while watching it.
My old chum Platters That Matter Records just had a great batch of records on ebay; it was unsold stock from legendary Rockville record store Yesterday and Today, much of which was in turn unsold stock from Baltimore's legendary Music Machine (which closed up first). Y&T was owned by Skip Groff, who was also the man behind Limp Records, and who still runs a web-based record store under the Y&T name. (Y&T also employed Platters That Matter Records for a while in the 90s; circle of life, etc.) I never shopped at Y&T much, because I lived in Baltimore during my college years. I did shop at Howie Horowitz's Music Machine religiously: every Monday I would pick up my weekly grocery check from my mom, cash it, and drive out to Howie's to spend it on British imports. Howie was great, he took special orders and got just about anything I wanted, if not through his normal suppliers then on one of his regular trips to England. Even so I couldn't buy everything I wanted, so I just picked up five records that I missed back then. The first is A+B=C, a five-song EP from Baltimore-area "new wave" band Growing Up Different circa 1983. I put "new wave" in quotes because they sound like AOR musicians playing AOR songs on synths and calling it "new wave," and that's exactly what they were. After the demise of regional AOR giants Face Dancer, the rhythm section of Billy Trainor and Scott McGinn hooked up with keyboardist D.J. Long to form Growing Up Different. It's not bad, it's probably typical of a lot of older (i.e. 30-ish) musicians in a lot of cities trying to adapt to a new musical style in those days. "Stare Back In Silence" is certainly competent synthpop, cheesy electronic toms and all:
The Glory Daze AOR website has an exclusive three-part interview with Billy Trainor about the history of Face Dancer and its incarnations over the years, the most recent being in 2003. Here's what he has to say about Growing Up Different:
After we put FD to rest, Scott and I started experimenting around with electronic music and had a pretty cool very 80's kind of band for a while. It actually became quite popular, and we got a singles offer from a record company in England. Like the dumb asses we are, we held out for an album deal in the US which never came about.
A+B=C was released by CES Records, "A Division of CES Talent, Inc." Locally only, I presume. I did see Growing Up Different once, at DC's fabulous, now-defunct Wax Museum. They were the opening act; I can't remember exactly who the headliner was, but I think it was either Men Without Hats or the Eurythmics. (That's right, I went to a Men Without Hats concert.) They were all right; they had some pretty cool equipment and played a tight set. I'm glad to finally have this audio souvenir.
I've had Trees' only album, Sleep Convention, tucked away in my collection awaiting the day that I would rip it to mp3 and spread its 1982 synthpop wonderfulness throughout the world. Somebody beat me to it, though (The Subersive Sounds, back in April!). Oh well, less work for me, I'll just piggyblog it. "Trees" was just one man, Dane Conover, playing every single instrument and gadget on the album. My favorite track was always "11:00 AM":
More recently, the Mine for Life blog put up some links to Trees videos on YouTube! Such as this one for "Delta Sleep":
Why is Harry Anderson dressed up like Mork?! (And thank goodness Night Court is off TV, people were always telling me I looked like Harry Anderson, just because we had the same hair.) Obnoxious comments aside, Trees made some of the warmest-sounding synthpop ever produced, so lighthearted and human, and with cleverly-crafted lyrics to boot. In what is becoming a familiar refrain-- if only there had been more. Mine for Life also dug up a current webpage for Popgems on GarageBand.com, Popgems being none other than Dane Conover and his wife Marisa. It is nice to hear that two and a half decades have not taken any of the sunniness out of his music.
Woo-hoo, I just got a new phono preamp, and a big old desk, so now I have my turntable hooked up to my PC and for the first time since 2002 I can rip tunes from vinyl again! It took a bit of doing; apparently the RCA audio input jacks on my Gateway GM5472 are merely decorative. So much for that selling point. So I broke down and plugged the jacks into a Y-adapter and then into the sound card line in jack, and now everything's dandy. For the maiden voyage of my new setup I've ripped "Water in My Eye" by Kissing the Pink (later just KTP), released on Magnet Records in 1982 as the B-side of the "Mr Blunt" single. It was not included on the band's first album, 1983's Naked, because by that time the singer was no longer in the band, according to the band member I interviewed by telephone for my campus radio station. Didn't actually record the interview, though... oops. Too bad about the singer, her voice is like a platinum bell (or maybe that's just the studio effects, but I love that sound!):
So who was that singer? I don't know, and I can't tell from Jeff Grote's otherwise exhaustive Kissing the Pink fansite. I wish they would have done more songs in this totally-synthesized vein. "Water in My Eye," and the rest of the Naked album, was produced by one of the architects of the 80s new wave sound, Colin Thurston. Thurston is best known for producing the first two Duran Duran albums; he also produced the Human League's Travelogue that I was just raving about the other day. I was taken aback to learn that he died in January of this year. Naked has been reissued on CD by Wounded Bird Records, who have an impressive catalog of fully-licensed reissues with original cover art.
It was a fantastic weekend for finding long-lost songs: I found two! The first is "The Child in Me" by Philadelphia band Stranger to Stranger (1983-1992). Released in 1985 as a 12-inch single, it became a staple on WHFS, even after its transformation into a corporate station. I've been doing a web search about once a year for it, and was prodded to do it today because I came across their album Casting Shadows on my shelves. So I Googled it, and there it was, on the only Stranger to Stranger page on the Internet, on a website for Rose Parade, the current band of Stranger to Stranger singer Gary Eshbaugh. The instrumental track of "The Child in Me" could pass for a 4A.D. band, but the lyrics are squarely in introspective singer/songwriter territory, Gordon Lightfoot-y maybe; they come together to create a song that is timeless (at least it still holds up 24 years later):
The second long-lost song I reacquired this weekend is "The Way of Life" by The Puppets. This quintessential synthpop song, as dramatic as anything from Depeche Mode, came out on a 12" from Canadian label Quality Records in 1983, and the Puppets were never heard from again. The campus radio station got a copy; my then-girlfriend got a copy; but I never got one, and never managed to find one since. Last night I chanced across Brent S.'s Brave New Waves blog (following a link to an Our Daughter's Wedding EP), saw a lot of good 80s music, and asked him if he had "The Way of Life." Lo and behold, he did, and he posted it for download! Hallelujah! I don't want to steal Brent's traffic, so if you're interested (and you should be), head on over to this post at Brave New Waves. (The download link is in the post title.) [11/8/07: That blog has just gone private, so I've deleted the links. Oh well.] He also posted a picture of the record label; the songwriting credits are for Shaun Brighton and John Cannon. I tracked down Shaun Brighton: he was the leader of CBGB band Nervus Rex, who broke up in 1981. He has apparently retired from music. I couldn't trace John Cannon; do any readers know anything about him?
The Human League was the first Sheffield band I ever heard: switching radio stations to WHFS in 1982 to check out the "new wave," "The Things That Dreams Are Made Of" is one of the songs that made me a convert. That wacky synth playing under the lines "Everybody needs love and adventure, everybody needs cash to spend" (I'll try to transliterate it: reet-reet-reet-reet-reet-reet-reet-reet-reet-reet-reet-reet--- deeeowwwrrrr) lodged in the pleasure center of my brain and became my unconscious benchmark for new-waviness:
I was aware of Heaven 17 at the time (thanks to a younger and hipper girlfriend) and knew they were a Human League splinter group, but I didn't yet know that the best work of both factions was already behind them. 1980's Travelogue album is a monolith of analog-synth futurism, though it took me some years to find that out. The schism occurred after that album; Phil Oakey retained the Human League name to pursue a more pop-oriented sound, the first result being 1981's Dare! album and the ultimate synthpop hit, "Don't You Want Me." Was that a blessing or a curse? The ubiquity of "Don't You Want Me" provoked a major backlash that took the League years to recover from; they never did catch that spark again (except for "I Love You Too Much," a minor gem that was completely overlooked), nor did they manage to leave the taint behind. "Human"? Blech.
One of the curiouser bits of Human League history is the early membership of Adi Newton, who soon left and went on to form ClockDVA: completely anti-electronic in its early incarnations, Newton reinvented ClockDVA as a "digital sorcery" band in the late 80s and picked up the thread of dark futurism begun by the Human League a decade earlier. ClockDVA's Man-Amplified album sounds like it could be the evil twin of Travelogue... but I'll stop my stream of consciousness there and save it for another day.
Update: less than an hour after I posted this, I discovered that the Human League are doing a short tour of England this fall, with a hometown gig at Sheffield City Hall on December 7. Once again I am watching the Sheffield scene from thousands of miles away. C'est la vie.
Update: Oops, I screwed up! The song I meant to post was "This Little Girl," but instead I posted "Chasing the Sun," which is the instrumental version of "This Little Girl." Both phrases are lyrics from the song, so I got confused. I've corrected the entry.
Here's another song from the 80s minimal-techno label Survival Records (more background here), "Chasing the Sun" "This Little Girl" by Play. Play was Wayne Kennedy's one-man band, joined on recordings by Drinking Electricity members David Rome (Survival's founder) and P.K. Edgely (Survival's designer). Play's sole album, Red Movies, collected three singles and their four B-sides. "Chasing the Sun" "This Little Girl" is the best, there is a stark grandeur to it that is unmatched by the other tracks:
It took me a long time to find Red Movies; every time I asked my record dealer, Howie, to look for it on one of his trips to England, he always said, "Play Dead? I've got some Play Dead here." No, not Play Dead! I know Play Dead, I like Play Dead, I have a bunch of their records, I just want PLAY, no Dead! I eventually found it somewhere else, and for a good price, just $6.99 if I remember correctly. It's never been reissued on CD, but a vinyl rip is available for download via Yarrost's LiveJournal.
Back in the 80s, the Survival Records label always seemed to do more with less. Their releases were mostly synthpop, a la Mute Records, but the instruments they used seemed even cheaper. They still got great beats, melodies, and arrangements out of them, though, and the records would later become highly collectible to devotees of "minimal electronica." One of the best tracks they released, and one of the most mysterious, is "Do It" by Do It, the final song in the four-song "Megamix" that makes up side two of the Mind & Matter/Megamix label sampler LP (1983). Now that I've looked into it, the mystery begins to clear up. Survival Records was founded by David Rome and Anne-Marie Heighway in 1980, presumably to release records by their band, Drinking Electricity. The third member of Drinking Electricity was P.K. (Paul) Edgley (on bass), who also did photography and sleeve design for the label. The label released two singles by Edgley's solo project, The Limit; "Do It" was the B side of the second Limit single, "Take It." I assume that this is the same song that was placed in the Megamix as by "Do It" (the song credit is indeed P.K. Edgley), but it may be an alternate version, as the other Megamix songs are (I think). On the other hand, "Do It" may be an alternate version of "Take It" in the first place. Argh--just when I thought I would never have to buy another record, this nagging question pops up. Here is "Do It" as by Do It from Mind & Matter/Megamix; the female vocals are by Anne-Marie Heighway:
I love that kick drum! Three years ago I was casting about for Cousteau-like music (during the dry spell between their second and third albums) on the Cousteau message forum, and someone pointed me to Scottish singer/songwriter James Grant. I realized that I was familiar with James Grant already, in his previous incarnation as the leader of Love and Money, and before that as the guitarist for Friends Again. I then bought his first solo CD, Sawdust In My Veins, and noticed it was on the Survival Records label. I assumed it was a different label, but lo and behold, it is the same one! As David Rome himself tells it:
When we started we specialised in electronic dance music, charting with Tik and Tok. Then in the mid eighties we moved more toward rock music finding success with The Quireboys, and then in 1990 we signed the Celtic band Capercaillie, and have been working with them both as a band and with their individual careers ever since.
Is there anyone who bought the 1982 Cherry Red sampler LP Pillows & Prayers and didn't fall in love with Joe Crow's "Compulsion"? If you didn't, you must have been some kind of curmudgeon, but that's cool. Ridiculously simple (Joe uses the synth equivalent of an Easy-Bake Oven) but amazingly catchy, "Compulsion" marches inexorably forward, oscillating between major and minor chords like our quotidian waverings between hope and worry, joy and pain, attraction and aversion.
Martin Gore of Depeche Mode liked it enough to record a version for his album of covers, Counterfeit. Most of the lyrics pages on the web even list Gore as the songwriter. Joe Crow's obscurity was maddening; my search for more Joe Crow material turned up exactly nothing. No search can be less successful than that. It turns out he did have a couple odds and ends out there, which he now details on his MySpace page. Yes! He's a real person after all, and he's still around!
The Veneer family is off to England for two weeks without the Internet. What will happen?!
