(from the CD Spare Snare, Prospective Records 1995)
Spare Snare are one of many bands I first heard courtesy of Jon Bernhardt’s weekly slot on WMBR’s morning indie rock show Breakfast of Champions. Basically a one man band featuring Scotsman Jan Burnett with occasional helpers, Spare Snare have been around since the early ’90s. Certainly the sound of “Thorns (2)” — think Yo La Tengo with a side order of Pavement — dates the provenance of these two tracks, but the lo-fi slide guitar blues feel of the first take is a bit more timeless. These tracks bookend the band’s first US release, which appears to be a collection of early UK singles. Another way you can tell this album came out in 1995 is that “Thorns (2)” was followed on the original disc by about 15 minutes of silence followed by a 10-minute noise workout called “If I Had A Hi-fi” that’s unlisted in the CD credits. Man, hidden tracks became a pain in the nuts fast, didn’t they? Thank god for cheap and powerful audio editing software.
I’ve noticed that in recent weeks, Wordpress has started getting an itchy trigger finger in terms of spam protection. I’ve been having to troll the deleted comments to recover several that are from both regulars and newcomers, but I’ve undoubtedly lost many more because frankly, we get hammered with spam here and I often don’t have time to scroll through 400+ spam comments to find valid ones.
My recommendation is that if you don’t want your message to get lost, don’t fill in the spaces for your email or website address when you post. That’s one of the flags for WordPress, apparently. (Also, URLs in posts tend to get shot down.) If you’ve been getting comments lost in the ether and that doesn’t help, email me at stewartmason AT verizon DOT net and I’ll if I can figure out the problem on this end. Sorry for the inconvenience and the metapost. Stay tuned for a new post from a noisy Scottish lo-fi act later this evening.
For a band from England, the short-lived Parachute Men sure sound a whole lot like Reckoning-Document era R.E.M. fronted by Kristin Hersh. They dressed with hints of goth. They tried their hand at celtic mandolin jangle. One gets the sense that they couldn’t quite figure themselves out. But they did manage to slide one pretty catchy tune onto this record (mysteriously buried on side two). Funny how often days-of-the-week tunes hit pop paydirt. Actually it’s a song about being on the dole and getting that all-important check. Giant drums and dainty guitars courtesy of producer Hugh Jones. Yet another song that made me shell out my hard-earned money on the chance that there were more like it on the album. Alas, there were not.
I had a similar experience with the Kadydids’ “Heavy Weather Traffic.” The Katydids were put together by husband and wife session musicians Susie Hug (vocals) and Adam Seymour (guitars). Soon after the band’s demise, Seymour became Chrissy Hynde’s guitar slinger in the Pretenders and still is to this day. Dig the rhythmic mod nod to the Who’s “I Can See For Miles.” Again, a brilliant song (and with classic Nick Lowe production) that gave me hope that here, finally, would be a perfect pop-writing juggernaut for my $11. Alas, yet another entry in my personal one-hit-wonder pantheon. Remember when major labels took a gamble on bands like this? I barely can, either. I guess if you look like a 17 year old nymphet, they still might.
Meat Whiplash were sort of the archetypal Creation also-rans, sounding enough like the Jesus and Mary Chain that they were a frequent opening act for them but lacking that spark of personality that would make them stand out from the rest of the anorak brigade. But in its own second-string way, the a-side of their sole single, “Don’t Slip Up,” is a pretty groovy slice of the mid-80s UK underground. By the way, Meat Whiplash are also a minor footnote of C86: when singer Alex Taylor left the Shop Assistants, she joined Meat Whiplash and they changed their name to Motorcycle Boy, who released several singles and EPs through the late ’80s.
(from the CD EP Object Lessons: Songs About Products, Inconspicuous Records 1998)
If you’re like me, and I know I am, your favorite zine back when there were things called zines was Beer Frame: The Journal Of Inconspicuous Consumption. Written by Paul Lukas, a New Yorker whose proud geekiness dripped from every page, Beer Frame was about, as the subtitle promised, consumer products that were either so obscure or so ubiquitous that you never thought about them. It was completely on target with a lot of interests of mine, and I loved every issue. (My former record label even had a couple half-page ads in later issues.) Lukas’ book Inconspicuous Consumption, available cheap through Amazon Marketplace, is basically a paperback compendium of the first dozen or so issues of the zine, unfortunately minus the hilarious and often fascinating music section in the back of every issue, which consisted entirely of CD and single reviews that only discussed the packaging and live reviews that only discussed how the subway ride to the club was and how much the beer cost, with one line at the end of each about the music.
Actually, Beer Frame introduced me to a number of my favorite artists of that period, including Richard Davies, Alastair Galbraith, and the Mountain Goats, whose song “Golden Boy” starts off Object Lessons: Songs About Products, the five-song EP that was Lukas’ one and only entrée into recording. It’s available on the Mountain Goats rarities anthology Ghana, so as much as I love it, it’s ineligible here. Not so the EP’s final track, “Honeywell Round Thermostat” by Vehicle Flips. Another band I learned of through Paul Lukas, Vehicle Flips were a trio led by Frank Boscoe, who had been the leader of an earlier band called Wimp Factor 14, whose single “Train Song” I was almost positive I’d already posted here but somehow I haven’t. That will have to be rectified. The hypnotic “Honeywell Round Thermostat” (named after the device I keep meaning to replace down in the dining room both because a digital thermostat is more energy-efficient and because the cats keep knocking the cover off and under the bookcase) is entirely representative of their sound, pitched somewhere between the Flying Nun bands and Yo La Tengo. Good stuff.
I picked this up at In Your Ear a few weeks ago based on nothing more than a potentially intriguing band name, album title and cover photo, coupled with a reasonable $3.99 price tag. I’m not entirely sure what I was expecting given the band’s time (1987) and place (apparently, Fort Lauderdale, Florida), but what I got reminds me in odd ways of early Beat Happening, but with a much stronger pure-pop element. It’s very DIY and minimalist — the band’s drummer, who also produced the album, is credited with “snare,” and indeed, that’s the only drum on the whole album. There’s also scratchy guitar, a lot of bass and a kinda rinky-dink organ, so it has that scrappy lo-fi indie pop thing happening, just close to a decade early. Between them, these two songs give a pretty accurate overview of what the album as a whole sounds like.
I know that in the previous Icehouse entry, I referred to them as something like “Australia’s premier Roxy Music ripoff.” Which, undeniably, they are, but there were times early in their career where they ripped off Roxy Music so well that it’s impossible not to have a certain level of admiration. This remix of “Hey Little Girl” (previously available on its original form on the 1982 album Primitive Man — this version is close to a minute shorter and has a much punchier drum track) is from the 1983 EP Fresco, which was meant as Chrysalis Records’ reintroduction of Icehouse to the US market after their first two albums tanked nearly everywhere except Boulder, Colorado, where for some reason they were really quite big. The other four tracks are “Street Café” and “Glam,” both in their original versions from Primitive Man, and “Break These Chains” and “Over the Line,” a pair of more guitar-oriented songs that presaged their next album, 1984’s Sidewalk, which was pretty awful.
(from the LP I’m A Lover, Not A Fool, Polydor Records 1972)
Randy Burns was probably the most potentially commercial act ever to be signed to ESP-Disk in the 1960s, and his three albums for the label, 1966’s Of Love and War, 1968’s Evening of the Magician and 1970’s Songs For An Uncertain Lady, are mellow, lyrical folk-rock that are easily the most mainstream-sounding ESP-Disk albums I’ve ever heard. Naturally, since the cult of ESP-Disk venerates the weirdness, they’re still pretty much ignored. Burns released three more albums after he left ESP-Disk, leaning to more of a country-rock direction. I’ve owned two of them (1971’s Randy Burns and the Skydog Band and 1973’s Still On Our Feet) for years, but I only found the one in between, 1972’s I’m A Lover, Not A Fool, this afternoon when my wife and I went for an after-lunch wander through Nuggets in Kenmore Square. As a fairly trad country-rock album, most of this record is outside the LH purview, but the really quite pretty “Seasons” has an orchestrated folk-rock quality to it that reminds me of some of the Laurel Canyon records of the era.
As an American teenager, I was kind of doomed not to fully understand Heaven 17. Not in the sense that they were intrinsically British in the manner of a band like the Kinks or the Television Personalities, but because they were bizarrely ill-served by their American record company. For one thing, the whole backstory behind the band was largely unknown to anyone who couldn’t lay hands on UK music mags: Ian Craig Marsh and Martyn Ware split from the Human league after their second album and formed the British Electric Foundation, a two-man songwriting and production team that released concept albums like Music For Listening To (an Eno-esque collection of instrumentals) and Music of Quality and Distinction (an album of electronic covers of vintage R&B and pop songs with guest singers like Tina Turner, who later started her comeback with a Martyn Ware-produced version of Al Green’s “Let’s Stay Together”). Heaven 17, Ware and Marsh plus singer Glenn Gregory, was originally posited in the UK as a “division” of BEF, and their first two albums Penthouse and Pavement and The Luxury Gap featured lyrics and artwork depicting the band as more of a multinational conglomerate than a pop band.
The ironic subtext of all this was pretty much entirely lost on American listeners because Arista first released a mishmash album simply called Heaven 17 (which featured an astonishingly ugly cover) that consisted of about two-thirds of Penthouse and Pavement plus two of the best songs from the then-unreleased The Luxury Gap, “Who’ll Stop the Rain” and “Let Me Go.” When The Luxury Gap itself was belatedly released in the summer of 1983, Arista took two of the songs they’d left off the first album, “Let’s All Make A Bomb” and “Song With No Name,” and bunged them into the US sequencing to make up for the lost tracks. All of this meant that the pointed ideological undertones of the albums were lost on a lot of the American audience. (Others seemingly willfully misunderstood them: one of my high school friends, a proud member of the Reagan Youth — it was Lubbock, Texas, after all — insisted that songs like “We Don’t Need This Fascist Groove Thang,” “Play To Win” and “Let’s All Make A Bomb” were more in favor of his belief system than my own.) On the other hand, much of the music still stands up quite well — “Crushed By the Wheels of Industry” was the first track on The Luxury Gap, and this considerably tighter single mix lops off a little over two minutes — mostly a long intro that focuses on that metal-on-paving-stone sound that appears in the last chorus here — and focuses on the blend of synth-pop and American-style R&B that was at the album’s heart. This went on to become one of the dominant Top 40 sounds of the ’80s, but in 1983, it was still pretty new, and heavily denounced in many circles. It hasn’t necessarily dated well, but I still like it. Unfortunately, Heaven 17 immediately fell into a hole with their next album, 1984’s How Men Are, and never made it back out.
In his comment to the Richard Barone song below, James reminded me of a favorite rarity of mine: the first single from Bob Mould’s solo debut, “See A Little Light,” was a great song, but I was equally fond of the single’s non-LP b-side “All Those People Know.” This is the only song from this era of Mould’s solo career that sounds like Husker Du could have recorded it, and I suspect that’s exactly why it was stuck on the flipside of a single instead of being put on the album.
