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Headliner John Vanderslice played a fine set that culminated in an audience sing-a-long with Vanderslice jumping off the stage and finishing by playing an acoustic guitar in the crowd, but openers Bishop Allen could have stolen the show with their high-energy, Angophilic brand of indie-pop.
This is exactly what it says it is. A budget-priced (I got mine for only $15.99 and it’s worth every penny), three-disc set of everything that Young Marble Giants recorded in their short life span and then some. Disc 1 features their sole album Colossal Youth. It’s for the bonus discs that those who already have Colossal Youth will want this, though. Disc 2 features their singles (including “Final Day”) and the entirety of Salad Days, which consists of demo versions of songs from Colossal Youth. Disc 3 only comprises five songs and consists of the sessions they recorded for John Peel. As such, this could’ve been reduced to two discs, but I do like the division between the full-length proper, singles and demos and BBC sessions.
Wire’s second act, represented here by this excellent best of, is again exactly what it says it is. Although nothing can touch their first three albums, it’s a bit of a shame that their ‘80s output is often overlooked or dismissed as a result of their formidable, earlier reputation. Nevertheless, just about all of their ‘80s highlights are here, including “Eardrum Buzz” (which received considerable MTV airplay in early 1989), “Drill,” “Silk Skin Paws,” and the excellent “Kidney Bingos,” a pop song as good as “Map Reference,” “Outdoor Miner,” or anything else they ever recorded in that vein.
I listened to almost all of my X records again recently and while their first four are by far their best, I’ve long thought of this one as underrated. Its chief problems are as an awful production and mix by MICHAEL WAGENER (who had produced MOTLEY CRUE before working with X) that wasn’t appropriate for their sound, and the inclusion of filler like “Little Honey” and “Supercharged” at the end of the record. Nevertheless, songs like the minor college radio and MTV hit “Burning House of Love” and especially the back-to-back tandem of “My Goodness” and “Around My Heart” are some of the best songs X ever recorded. The album is structured around the collapse of JOHN DOE and EXENE CERVENKA’s marriage and for that reason it produced some of their most emotional work. The 2002 Rhino reissue also includes some nice bonus tracks, including a previously unreleased cover of THE REPLACEMENTS’ “I Will Dare” and their cover of THE SMALL FACES’ “All or Nothing”. The latter was on the original running order of the LP’s second side, but the band never liked it, so it was tacked on as a bonus track.
It’s tempting to dismiss some of the music on here as cheesy due to the calypso and lounge feel of tracks like “Sipping on the Sweet Nectar”, but this is one of my favorite albums of the year. Jens is an expert in crafting perfect, hummable, upbeat-sounding pop gems with bittersweet and often melancholy lyrics hiding underneath, like so much great pop music before him.
A worthy follow-up to Everything All the Time, this one is shorter in length and doesn’t have as many stand-out tracks on the first few listens. Nevertheless, it’s another fine effort that’ll likely get many plays here.
This has been touted as their most straightforward record. I couldn’t disagree more. Much of this is as obtuse and dense as their previous two albums and some of it reminds me of their last album Drum’s Not Dead. However, about half of it reminds me of their first album, though with a decidedly more hard-rock influence. The end result makes for, as always with Liars, some strange music, but this album feels disjointed compared to their previous work because of the stylistic differences. When they bring out their more rockin’ side, it works much better.
This is like a folksier, quieter answer to last year’s excellent SONIC YOUTH album Rather Ripped, but with nice vocals by CHRISTINA CARTER of CHARALAMBIDES on the duet “Honest James” and a few oddities like a tape of Thurston recording some odd “sonic experiments” in his bedroom when he was 13. I really like it on the first few listens.
This is The Feelies’ first and by far their best album. It’s too bad that GLENN MERCER only plays the title track in his live sets these days, but I’ll take what I can get in that respect.
Perhaps my favorite Prince album, this one contains some of his best songs ever, including the title track, “When U Were Mine” and “Uptown.” It also set the template for the rest of his ‘80s work, with one foot in new wave and classic rock and the other foot in r’n’b and funk, that would produce the famous Minneapolis funk sound (with synths instead of horns) and lead Prince to international superstardom a few short years later.
