Anyhoo I hope'cha dig
the following spew given just how much time I hadda put into it. Especially in between
alla those real-life doodies I have to tend to during these unfortunately
overworked days. Just bear w/this guy a bit because,
frankly I'm way outta condition and the following just might come off a bit...wonky to most of youse out there in real life land.
***
Okay, you inquiring minds want to know at least
some of the ugly details that have been curtailing my delivering the goods the way I should. As for one---howzabut the
fact that I hadda endure getting my left eyeball worked on at Allegheny General
Hospital in merry Pittsburgh Pee-YAY! due to a torn retina, and the nitrogen gas bubble
that was injected into my bare eyeball in order to push the retinal wall back
into place (almost thought this procedure would be a re-enactment of
UN CHIEN ANDALOU!) has created a large jiggly circle in my line o' vision that
kinda looks like Rover going after Patrick McGoohan right in my very head
(either that or the front cover of the Quiet Sun
MAINSTREAM album)! To be honest and up front about it this paerticular happening in my usually dullsville life ain't exactly a funzy thing to be enduring...in fact it's hampering even more my ever-decaying vision which is probably the reason why I'm making alla these typos that I will
be too stoopid to correct once my sight returns to somewhat of a normality hopefully in the near future.
Other'n that I've been trying to amuse myself in ways quite different than I did when I was fourteen stuck alone in the house with an old NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC hidden under the mattress. Interestingly enough my current faverave time of the day anymore just hasta be six in the evening when I settle back for my nightly viewing of MANNIX on FETV, a switch from the re-re-REruns of GUNSMOKE I've seen over and over again these past few years. MANNIX usedta be a weekly staple at the ol' homestead at least until the Orson Welles/Lillian Gish anthology of silent classics entitled THE SILENT YEARS ran opposite, and watching these ubercool episodes featuring high energy action and characters you can either root for or wish the worst calamities upon really does remind me of just how hotcha things usedta be, at least until the sensitive mollycoddled pantywaists known as "progressives" or at least "world savers" mucked things up for good with their general castration of everything they laid their grubboid hands upon. Koinda makes me wanna don a seventies sports jacket just like the kind Mannoix wore and knock a few pampered menials (including a good portion of you readers) around until you get some SENSE (regarding the affirmation of the concepts of good/evil and masculinity/femininity) into some skulls that certainly do need some heavy duty pounding into these sad 'n sorry days.
While I'm at it, a fond farewell to Big Brother Wally a.k.a. Tony Dow, who I guess really is dead after a slightly premature call akin to the false report we received regarding Tom Petty a few years back.
***
I might as well ( mean---I BETTER!!!) thank a whole lotta people out there who,
bless their little peen-pickin' hearts, really do care 'bout me and this
particular effort I have torn asunder over the past eight or so months. To
those of you who've sent in promo items thanks, though some of your
understandably fine efforts (talkin' 'bout YOU Feeding Tube!) will have to wait until I can get my turntable
hooked up again (It's a long story I will not bore you with since I get the feeling that you guys are bored enough already) while Paul McGarry's continual
dropping off of burnt Cee-Dee offerings also helps out loads even if I have
less time to settle down and write these reviews up than I had last year at
this time (a situation I sure hope changes in the distantly near future). And
of course there are those Cee-Dee-Ares that P.D. Fadensonnen sent past X-mas
are still handy enough for me to slap on during those particularly introverted
moments in my life. Of course Bill Shute should also be praised for
remembering my birthday a few weeks back with a package of old comic books and
comic book reprints which I will get to in earnest once I regain some
semblance of what it used to be life back inna good ol' days. Anyway, hope you like 'em, and hope on I will...
***
|
BLOG TO COMM sez: choose
YOUR punk! And yeah, who in their right might woulda known that the infamous Mr .Rotten would have grown to become the profound one when it came to punkdom anyway??? To be honest about it Henry is right for once since guns are for weak people...I mean, do you really think a 98 lb. grandma can fend off a 200-pound attacker with her mere fists? As the old saying goes, "God created all men---Col. Colt made them equal"!*** |
Gotta admit that o'er the past few decades I have NOT played any of those late-eighties Divine Horsemen
platters that are scattered about the collection. Dunno why because they were
good enough efforts to appeal to my own sense of long-lost rock aesthetics, or something like that. Perhaps they remind me of a pretty dire time in my life which
ain't really saying anything considering just how dire my life has been ever since I entered kindergarten.
However, this 2021 release by the new if aged group is pretty hotcha --- not
over-the-top engrossing like the Flesheaters were but steady enough to appease
any of you fans out there who have at least a few vivid and pleasant memories
of early-seventies FM rock radio still embedded in your minds. Chris D. and Julie Christiansen still moosh
well enough to please the ears and hey, even though I kinda thought the
Horsemen were comparatively piddle next to the A MINUTE TO PRAY=era 'eaters this
one does have more'n a few ounces of pure rockist merit to its makeup. Of
course I'll never listen to it again.
***
This guy is perhaps the last true Bostonian devotee of the long-running Velvets homage brigade dating back to the Boston Tea Party days of Jonathan
Richman and Wayne McGuire. And, of course, these '82 recordings with a bulk of what at the
time was Mission of Burma doing the backing do have the ring of fading
seventies underground bumping into the dank miasma of the eighties with a
storm clash of bared-wire intensity that one won't forget for quite awhile.
Basic hard repeato riff backs Foole/Ireton's throat scrapes which evoke the
best rock screamers of the past from Iggy to Roslie and, of course, alotta of
your faverave sixties flashpoints can be heard and with relative ease at that!
(Please be sure to check out the hidden track which even threw a heard it all
before kinda guy like me for a loop!)
***
The marvelous glop slop production makes the latest Shangs effort even more of
a spacious effort than one would have expected from their earlier releases.
David Nelson Byers sounds more late-sixties El Lay sunshine pop than his
Ontario locale would lead one to believe while the music's just about as slick
pop pretend avant garde as you can find outside of, say, Sagittarius. Paens to
some of the greats in the Shangs oeuvre are present...the Feminine
Complex, Craig Smith (feh!), Joanie Sommers (yay!), Ash Ra Tempel with Timothy Leary (yeeesh!), the Lennon
Sisters????
***
Sorta like nasal Dylan gone English late-sixties folk. Actually this has a
heavy ESP-disk loner style a la Mij, though it certainly is not as expansive as Erica
Pomerance. Some Bee-Fartian blooze chooze slips in, 'n ain't that more'n just
a li'l Davy Graham here/there as well? I hope that ain't Donovan I'm vibing.
Man, this guy sure is an eclectic chap now, ain't he??? Overall kinda West
Coast-y in a good time Marin County sorta vein but it sure ain't patchouli
smellin', ifyaknowaddamean....
(Hey, note that NOT ONCE did I mention anywhere in the above
paragraph the Oliver of shoo-be-doo-be-da-da fame making some lame joke about
how I thought this Oliver was that one as someone so
OBVIOUS as myself would be wont to do
given just how in search of a bad pun or reference I tend to be. I have prided
myself on this simple fact and y'know what? I get the feeling that you are
happy about it too. Yeah---right...)
***
I really thought much of the Slits back in the maybe not so good ol' days but
then again they, like a good portion of the Rough Trade/post-punk (yech!)
cadre, sorta tired on me with much of that punk rock promise and
spark thrown to the wayside in favor of some rather tired ethos that made me
doubt my original faith in these groups in the first place. Here they are
somewhere in the cusp of it all doing more of that angular music which, in
some strange fashion, at times almost echoes the more abstract music heard on
the first Alice Cooper album. Ari and company can actually play some
surprisingly engaging modpop before slipping into the usual faux reggae and
neo-soul moves probably in order to prove to everyone that they really do like
black people after all. It does sound like something you'd expect
from a buncha gals who cut their musical parameters on Velvets, Stooges and
krautrock records (mixed in with the usual Roxy/Bolan touchpoints) and used
their influences to the max, at least until the eighties hit and it all became
water under the bridge anyway.
***
Funny, I only got four burns from this Fadensonnon-derived set (one of 'em
musta gotten stuck in with my Paul McGarry donations), but wha' th'
hey considering that the music heard on what's left is mighty
decent sound and noise signifying everything! Rhames was a
multi-instrumentalist who handled his various instruments with marvy
aplomb as he (along with the help of such able names as Rashied Ali and some I
never knew about until now) zap through various jazz highpoints of the past
while fortunately enough avoiding the dismal abyss as to what jazz has become
ever since the new thing was treated like old hat by the spiritual successors
to Leonard Feather. Recognizable nods to Coltrane and Parker can be discerned via Rhames' tenor prowess,
and believe it or not but his duos with Ali evoke not only the legendary INTERSTELLAR SPACE but Ali's Survival platter with Frank Lowe! Not only that but Rhames excels
on guitar (not as flash as EMERGENCY-era John McLaughlin but rougher
than many of the free jazzers steeped in electricity) and piano (again, not as
flash as solo Ra or Taylor but enveloping enough). A fine sendoff to a guy
whose career was cut short by a bad case of Magic Johnson's Disease.
***
Like the Can SACRILEGE effort it's nice in an interesting kinda/sorta
re-visity way, but next to the real deal it's like, why bother? Again a
once-time spinner for those of you curious enough to want to hear the
least-exciting member of PiL re-do a forty-plus-year-old accomplishment, but
don't come complainin' to me about alla them dead cats bound to pile up at
your abode due to such a curiosity as this.
***
Stare Kits-LIVE @ TIER 3 1979 CD-r burn
Can't say that I'm familiar with this act which performed all three of their live gigs at the late-seventies under-the-underground haunt Tier 3 (or Tr3 as I recall it being called way back during whatever heyday the place might have had). After giving this surprisingly hi-quality recording a try all I gotta say is---these guys ('n gals) were pretty hotcha even at a time when the underground rock inna burgh was heading into some rather ginchy areas of self-parody. Stare Kits kinda come off like Siouxsie and company only with lotsa early Blondie and no Can, or better yet the plethora of then-current up-and-coming acts that were saturating what we once knew of as "new wave"---only with less of that junk shop jewelry ethos that got kinda tiresome after awhile. I sure wish there were more underground rock acts like this throughout the eighties 'stead of the MTV glitzers that unfortunately got alla the attention and more or less ruined rock 'n roll (as that feral hard-drive form of anger-addled expression) and if you don't agree with me I'm sure there are more'n a few nude Madonna glossies for you losers to spill seed over, ifyaknowaddamean...
***
Only heard these guys via their psychedelic take on "Hey Joe" that appeared on some mid-eighties Japanese sampler, so this later effort did seem somewhat appealing to me. Too bad it's taken from a 1971 performance which shows that these guys were more'n apt to take the worst aspects of "rock music" to heart just as much as they were to take the best of it a few years earlier. Contains covers of Three Dog Night, Mountain and to an extent the Moody Blues amidst other gems that'll not only remind you of just how blah FM rock coulda been at the time but of the old adage "Whites create, Asians imitate"! You might get some sorta heavy rock kick outta the thing but I sure as shootin' didn't.
***
Still looking for back issues of BLACK TO COMM? Judging from the lack ot response I get from these tail end come ons I really doubt it. Wise up for once, willya?
