While most people who weren't there will never perceive of it as a Golden Age of Pop Music (and I'm not sayin' it was either), it will nevertheless take years to track down all of the worthwhile stuff that came out of the "college rock" explosion that started when REM, Burma, The Replacements, The Dream Syndicate, etc. etc. inspired kids around the country to pick up guitars. Of the hundreds of bands that sprung up, there were plenty who were never able to secure significant distribution for their records. There were even more that never had the wherewithal to press up vinyl in the first place. Their legends survive on well-worn cassette tape stored in boxes in closets or in the memories of middle-aging former scenesters. (Here in my neighborhood there were some pretty damned terrific outfits like the Moving Van Goghs and Klyde Konnor who recorded minor masterpieces that exist only on cassette.)

The Keepers, from Boston by way of my wife's college town of Oxford, Ohio, are just another story of "Local Band Makes Beer Money, Not Much More" (the liners have all of the whys and wherefores of their lack of success), but fortunately Chuck Warner has issued this CD which compiles live stuff, radio tapes, and demos (as well as four tracks from an early vinyl release), that we might have a chance to hear an exceptional band that would have sounded great on a bill with the Dangtrippers or Wishniaks. And yeah, I think that's worth preserving.

Trivia: Band member Craig Stevens was the brother of the Cavedogs' Brian. Figures.

Band members: Do you know where the master tapes of your old band are? Maybe you should check on that.

I believe this was the Mekons' last release for Virgin, a pair of 7" singles featuring four songs, including the terrific "Teeth," a manic post-punk rocker with a killer fiddle line that's an early indicator of the country-influenced direction the group would take during their mid-'80s renaissance. I tracked this set down on eBay last year as a gift for my wife, who heard "Teeth" on her favorite radio show, exactly once, some 18-20 years ago, and had neither forgotten the song nor been able to locate this version of it. (An alternate take, "Another Set of Teeth," is a bonus track on some reissues of the Mekons' second album, Devils Rats and Piggies A Special Message From Godzilla.) That show, incidentally, is Little Hits reader and occasional commenter Jon Bernhardt's Friday morning indie-rock showcase Breakfast of Champions, on WMBR, Cambridge, 8-10 a.m. Eastern, archives and podcasts available at www.wmbr.org/shows/boc.html and highly recommended to anyone who's spent more than 10 minutes at this site.

My own extremely minor Mekons connection: for several years at an old freelance gig, Mekons/Rumour drummer Steve Goulding was one of my bosses. Steve would no doubt be the first to tell you that this barely even qualifies as name-dropping.

-Stewart Mason

People forget this these days, when ambient instrumental music tends to be disdainfully lumped in the "new age" bin and forgotten (and rightfully so, since much of it is genuinely awful), but in the late '70s and early '80s, this type of music was considered positively cutting-edge. It wasn't, of course -- see "Satie, Erik" -- but after Eno's early experiments in ambient music, many interesting post-post-punk albums (almost all of them in the UK and northern Europe) included those influences. One of my favorites is Virginia Astley's 1981 album From Gardens Where We Feel Secure.



The daughter of British film composer Edwin Astley, Astley was all but unknown when she recorded this album, having only been part of the never-recorded cult trio the Ravishing Beauties (whose other two members, Kate St. John and Nicky Holland, went to some success as members of the Dream Academy and Tears For Fears, respectively, plus Nicky did a couple of pretty good AAA solo records) and doing some session work with her brother-in-law, some dude named Pete Townshend. That's Virginia's piano all over "Slit Skirts," for example. Supposedly originally written as demos for the Ravishing Beauties, the 10 songs on From Gardens Where We Feel Secure are piano solos with occasional woodwinds, backed with tapes of the sounds of the pastoral English countryside. "It's Too Hot To Sleep" is the closing song, fading out to the sound of insects cheeping through the night. Astley's classical training (and, perhaps, her father's cinematic influence) is obvious here: it's subtle, but there's a logical progression to this tune as opposed to the aimless meandering that so many similar records feature. Astley has maintained an extremely low-key career since her brief moment in the British indie spotlight, but this remains by far my favorite of her albums.

-Stewart Mason