Some lovely stuff here, particularly the gorgeous Bedflowers who sound like Opal if Amelia Fletcher had joined up after Kendra Smith left. Also, is it just me or does Bulldozer Crash's Changing sound a whole heck of a lot like Just Like Heaven?
Side A
1. Des Garçons Ordinaires - Summer Games 2. Bulldozer Crash - Changing 3. The Spinning Wheels - Don't Get Me Wrong 4. Meek - Beautiful Day 5. The Straw Dogs - My Cherished Lonelyness 6. La Sintesis - September 7. The Bedflowers - My Ex-Lover's Adress 8. Antiseptic Beauty - Shoegaze 9. Les Daffodils - So Easy As You Lie 10. Flame Up - Let The World Smother You 11. Charming Boys - Rain
Side B
1. The Little Rabbits - The Boy Who Never Saw The Light (live) 2. Penelope Trip - Inside The Taxi 3. The Gravy Train - Happy Again 4. Les Chaplinn's - Sunny Day 5. The Prayers - Sister Goodbye 6. The Lovelies - Stupid Habit 7. Kaleidoscope - Dream 2 8. Koma Kino - Weaky Town 9. The Penelopes - A Place Called Home 10. Alival Tiosihteeri - Nasta Kaupunki 11. Mosaic Eyes - Klaus' Eyes 12. Die Time Twisters, Verdammt! - Denn Jetzt Bist Du Da
These songs are like snapshots; the wet, chemical alchemy of real-life emotions frozen and blurred, crystalized and captured in velvet-grained silver gelatin. That's not a knock. Good pop distills the messy ambiguity of life and rearranges it into perfectly balanced nuggets of time and sound, allowing us to romanticize our pain, or even see it as heroic. (Those old vinyl 45s are legendarily fetishistic, and by their very nature as self-contained physical objects allow us to externalize, manipulate, and catalog our emotions from a safe distance. It's not for nothing that these sleeves all feature the detached, isolated, context-free iconography of romantic cinema. Starlets looking as cool, cold and untouchable as actual stars, and yet here you are turning them over in your hands.)
My experience with so much of C-86 is about what it's like to feel a feeling instead of being the direct embodiment of feeling itself, which is why so much of it evokes things safe and wistful. It's instant nostalgia (I miss the comfort of being sad, indeed) ionically charged with the symbolism of things acutely felt, existing in the infra-thin moment between loss and possibility.
That tart crispness becomes a roundabout way of eroticizing isolation—the tingling sensation of being wrapped in a warm sweater on a cold day and getting goosebumps anyway. While rock and roll of the past aimed directly at the groin (and what it might be doing in the vicinity of someone else's), C-86 is a generation or more removed from the 60's pop it reveres and acknowledges that temporal distance by underpinning the physical and emotional distance between the singer and subject, and between the song and its listener. To make up for the carnal absence it prefers to idealize loss itself the same way it idealizes the white pop and girl group sounds of the 60's. Everything is perfect in memory. Your skin can feel just as electric as your ears when being touched by invisible waves.
I think this is why the majority of C-86 and twee bands of the 80's existed primarily on singles. The songs on albums have to relate to each other, but singles come to you as individuals. You can have private relationships with them. They're meant to be handled. Singles are flirts, constantly demanding your attention to flip them on your record player, or pore over their enigmatic sleeves. Albums belong to the world, but singles are yours, no matter how many other people have one.
But, whatevs. The James Dean Driving Experience are actually pretty upbeat (and as evidenced by their name, a bit cheeky), but mostly dreamy. It's perfectly realized jangle-pop in the vein of the Sea Urchins, Remember Fun, or Hey Paulette. The download includes the singles and eps for World Weary & Wise, Lonely Hearts XI Versus The Rest Of The World, Dean's Eleventh Dream, Clearlake Revisited, and Sean Connery.
Finally, an album that won’t make you want to have sex with your mother!
Tired of music that does nothing but feed your unholy Oedipal desires? Weary of bands whose idea of a MILF is waaay too narrow? Who isn’t? Let’s face it, popular music today is a minefield of pants-tightening paeans to the insatiable itch to put the “mother” in “motherfucker”. Gaga’s miming it on stage, fifteen years ago the Dave Matthews Band devoted a double concept album to it, and back in the 80’s you couldn’t get Phil Collins to shut up about it.
Well, worry no more! The 14 Iced Bears special blend of jangle-pop and psychedelic-punk is 100% guaranteed to take your mind off boning the baby cannon that brung you into this world, or your money back.
1. The Love Parade - Dave Clark 5 2. The Gravy Train - Devil In Your Shoe 3. Lavender Faction - In My Mind 4. The Sunflowers - Sunflower Babies 5. St.James Infirmary - The Sun Don't Shine 6. The Mayfields - Out To Sea 7. Penny Candles - Memory Box 8. Regulators - Southside Johnny 9. Remember Fun - P.S. Elaine 10. Church Grims - Plaster Saint 11. Marc - Clearer, Brighter, Sharper 12. Felicity's - Why Don't You Come Round 13. Crimson Mints - Makes Me Want To 14. Mousefolk - Wishing The Summer Away 15. The Fat Tulips - All That Matters 16. The Love Parade – Eternally 17. The Gravy Train - All Fall Down 18. The Sunflowers - Sunflowers Mum 19. Perfect Kiss - So Many Alike 20. Church Grims - Seen It All 21. Panda Pops – Submarine 22. The Williams - Still Keep Coming 23. St.Christopher – Charmelle 24. The Driscolls - It's Your Daughter 25. The Sohfas – Thorns 26. The Spinning Jenny's - Gardeners Weakly 27. Bulldozer Clarts - Walks Away 28. Librarians - Stripping In The Cemetry 29. Strawberry Story - For The Love Of Billy 30. Hellfire Sermons - Down All The Days 31. Patrick Skelly & The Prescriptions - Land Of Tears
Songs introduced by Ted Chippington 1. Big Flame - Man Of Few Syllables 2. The Wedding Present - You Should Always Keep In Touch With Your Friends (Version) 3. The Soup Dragons - Fair's Fair 4. The Creepers - Sharper And Wider 5. The Shop Assistants - Home Again (Live) 6. The June Brides - This Town (Acoustic) 7. Rob Grant with Yeah Yeah Noh - Mr. Hammond Has Breakfast In Bed 8. Stump - Kitchen Table 9. The Legend - Everything's Coming Up Roses 10. Pigbros - Barren Land 11. Stitched Back Foot Airman - The Deadly Spore 12. BMX Bandits - Sad 13. Bogshed - Jobless Youngsters 14. Chumbawamba - Kinnochio
This ridiculously hard to find compilation was originally issued by Swedish pop fanzine Grimsby Fishmarket (I think in 1991). The Orchids track was an exclusive to the tape and never appeared anywhere else. Quite a few bands I'd never heard before, too.
1. Eusebio - Louis Philippe 2. Song About Girls - Bummer Twins 3. Walking Back To You - The Cherry Orchard 4. This Friendship Of Ours - This Perfect Day 5. Chick House - Roof 6. Barriers Of Mine - Are You Mr Riley 7. Silent Sigh City - Happydeadmen 8. Shaunty - Joe Clack 9. She Fakes Apples - My Finest Hour 10. I Fell In Love Last Night - Cerise 11. Kymri - The Apple Moths 12. Jennifer Anywhere - The Kitchen Cynics 13. Room - Bridge 14. Turn Over - Momus 15. Into The Morgue - Mary-Go-Round 16. Next Summer - Brighter 17. New World - Venus Peter 18. Chelsea Guitar - Blueboy 19. Not Unusual - BJ Eagle 20. The Light That Will Cease To Fail - Stereolab 21. High Rise - The Cherry Orchard 22. Windmills And Milestones - Bummer Twins 23. Wood Dust - Joe Clack 24. Ralph De Bricassart - Happydeadmen 25. Time Will Pass - The Rileys 26. And When I Wake Up - The Orchids 27. Birds Of Prey - Marble Hammock
One of Slumberland’s best noisepop releases. The band has swept up the shrapnel from their debut into bristling piles of jagged, brightly colored confetti. Their shoegaze excesses have been condensed into blasts of garage punk mauling 60’s mod rock. You can see the genesis of the Aisler’s Set, but it’s a much, much louder, fuzzed-out version of what’s to come. When they’re going full tilt, they have a way of pummeling through a song with delirious abandon, which just digs the hooks in deeper. You may not notice them the first time, but soon you won’t be able to get Hey Allison, All This Time for Nothing, and Self Starter out of your head. It hurtles by in just under half an hour, so I’ve appended the songs from their 1620 single as a bonus.
The first couple of times I listened to this, I was sure some part of it had been recorded on the wrong speed. The vocals are so damnably cute and coy—a winking come-on from a couple of Ronettes obsessed teenage garage punks hiding switchblades in the pockets of their leather jackets. But now it all falls together. All the great 60's girl-group pop was about love and obsession, so it makes sense that Schatzi and Hazeltine have built their own musical shrine to the sultry sound of tuff-girls and the menacing vulnerability of teen love. You can feel the sway of her hips in the swagger of her voice. They're lipstick killers—gang debs demanding kisses in exchange for the pleasure of their songs.
The hand-made, low-budget wall of sound is exceptionally well crafted and layered, much more so than you'd expect for a couple of songs that were probably dreamed up and tossed off in one exuberant afternoon. It's a total blast. Plus hand-claps! Glockenspiel! That moist, swollen-lipped, tiger-kitteny growl they stole from Ronnie Specter for the "oh-oh bay-a-buh's"! Crush worthy.
Teen sexual health and information website Scarleteen is starting a new project to help young people find or recommend quality doctors. It’s called Find-A-Doc. Scarleteen founder Heather Corrina explains:
We all know one of the best ways to find quality sexual healthcare and other in-person care services is by asking people we know and trust for a recommendation. But that can be difficult, especially for young people: so many are either ashamed about sexual healthcare and other related services, or are afraid that disclosing they’ve had care will result in a breach of their privacy. Many young people don’t even get care they need in the first place, so don’t know anyone to refer someone else to, especially in areas where services are limited or where seeking out services presents a profound personal risk.
Readers can use our new online tool to find out who Scarleteen users around the world have gotten great care from that they’d personally recommend, and see listings of care services our staff, volunteers and allies know to be bonafide. Or, you can enter your own review to help others find services they need from providers you know are great, or add your review of a provider or service to an existing listing. If you’re a service provider, you can enter information about your clinic, center or practice and it will be published for review. Any of the above can be done anonymously, so no one has to worry about privacy.
The project covers doctors and health facilities that provide sexual and reproductive healthcare, STI/STD testing and treatment, birth control and emergency contraception, pregnancy testing and all-options counseling, abortion services, pre-natal care, obstetrics and midwife services, counseling, therapy and support groups, trans gender and gender-variant services, LGBTQ services, teen specific services, rape/abuse crisis services, and shelters and crisis housing. You can also target your search for non-English speakers, disability access, and cost. The plan is to make this worldwide, so if you need a doctor or have one to recommend, head on over there.
And now on to the album at hand.
An unjustly forgotten classic, Girls at Our Best’s sole album falls somewhere between post-punk, twee pop, and new wave—combining elements from Siouxsie-style artiness to Gang of Four’s punk-funk to general power pop, with the occasional nod to disco, music-hall, and surf rock thrown in to boot. It’s a delightfully fun romp from a period when young bands were willing to try on whatever random sound struck their fancy.
Formed in Leeds in 1979, the band (actually featuring only one girl) played the scene without much success and were about to break up when they saw an ad for a recording studio offering half-off rates. Their resulting single was released on Rough Trade and managed to go to the top of the indie charts, as did their follow up. In 1981, the singles and b-sides were collected together as an album (reissued here with some additional tracks, and available again as an expanded album from Cherry Red) after which the band wandered off, never to be heard from again.
It’s punk/new wave with a light touch. Their sunny exuberance and choir-girl falsetto clearly set the tone for later C-86 bands like Talulah Gosh, Flatmates, and the Siddeleys. Like the Au Pairs, a lot of their songs can be read as humorous, somewhat feminist critiques of politics, pop culture, and capitalism, but they don’t have as coherent a philosophy and they’re putting more of their energy into writing pogo-riffic melodies.
Just a note of warning: The lead single, Getting Nowhere Fast is intentionally cut off before the end of the song. It kinds of bugs me when bands do that, but whatever.
The ghosts of dead teenagers sing to me while I am dancing.
Speaking of nostalgia, I was a total classic rock snob in high school. If the band hadn’t existed prior to 1970, I wasn’t interested. There were occasional cracks—an REM tape inherited from a friend, an abiding love for The Cars (who I still think were highly underrated, despite being popular)—but for the most part, I listened to The Beatles, Pink Floyd, Simon & Garfunkel, and Buddy Holly. I considered dance music the bane of my existence. Groove Is In the Heart was wildly popular during my senior year, and I wanted to stab it in its shiny, happy face. As a teenager with insufferable hippie pretensions, there was nothing I hated more than mindless happiness. I reveled in miserabilism and wanted my music to do the same. If it wasn’t whiny, depressive navel-gazing then it wasn’t about anything, maannnn. So fuck you guys coping through communal ritual and physical ecstasy, because I’m going to my room where I am a rock, I am an island. (I’m reminded of Robyn Hitchcock’s line that “It’s the privilege of youth and beauty to hate themselves”).
Thankfully, Fuchsia introduced me to all sorts of 80’s alternative, goth, and college rock, and eventually the power of a good beat was more than I could resist. It was a revelation—I could dance and be depressed! Now, of course, all the best dance music carries sadness in its heart, even at its most escapist. My Favorite understood this dichotomy perfectly and crafted an elegiac love letter to those intense days when it felt like everything in the world could break your heart, but you still really wanted to dance and get laid. So now I’m nostalgic for a band creating meta nostalgia for a scene that I had no interest in when I was actually living through it.
Michael Grace lives in a scintillating twilight world of gray New Order melodies and Andrea Vaughn has the sort of cool, clear, schoolgirl voice you used to find on Sarah Records releases. They understood the comfort of being sad, but they also found the humor in it. Their lyrics are positively littered with throwaway couplets of bitter wit: Loneliness is pornography to them but to us it is an art. They won’t read your biography , these men, they will only break your heart…Your darkness is brighter than all the lights in the disco tonight…The streets were crawling with vampires, because after your shelf life expires you’re not a kid, you’re a monster…I spent five years in the infirmary but he never sent me letters. He only sent me dirty polaroids…I wear her dreams like a badge, pinned upon the wrong uniform...
The standout is the devastating Homeless Club Kids (especially the Future Bible Heroes remix on the second disc). Over a beautifully melancholy melody, Andrea eulogizes the lost kids trying to escape the daytime world through a new type of family on the dancefloor. The kids see themselves as “indivisible”, but Vaughn can see their eventual doom (whether through actual death or the eventual death of all youthful dreams). Like a less jaded version of Pulp’s Sorted for E’s and Wizz, Homeless Club Kids can’t help but wonder: Are you a shimmering, transcendent beast moving as one organism, or just a bunch of awkward kids in a warehouse basement? Well, both probably, just as Vaughn both mourns their loss while wishing she were one of them. As the song fades out, she’s walking home with their voices still in her ears, “and they’ll be sad and young forever, and I cry until I throw up.”
If it weren’t for the references to the Spice Girls and Tamagotchi, and the fact that they claimed to be a Helen Love cover band, you could easily believe that this long lost bit of casio-powered pop had danced its way out of the band’s bedroom back when twee was going all electro. Even the name is an obvious nod to the scene’s choice of outerwear.
As it is, they showed up out of nowhere in 1996, released two singles and promptly disappeared. No one’s entirely sure who was in the band (There’s some speculation it involved Helen Love members in an even goofier mood, or a spoof perpetrated by the Reading UK band Cuckooland. Another bio claims they were from the Isle of Wight, so who knows). Whoever they were, they left some adorably twee disco tunes full of chirpy, sparkling keyboards, punk guitar, and heavenly vocals.
To give you some idea of how cartoonishly fun they were, I’ve half convinced myself that Andrew WK stole the thrashing keyboard/ guitar intro and rousing horn section from the chorus of Cybersex.
1. A Dream Come True 2. Ernie Ball 3. He’s So Frisky 4. New Look Baby 5. The Locomotion 6. Theme From Dolly Mixture
Germs of Youth records has put out a limited vinyl reissue of Dolly Mixture's Demonstration Tapes, hand stamped and signed by the band. They're only making 300, so hurry.
Update 9/8/10: I've uploaded a new copy of the file and redirected the link. If any of you still have problems with it, let me know. Other than a skeletal entry on Tweenet, there's not a lot of information about these guys to be found. I'm pretty sure they were from Bristol, and a several of their singles were released by Tea Time Records, a label they started with one of my favorite lost bands, Mousefolk. Like a lot of 80s indie groups, they seemed to exist mostly on compilations, appearing on at least fifteen different tapes (including Airspace II, Are You Ready?, Corrupt Postman, and Something's Burning In Paradise). They have a 60's garage pop sound that can fall anywhere between the Kinksian Mrs. Jones to the walloping Call Me Anything. Groovy Little Town was probably their biggest "hit", and like most of their tunes it's a total earworm.
I love that they haven't even bothered to even change their set dressing between these two videos (probably couldn't afford to). Girl, I Want You Back
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