Best Reissues of 2008
One of my favorite post-punk bands, Blurt filled one side of the 1980 two-LP compilation A Factory Quartet after having released just one single. The four tracks from that album lead off this CD, followed by the live album In Berlin (not released by Factory, but originally recorded for it), an album I not only love unconditionally, but also firmly believe is one of the most conceptually pure ever in its musical focus. Over stunningly simple guitar riffs (Ted Creese) and drumbeats (Jake Milton), Ted Milton squeals and squawks on alto saxophone and blurts (the band name was utterly appropriate) his absurdist poetry. It was inevitably compared to the Contortions, but whatever similarities there are – and mostly it’s probably that the average critic wasn’t used to hearing sax – for the comparison to work you must subtract James Chance’s bullshit and posing and any semblance of American R&B styles. This is a bit expensive as an import, but worth every penny.
In 2006 I wrote about the 1982 LP Fields (originally released by Plexus), “with everything early-’80s NY being hip right now, a reissue would be welcome.” Here it is, finally, along with their 1981 Aquamarine EP and a bunch of bonus tracks. The Individuals were Glenn Morrow (later of Rage to Live, and founder/owner of Bar/None Records), Janet and Doug Wygal (later of, naturally, The Wygals), and Jon Light Klages (who made an underrated solo album). They should’ve been stars; their angular, occasionally dissonant indie-rock still sounds great. The “hit” was “Dancing with My Eighty Wives,” but this is the sort of album where fans love pretty much every track and each is distinctive. Anybody who dug the Pylon reissue should check this out too.
This is essentially the first Heaters album, from 1978, but as proclaimed on the back, “This is not a reissue! This is a combined remix and rerecording!” …. Three decades on, the classic underneath the bad production has been revealed, proving that the excitement they generated in their home base of Los Angeles was not mere hype. Melissa “Missy” Connell (bass, vocals) wrote or co-authored most of the songs, imbuing the album with a great deal of stylistic variety, most of it including sly or loving winks at past styles yet sounding utterly 1978. Belting frontwoman Mercy Bermudez (AKA Theresa Robertson) sings as though her life depends on it, and the accompaniment’s just as energetic, surfing the New Wave with power pop informed by ‘50s rock ‘n’ roll – notably Maggie Connell’s pounding piano – and the hard ‘70s guitar of James Demeter. Even the slower tracks are bursting with tension. Three ebullient concert recordings are added as bonus tracks.
This, the second Hitchcock box from Yep Roc, reissues three albums (also available separately) that had already gotten expanded reissues – 1985’s Fegmania and the live album Gotta Let This Hen Out, and 1986’s Element of Light – and throws in an otherwise unavailable two-disc set of rarities and live cuts. I am philosophically opposed to this sort of thing, but it’s done so well here that it’s irresistible. Not perfect, though: I would have included the alternate version of “Airscape” found on the previous iteration of Element, and “Dwarfbeat” shouldn’t have been left off the new Fegmania, and have various additional quibbles; also, Hitchcock’s commentary in the Rhino editions’ booklets is missed, as is the “Brenda’s Iron Sledge” cartoon on Hen. So, this set doesn’t supersede Rhino’s reissues, but fans should be happy to have both, and there’s so much “new” stuff here that the rebuying-stuff-already-owned problem is sufficiently mitigated. Sorry for not going into detail about the original LPs’ contents, but you should all know already that they are works of genius, especially the beautiful Element, which I consider to be tied with I Often Dream of Trains for best Hitchcock album.
Various artists – Titan: It’s All Pop! (Numero)
Power Pop fans will be delighted by this compilation of 1978-81 music from the little Titan label of Kansas City, whose slogan was “the house of rockin’ pop.” Its 42 tracks on two CDs (“fave side” and “rave side”), are everything the label released and a slew of unreleased material, plus four “prequels.” AM bubblegum – in particular The Raspberries (whose Scott McCarl’s 1973 “I Hope” is here in all its shamelessly Beatlesque glory) – is a constant reference point, but with less production polish, reminiscent of The Shoes. Power chords chime brightly; high, pleading lead vocals are augmented by rich vocal harmonies on refrains; guitar solos are short and rudimentary but energetic; the lyrics focus exclusively on young love; songs are usually uptempo but charmingly wimpy ballads occasionally offer a change of pace. But in general, if you want variety, this is not the set for you. If you want to relive the ‘70s birth of Power Pop and revel in hooks galore, though, Titan: It’s All Pop! is made to order.
Born in Mississippi, raised in St. Louis, and long based in Chicago, Cohran was a member of the Sun Ra Arkestra until Ra moved to New York in 1961. In 1965, Cohran was one of the four co-founders of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM). The Artistic Heritage Ensemble, with its integration of jazz, African music, and soul, was a big influence on Earth, Wind & Fire (some EWF members were in the AHE). These 1967-68 recordings find Cohran playing cornet, an amplified thumb piano he dubbed the Frankiphone, zither, and violin uke. “Unity,” the most anthologized track here, is also heard in a bonus concert version with a far-out Pete Cosey guitar solo.
Nigeria Special: Modern Highlife, Afro-Sounds & Nigerian Blues 1970-76 and Nigeria Rock Special: Psychedelic Afro-Rock & Fuzz Funk in 1970s Nigeria (Soundwave)
From the people who brought us the great Ghana Soundz series came three Nigerian compilations, the first and third of which made the cut for this list. The first, a two-disc, 26-artist compilation, is certainly tightly focused, yet there’s still a wide variety of sounds and styles, from the Tony Benson Sextet’s loungey (yet hard-grooving) organ-powered jazz to prime highlife from Celestine Ukwu & His Philosophers National and the Harbours Band, from ex-Fela sidemen The Don Isaac Ezekial Combination to various hybrids incorporating rock, soul, funk, psychedelia, and blues into Nigerian styles old and new, all rhythmically infectious. On the third, most of the time there are elements of highlife or Afrobeat in the sound, but the guitarists tend to favor rockish styles and there’s lots of heavy, swirling organ fattening the sound. There’s a track here by Elcado that sounds like a cross between Santana, Traffic, and the Grateful Dead, Mono Mono’s instrumental “Kenimania” conjures up the Allman Brothers, and the guitarist of Original Wings sounds like he’d listened to Wes Montgomery, but the rhythm sections of these bands groove a lot deeper than their Western counterparts.
The relatively obscure 1977 Saturn release Some Blues is mostly jazz standards by a bassless septet is used (expanded to an octet with the addition of bass on the title track), leaving plenty of solo space for tenor saxophonist John Gilmore, who even achieves an original take on “My Favorite Things.” The bonus tracks, worth the price of the disc all by themselves, are an untitled Ra original from the ‘77 session and two 1973 rehearsals of “I’ll Get By,” trios with Ra’s pianism and great bassist Ronnie Boykins the constants, one take featuring Gilmore and the other a tender reading with his place taken by trumpeter Ahk Tal Ebah. A two-CD set topping 139 minutes, Disco 3000 contains the January 23, 1978 concert at the Teatro Cilak in Milan, Italy. Of course, there’s plenty of live Sun Ra available, but what makes this special is that it’s not his big-band Arkestra, just him (keyboards), John Gilmore (tenor sax, drums), Michael Ray (trumpet), Luqman Ali (drums), and occasionally singer/dancer June Tyson. And as sax fans and Ra followers know, any setting that gives Gilmore lots of room to blow is to be treasured. Gilmore is one of the great tenor soloists in jazz history, but because he devoted his talents to Ra’s band for most of four decades instead of pursuing the stardom he could easily have earned, his place in the sax pantheon is know only to cognoscenti. I think all of this material came out on various LPs, mostly rare; to have it all available in one place is wonderful, and even at import price it’s a relative bargain.
This one gets points for rarity. Many don’t know who the Nerves were, despite know one of their songs quite well: “Hanging on the Telephone,” penned by Nerve Jack Lee, kicks off Blondie’s classic Parallel Lines. Paradoxically, Lee (guitar, vocals) is the least famous member of the original trio; Peter Case (bass, vocals) went on to the Plimsouls and then a fine solo career, while Paul Collins (drums, vocals) founded The Beat – which to avoid confusion with similarly named bands became known as, logically, Paul Collins’ Beat. You may at this point be deducing a power-pop thread tying these strands together, and in fact the Nerves EP is a long-lost classic of the genre. Lost no longer, however, as the group’s first-ever non-bootleg long-player now appears gathering that disc, a previously unreleased 1977 single, demos, live tracks, a Plimsouls track originally written for the Nerves in 1976, and Lee’s subsequent band. It’s all well worth the wait we had to endure, and should induce a lot of nostalgia for thirty years ago.
To quote from my Culturecatch review: Former Confederate soldier Polk Miller (1844-1913) was the son of a Virginia plantation owner; His Old South Quartette consisted of four black singers. They toured the country’s most exclusive clubs and concert halls, supporting Miller’s lecture “Old Times in the South.” The glorification of the days of slavery that Miller delivered in his lecture would undoubtedly nauseate most of us nowadays, but the music – aside from “The Bonnie Blue Flag,” the Confederate battle anthem – is free of such material. Mark Twain wrote, “I think that Polk Miller and his wonderful four, is about the only thing the country can furnish that is originally and utterly American. Possibly it can furnish something more enjoyable, but I must doubt it until I forget that musical earthquake, ‘The Watermelon Party.’”
