Charming and tuneful pop perfection from 1979 baby!
If your idea of a heavenly pop hit is soft rock somewhere between Drivers Seat and Baker Street hold on.
Everything here is in exactly the right place: That lovely 12 string, prominent melodic bass, cascading somewhat eerie piano, a masterclass in understated or perhaps perfectly stated hook laden harmonies & backing vocals, great sounding drums and to top it all off a reigned in clear saxophone played by the guy who funnily enough played on Baker Street. Cozy, slightly melancholy and ultimately romantic, Hold On's still highly resonant today. Timeless baby. FM AM... it belongs everywhere forever on your radio dial...
Surprisingly #18 Billboard chartbuster Hold On wasn't a top 40 hit here or even in Canadia...
A lo-fi slacker rock jam that's probably mostly forgotten these days.
In 1993 before burning cds from your mates became a thing I had One Sock Missing on a TDK D90 blank cassette with Archers Of Loaf's Icky Mettle on the other side. A couple of years later I saw The Grifters support Jeff Buckley at The Palais in St Kilda which I guess is a notable gig because soon Jeff was dead and he became a superstar in the rock history while this excellent tune has just 3436 views on youtube.
Ramshackle Rolling Stones damaged rawk. A messy drunken singalong where the raw lo-fi noise becomes cosmically unhinged.
From the raucous garage-y end of slacker rock comes this ultra scuzzy monster of a tune. A style much closer to ye olde noisey proto-punk groups like The Electric Eels than contemporaneous lo-fi acts such as Pavement.
The greatest group you didn't know in the 90s. It's the dude from top 80s band Great Plains Ron House and with TJSA he put together an even more explosive group to realise his vision of charming yet volatile drunken nihilism.
Bringing you all the underground misses of the 90s!
The guitarist from St✮Johnny Tom Leonard had a solo side project called Luxurious Bags. Their little known cd Frayed Knots was a toppermost lo-fi psychedelic slacker noise pop jam. There's a gorgeous euphoric pop anthem hidden beneath the muffled lo-fi layers of hazy sound here.
The 90s you never heard... it doesn't get any better.
A lot of people missed St✮Johnny at the time. I mean you'd already had Dinosaur Jr for ten years plus Swervedriver, Flaming Lips, Mercury Rev, Pavement, Polvo et al. for a while so by the time these guys got signed to Geffen they got overlooked. However Bill Whitten had a way with a downbeat melody and in conjunction with guitarist/Moog-ist Tom Leonard they stacked together cool sometimes surreal layers of thick ecstatic sound. The noisey pop aesthetic on their 1994 cd Speed Is Dreaming was slacker rock in excelsis.
St✮Johnny - I Give Up [1994]
Slacker anthem folks!
Blissed out dejection at its finest.
Daydreamy daze...
St✮Johnny - You Can't Win [1994]
A bewitching tune from the dreamy shoegaze end of slacker rock.
Lovely & wistful with energetic bursts of euphoric noise.
This ain't no glitter litter despite how clichéd it may seem initially, they absolutely nail the genre in an undeniable manner for one of the great hard rockin glam non hits of the 70s.
It's a teenage rebellion stomper.
These guys were called Iron Virgin so... after two singles Scotland's very own answer to The Sweet vanished into obscurity. Yet since 2003 they keep turning up on glam "nuggets" type compilations on a regular basis. The junkshop glam aficionados consider this one of the finest and most beloved lost singles of the glam rock era, who am I to disagree. I'm no British heavy metal expert but Rebels Rule has even been cited as proto-NWOBHM.
Obscure moody and broody garage psych from another one and done group from Michigan
You gotta love the intense mandolin and misanthropic sentiments delivered with tormented desperation by singer Bob Glese and those mournful dirge-y backing vocals... all in a pop song that coulda got played on the radio.
You could imagine them playing this in a dusty saloon in a scene from a south of the border acid western.
In the great British tradition of singles not included on albums. Roxy Music's second single came out a month prior to their second LP For Your Pleasure but was not included on that record.
It's crazy that such sonic weirdness dressed up as pop made the UK top 10 back in 73.
It all begins with an outstanding intro with notable drummage then the tune floats along on a surreal electric marshmallow with an underlying ecstatic aquatic feel. Next is a totally off kilter studio manipulated sax, unconventional arrangement of words for pop ie. no chorus applied with Ferry's unpredictable quivering tones, cool disorientating guitar shenanigans, further toppermost drum action with added maracas and an ace fade out.
Eno said this tune shouldn't have been released as a single but he was so wrong, as he often is, because for many of us Pyjamarama is Roxy's greatest single and one of the best chartbusters of the 70s.
*When I started this blog most songs and albums didn't have their own wikipedia pages but now everything's got an entry which engulfs the efforts of the little bloggers and kinda makes blogs redundant. However wikipedia are still often inaccurate and just don't have the Space Debris touch plus the once neutral wikipedia website is now slimy and ideologically captured with their not so subtle hidden agendas, smear campaigns and biases. For proof just seek out any interview with original cofounder Larry Sanger from the last five or six years.
Scuzzy Acid fried surreal space rock musique concrète.
The soundtrack to your horrifying nightmares becoming reality.
Chaotic junkyard psychedelic noise recorded by a couple of deranged cyber-punk sailors of the mind.
The astonishing psycho-geographical sound of a lysergically altered brain.
Far out man.
Really though you need to listen to the Half Machine Lip Moves LP in its entirety in one sitting. Zombie Warfare out of this context is strange... well I mean it's already strange but it's weird for me hearing it on its own not surrounded by the rest of the album's insanity... so...
[1979]
I was only seven when this came out so I missed it at the time. In the early 90s we knew of this record because Chrome had been mentioned by groups like Butthole Surfers, Pavement, Jesus Lizard and I'm sure a few years later Steve Albini wrote about Half Machine Lip Moves once in Melody Maker. However finding their records or cds in Melbourne was hard because they were out of print so for many years I only had a tape of this with the previous album Alien Soundtracks on the other side thanks to an old friend and bandmate. Now all you young folk and late-comers have it all immediately available at your fingertips which is kinda cool but also kinda weird because you didn't have to invest the money, time and travel to gain the knowledge to anticipate getting a hold of and eventually listening to such a coveted artefact. Also renting music on streaming sites is an odd and poxy concept. You really need to own the music otherwise you don't own the music, know what I mean.
One of those songs that nobody ever says is one of the greatest but...
What a sound! Everybody's favourite louche lounge lizard with one of the heaviest and most brazen guitar-centric things he ever did.
The 'In' Crowd was an old 60s soul tune that Ferry rendered unrecognisable with this glorious racket. Also preempts Bowie's plastic soul period.
Menacing bass, hard riffage, quicksilver vocals and anthemic ominous horns... wait for the 3:18 moment when the guitars go bananas, well the whole song gets wonderfully unhinged at this point and doesn't let up til the end. He really was doing something different, I don't think they've named whatever this is properly yet. It's hard to pin down while somewhat psychedelic it's dramatic, heavy and dark, seedy yet glamorous, and obtuse, arty and intense.
The 'In' Crowd is loud hypnotic funky sleazoid music for soundtracking disreputable discotheques everywhere.
A delirious one of a kind psychedelic glitter scuzz jam.
If you chucked David Essex, Neu, Hendrix and Glitter Band into a blender...
The sort of thing you imagine Helios Creed and Damon Edge were probably into... I mean if you stripped the vocals off here it would resemble Alien Soundtracks/Half Machine Lip Moves era Chrome.
I thought back in 1985 "Geez this dude from Mr Mister is pretty old. What's he been up to? Where's he been till now?" Forty years later I've finally found out the answer, he was the dude in Pages. Turns out two of the dudes from Mr Mister were in Pages.
Pages were a soft rock duo, consisting of Richard Page and Steve George, who formed in LA in 1977. They did three LPs of soft rock with jazz and soul inflections, I guess the kids would call this breezy AOR shtick Yacht Rock these days.
Only A Dreamer is a lovely laid back tune with melodious sweetness and breezy harmonies whilst covering adult themes concerning a bleak relationship scenario. Tasty guitars supplied by none other than Jay Graydon, the dude who played the guitar solo on Steely Dan's Peg.
Smooth.
Nice.
Perhaps too smooth for some but smooth nonetheless.
How was this not a worldwide chartbuster? Surely it charted in Canadia at least. A quick interweb check reveals this wasn't even released as a single, it was just too smooth. None of their singles were hits. These fellas would have to form Mr Mister to finally achieve international chart success a few years later.
Hits and memories with the gold soundz of the 90s.
The genius of a song like this was that despite being seemingly generic this was absolutely undeniable even in the face of the facts that we were coming to the end of slacker rock. Dinosaur Jr had been around for almost ten years, Pavement were about to reach saturation point, David Baker was departing Mercury Rev and the uncommercial Trumans Water had already arrived. The whole idea seemed to be running out of juice and you knew that slacker rock was on its last legs. Then out of nowhere an unknown group from of upstarts bursts onto the radio with one of the most vital bangers of the era. Audacious.
Web In Front still has that fresh energetic sound today. Hook laden youthful exuberance doesn't get any better.
I loved CHiPs when I was little, even had CHiPs pyjamas. Friday nights were the best. When CHiPs finished we then got ace replacements like Nightrider and the A-Team.
