22 posts tagged “uk”
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"--
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.
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:
Hear more Slab! on Muxtape!
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"--
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: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.
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:
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*:
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.
* Headboy keyboardist Calum Malcolm has owned Castle Sound Studios in Scotland where the Headboys lp was recorded for over 20 years and has produced records for The Blue Nile, Prefab Sprout and others. (from Lost Bands of the New Wave Era)
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:
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.
(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.)
I was in the ninth grade when I discovered the "imports" section at the local record store (Waxie Maxie's), filled with stuff that looked downright weird. Even better, though, was the discounted imports bin, and one day when I had five dollars to spend I waffled between Chrome's Red Exposure, which looked strange and interesting, and Jack-Knife's I Wish You Would, which had John Wetton, who was a known quantity to me, on bass. I opted for Jack-Knife; years later I got really into Chrome and eventually found another copy of Red Exposure to buy. Would having bought it the first time have changed the trajectory of my musical fandom? Chrome was decidedly different, and I sometimes wished I'd gotten an earlier start in alternative music. But a few tunes on the Jack-Knife album hold up well; on the title track Wetton plays one of his most kinetic basslines, and Curt Cress opens the song with the funkiest drumming you'll ever hear on a rock record. Then there's the fantastic guitar solo by Richard Palmer-James which, when it sounds like it's over, picks up again for another several bars of wah-wah ecstasy:
Jack-Knife was a one-off, Wetton getting some old bandmates together to have some fun between U.K. recording sessions in 1979. As such it's surprisingly good, and groove miners can find a lot of first-rate breaks (some with cowbell!) to sample.
Just a quickie here: last night I put up the Doors' "Peace Frog" and another song that recycled its rhythm, "The Only One I Know" by the Charlatans. I also wanted to include another of its descendants, Echo and the Bunnymen's "Bedbugs and Ballyhoo," but I couldn't find it at the time. Now I've found it, so here it is as an addendum:
Brent Cash has swooped right up to the head of the Sunshine Pop class, pushing aside all those who have been keeping the flame alive (just) for the last decade. And most of those keepers are not really sunshiny at all, they tend toward the cloudy and morose but occasionally let some crepuscular rays of sunlight filter through. Their songcraft is rooted in Burt Bacharach and Jimmy Webb, with unexpected chord and meter changes around every corner, and arrangements that could stand on their own as instrumental lounge music. Matt Hales, a.k.a. Aqualung, is such a one, though his chord progressions reveal more of McCartney's influence than anyone else, as on the exquisite "Brighter Than Sunshine" which is the first song in his MySpace player at posting time: Argh, I can't turn off the autoplay, so here's a Seeqpod player instead:
Would Mike Oldfield's "Tubular Bells" (1973) have sounded scary without its association with The Exorcist? Would Goblin's theme for Dario Argento's "Suspiria" (1977) have sounded like that without "Tubular Bells"? (Or Pink Floyd's "One Of These Days," once you get to the middle?) Whatever the case, Italian band Goblin came to define horror movie soundtrack music for a generation. So I think it's not too far-fetched to speculate that RJD2 had Goblin in mind when he came up with "The Horror," the opener for his 2002 album Deadringer:
"The Horror" samples the theme music from Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! and First Moog Quartet's song Hey Hey. -- Wikipedia
I don't have the resources, the time, or the attention span to conduct a comprehensive dance-punk genre review, but I did find a few bands that I like; and that's what this blog is all about anyway, as it says right up there at the top, "Songs I Like." One thing about these dance-punk bands, they pretty much suck at naming themselves. Case in point: Does It Offend You, Yeah? That's the name of the band. It's a Ricky Gervais line from The Office. "No thought went into it whatsoever," they say, and it shows. According to Wikipedia they are a "British electro-rock band from Reading," "electro-rock" meaning "dance-punk with a synthesizer." Getting beyond their name, their debut album, You Have No Idea What You're Getting Yourself Into, has several noteworthy songs on it, my favorite being track two, ""With a Heavy Heart (I Regret to Inform You)"--
What's a worse band name than Does It Offend You, Yeah? How about "!!!", the band with nothing but punctuation for a name? Try Googling that--you'll get nothing! Nice strategy for getting the word out! Their MySpace page includes some pronunciation tips: "! ! ! is pronounced as any sound repeated three times. Common interpretations are chkchkchk, powpowpow, uhuhuh: unlimited possibilities." Indeed, they've even taken to writing the band name as "!!! (Chk Chk Chk)"-- if you have to explain it right up front, that's a good indicator of a bad name. But I can't fault their music. They've been at this dance-punk thing for years now (like fellow Brooklynites Radio 4, seen here earlier), and they're pretty darn good at it. Once again I've settled on track two of their latest album, Myth Takes (groan), as my favorite (though "Heart of Hearts" is more immediately gratifying, but it's way more "dance" than "punk"):
Rounding out today's trio are the tolerably-named Infadels, from London. Their first album, We Are Not The Infadels, is two years old now, but it's new to me. In keeping with the inadvertent theme of this post, the standout is track two, "Can't Get Enough," which has the wickedest beat that any of these bands have recorded. It could just be that I'm a sucker for a driving synth line, but I don't see how anyone can resist this one:
All three of these bands have stellar reputations for their live shows, and I could definitely get into spending a couple sweaty hours bopping around to their music, if any of them by some miracle actually come play in Ithaca. Eh, fat chance. I'd drive to Syracuse to see them, though. Come on, guys, how about it? Please?
