posted
Felt sick, stayed in, listened to a lot of music:
Madness, "Madness" - A band that is not to blame for its load of bad American imitators, these Londoners playfully blended English music hall, Jamaican rhythms, and universal carnival keyboards, while adding enough substance and melancholy to avoid being purely whimsical. This compilation, which introduced the band to Americans, is a combination of UK hit singles with selected tracks from what is generally considered their best album, "The Rise and Fall."
Madness, "Total Madness" - A later compilation notable for including six of their later, less successful singles, which in hindsight are just as good as their earlier ones.
Nick Lowe, "Labour of Lust" - One of the best albums to come out of the New Wave movement, it was recently reissued with the proper amount of tracks and sequencing. Playing the role of irrepresible but nonetheless lovable rock & roll rascal, Lowe unleashed a dozen melodic tales from the road, including his biggest hit, "Cruel to Be Kind."
Elvis Costello, "The Very Best of..." - The only two Elvis C. albums I own are this compilation and the covers collection "Kojak Variety." I think the guy has a facility for the clever turn of phrase, an exquisite taste in music, and is great at talking and writing about music (his liner notes are often more entertaining than the albums,) but he's just not much of a composer or singer (although I find his much-mocked voice to be more endearing than annoying.) This compilation gathers most of the highlights from the first decade of his career. IMO, it peaks early with the peerless UK #2 "Oliver's Army" (sometimes the charts don't lie.)
Squeeze, "Singles 45 & Under" - At their best, bandleaders/singers Glenn Tilbrook & Chris Difford blended their contrasting voices and lyrical outlooks to make some terrific pop songs...and one terrfic album (see below.)
Squeeze, "East Side Story" - Another of the best albums to come out of the New Wave movement, this is a delightful assortment of tunes and styles from start to finish, and includes the band's career high, "Tempted," (sung not by Tilbrook or Difford, but by Paul Carrack, who has a richer, fuller white-soul voice that made all the difference -- if only Carrack had stayed with the band longer.)
posted
Lily Allen, "It's Not Me, It's You" - Proving she was much more than a celebrity for its own sake, her second (and possibly final) album revealed her to be a sly social commentator while showing a greater emotional range than her relentlessly sweary and sarcastic earlier work; oh, she can still spit venom with the best of them (one track is titled "F*** You" -- maybe that's where Cee-Lo Green got the idea), but the most affecting moments are the confessional ones, my personal favorite being her ode to her complicated relationship with her mother, "Chinese" (as in, "We'll get a Choinese an' wotch TV.")
The Style Council, "The Singular Adventures of the Style Council" - My Anglophilia has, surprisingly, never translated into a real appreciation of Paul Weller. But of his three phases -- the angry young New Waver of the Jam, the pseudo-continental white soul crooner of the Style Council, and the gruff confessional singer/songwriter of his solo career -- I prefer the Style Council by far. It doesn't all hold up, especially the later songs, but the sincerity of Weller's love of black music puts it head and shoulders above the majority of his 80s peers.
Heaven 17, "Higher and Higher, the Best of..." Human League offshoot whose songs hold up better than those of their sister group, maybe because they weren't as popular in America and so didn't get overplayed on the radio and reduced to fodder for ironists with nothing better to do. Having said that, my favorite is their only US Hot 100 entry, "Let Me Go."
My favorite period for The Black Watch was during the time that J'Ana Jacoby was in the band. Their later stuff seems good, I grant you. But it somehow lacks the push-and-pull that John Andrew Frederick seemed to have with Jacoby when they were working together.
Anyway, if you have 77 cents plus postage that you're not doing anything with, you could do a lot worse than this mini CD. It's got Cure-ish flourishes and sugar-sweet strings (used more for irony than for real sentiment), and Frederick and Jacoby both sing like SoCalifornia angels with English degrees (or maybe just plain old Anglophilia) and snarky little horns visible just below their halos.
-------------------- Hey, Kids! My "Cranky and Kitschy" collage art is now viewable on flickr. Drop by and tell me that I sent you.
From: Vanity, OR | Registered: Dec 2008
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cleome46
or you can do the confusion 'til your head falls off
posted
Poor Lardy. I never did remember to follow through on that.
And if you want un-ironic strings, there's always XTC's Apple Venus (I only own the stringless demos: Homegrown and Homespun, at present.) Or anything by Ralph Vaughn Williams.
-------------------- Hey, Kids! My "Cranky and Kitschy" collage art is now viewable on flickr. Drop by and tell me that I sent you.
From: Vanity, OR | Registered: Dec 2008
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posted
Cleome, you've given me the idea to play some XTC later. Thanks.
Funnily enough, my favorite albums of theirs are the two they recorded with outside producers -- "Skylarking" (Todd Rundgren), and the ever-underrated "Nonsuch" (Gus Dudgeon, who, unlike Rundgren, didn't see the album through to completion.)
cleome46
or you can do the confusion 'til your head falls off
posted
Nonsuch had the bad luck to come out at the ascendancy of the Mallternative Grunge era.
So did the Throwing Muses' Red Heaven, which I think of as being one of the best rock albums ever. TM and XTC don't have much else in common apart from doggedly doing whatever the frak they feel like doing, and to blazes with what's popular. That's why I love them both so much.
-------------------- Hey, Kids! My "Cranky and Kitschy" collage art is now viewable on flickr. Drop by and tell me that I sent you.
From: Vanity, OR | Registered: Dec 2008
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posted
Another album that got buried in the early 90s youthquake was the Psychedelic Furs' "World Outside," which was their best since "Forever Now." The Butler brothers then tried to jump on a bandwagon with their next band Love Spit Love, which has been lost to the tides while the best of the Furs endures. There's a lesson in there somewhere.
cleome46
or you can do the confusion 'til your head falls off
posted
I like the Furs but could never have admitted that in the Eighties. I was too big a snob.
-------------------- Hey, Kids! My "Cranky and Kitschy" collage art is now viewable on flickr. Drop by and tell me that I sent you.
From: Vanity, OR | Registered: Dec 2008
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posted
Donald Fagen, "The Nightfly" - One half of the Steely Dan braintrust retains the smooth sounds of L.A.'s finest sessioneers, but tones down the irony considerably. The result is a surprsingly warm and clear-eyed album, Fagen looking back at his formative years -- specifically the late 50s/early 60s -- affectionately but lucidly, avoiding the soppy nostalgia that most of the rest of his generation fell prey to (although that didn't stop Howard Jones from taking the lyrics to "I.G.Y." at face value and doing a clueless cover version.)
posted
Lately I've been relistening to Simon and Garfunkels Bridge over troubled water. The only living boy in New York always reminds me of Oliver's dad. Things may not have worked out with him but I still love that song.
After reading the posts above I'm going to dig out some Madness and Psychodelic Furs and relive my twenties
-------------------- "Tempus Fugitive" the final part of the Adventures of Dream Boy series, set in the Three-Boot Universe. Read it only in the Bits o' Legionnaire Business Forum.
From: here, more often than not | Registered: Sep 2003
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I like Simon & Garfunkel a lot, their solo careers not so much, especially not Simon's. I think that, like a lot of rock stars, he lost touch with the everyday world at some point, and his lyrics became patronizing and pretentious. Just my opinion.
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