7 posts tagged “whfs”
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.
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:
And while I'm on defunct Irish bands of the 80s, here's another one I liked, In Tua Nua:
Back in 2003, Radiohead fan Mrs. Veneer got me a little on board the Radiohead bandwagon by steering me toward a handful of songs that were near-perfect matches for my personal music receptors (Airbag, Electioneering, Idioteque). So I picked up Hail to the Thief in its first week of release, brought it home and listened to it with Mrs. V., and we were completely underwhelmed. She called it "unlistenable" and decided that Yorke and company had made it that way on purpose; I found it simply unmemorable, with not a single song calling out for a second listen. I've just been revisiting it, though, and I've found a few songs to like on it, and one in particular that really grabs me:
The reason "Where I End And You Begin" appeals to me is its similarity to (or ripoff of, depending on your point of view) "Theme for Great Cities" by Simple Minds (from the Steve Hillage-produced Sons and Fascination): same beat, same warbling synthetic organ sound behind it all. "Theme," a grand instrumental, was one of the handful of songs I would wait for on WHFS in the year of my New Wave conversion (academic year 1981-82); when the trumpet-synth comes in for the chorus, and the key turns major, it's a masterful release of the tension built up in the preceding passages:
I was lucky to find a used copy of Themes for Great Cities (at College Park's late, great Record and Tape Exchange), a
best-of collection released by Stiff in November 1981; it became one of
my most-played records. The sheer muscle and modernity of Simple Minds
in their early years was aesthetically intoxicating, and even now those
early works retain much of their power. They managed to capture in music society's struggle with the accelerating speed of technology better than anyone else except perhaps John Foxx's Ultravox. The New Gold Dream
album, with its lighter sound and Christian themes and imagery, was
slightly disappointing but still enjoyable; I saw them on their tour
for that album, at Ritchie Coliseum in College Park, with China Crisis
opening. (China Crisis ended their set early: it was raining outside and water was dripping onto the stage from the leaky ceiling, and when guitarist Eddie Lundon got a shock he took off his guitar and left the stage, followed by the rest of the band.) Unfortunately Simple Minds continued their charge toward the mainstream, losing all artistic credibility once and for all by recording the Keith Forsey-penned "Don't You (Forget About Me)" for The Breakfast Club, thereby becoming yet another victim of The Curse of John Hughes. Simple Minds closed out the 80s with so much bombastic dreck that few people even know about the forward-looking music they created between 1979 and 1981. See Saltyka's blog for an excellent, comprehensive look at this heyday period. Dikkii has some valuable insights as well. Finally, Simple Minds' 1998 album, Neapolis, was touted as a return to their early sound. No such luck. Jim Kerr is still stuck on "big-issue" songwriting, and the rhythms sound like trite, run-of-the-mill late-90s loops. It's not all bad news, though; the instrumental track "Androgyny," while no "Theme for Great Cities," could pass for a 1981 B-side:
One Baltimore-area band to almost hit it big in the 80s was Vigil; I think they were actually based in Glen Burnie. The quartet of Jo Connor, Andy Reynolds, "X Factor" and Gregg Maizel had gained a local following under the moniker "Here Today," releasing a 12-inch single of "Whistle in the Yard," an enigmatic, gothic-tinged song that never quite resolves. I saw Here Today at the Wax Museum in Southeast D.C.; that was a cool venue, with what is now called "stadium seating" but back then was just called "seating." In its brief existence I got to see several great shows there: Eurythmics, Thompson Twins, Root Boy Slim, New Models, and Men Without Hats (eh...) to name a few. Actually, I think that's all I saw there. Here Today was the opening act the night I saw them, and I don't remember who the headliner was, but it was one of the bands I just listed. As for Here Today, their Wikipedia entry says they
signed to CBS records, changed their name to Vigil and were promptly dropped. Vigil was quickly signed by Chrysalis Records and recorded their debut lp in glorious digital. It came out and sold enough copies to allow them to record another lp but only one track was officially released "Therapist" on the Nightmare on Elm Street 4 soundtrack. They recorded their eponymous debut album on Chrysalis Records in 1987. As of 2007 it is out of print.
Before the debut album came out there was a 12-inch single of "I Am Waiting." That song is pretty good, but it was the first song on the B-side, "I Love You Equinox," that got played on WHFS and created a buzz. When Jo Connor sings, "You can set your watch by her cycles 'cause she bleeds like clockwork," don't get grossed out, because it turns out he is singing about the moon, so it's OK, see?
That song always reminds me of Rush for some reason. The Vigil CD was a big deal because it was one of the first rock albums to have been recorded and mixed digitally, so it got the elusive DDD label on the back. I never got the CD, though, just the vinyl LP and the 12-inch; this is a rip from the 12-inch.
As for the second album, the Vigil MySpace page (on which you can hear "Whistle in the Yard") notes: "Eventually the second album was released on cassette only as Onto Beggar and Bitter Things." The band released it themselves when the record company wouldn't. I saw a copy once, my friend Mark Harp had it, but I never heard it! I sure hope that turns up on a sharity blog someday. Jo Connor is still making music, and has his own MySpace page as well.
Vigil must be in the zeitgeist right now, a 1986 live performance of "I Love You Equinox" has just shown up on YouTube, recently enough that I was viewer number 7:
Hey, there's "Whistle in the Yard," too!
I was viewer number 3 for that one.
And there's more! Its a veritable Vigil bonanza!
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.
of Sponge's "Wax Ecstatic." In my lean music years of the mid-90s I didn't hear much outside of the barely-tolerable watered-down "modern rock" that WHFS was offering, and I never liked the two songs by Sponge that they always played, "Plowed" ("In a world of human wreckage," etc., though it sounded like he was singing "rickets") and "Molly (Sixteen Candles)" (a song about a John Hughes movie is just as bad as a song in a John Hughes movie). So I was surprised when Sponge came out with "Wax Ecstatic (To Sell Angelina)" in 1996, with a tougher sound that I could really get into:
It took me a couple years to realize that this song is pretty similar in feel and chord structure to "Subterraneans," and maybe that's why I liked it so much. Apparently Wax Ecstatic, the album, was planned as a concept album about the murder of a drag queen. But I can't really tell what the song is about, even after reading the lyrics. Something about hyping a wax hair-removal kit? Maybe it's supposed to be indicative of all the hopes placed in products in our consumeristic society? And is he really singing "wax ecstatic"? Because to me it's always sounded like "wax the static." At least the guitars, bass, and drums are unambiguous.
