A hypnotic funky psych-groove jam with some neat twangy surf guitars, lead guitar lines put through a wah wah for added trippy effect while a space age synth adds further out there flavour.
*This goes right back to the dawn of the CardrossManiac2 blog. This great tune Megattera was included on the fabulous all killer no filler compilation Flipper Psychout: Original Italian Library Music From The Vault Of Flipper which was in the top 5 best archival compilations of 2011 list.
I think this is my favourite album cover ever. I like boats and boat art. Paintings should only be of boats. It's the only worthy art.
I know I have an mp3 of this somewhere or maybe it's long gone with my computer from 2010. I do recall this being one of the best library records I encoutered back in 2007-2012, the heyday of the file sharing blog era... whenever it was when they invented mediafire. The idyllic seaside cover is a bit misleading as only a couple of tracks have a charming scenic beauty, mostly the coastal tranquility sours and a bustling nervous energy darkens the tone as it all turns a bit ominous. Obviously the music would have been perfectly suited to a documentary featuring creatures living under the sea whose doom is always looming.
Porto Di Lavagna [1977]
Mostly blissful serenity with interludes of foreboding clouds.
Catamarano Baloo [1977]
Sea breezy cheese. Copacetic pleasantness with occasional swells into elated zones. A cinemascope soundscape worthy of a post-coital scene in a 70s Italian blue movie.
Nice.
Vela 6 [1977]
I honestly can't think of another piece of music like this. An impeccable sound design of layered synths and assorted keyboards. Those thickly textured serene synths combined with with those uneasy fidgety organ runs, thin melodic keyboard lines, fluttery pianos and the swirling dark aquatic synthetic bass tones bubbling away create a strange world of sound.
Circolo Vizioso [1977]
More of a suspenseful horror synth soundtrack vibe from the get go. Hypnotic and haunted.
Soling SOS [1977]
Cataclysmic thick synthetic textures and sporadic sinister percussion. Echoing keyboards of gloom and a triangle of impending doom.
[1907]
Speaking of boat art here's a great boat painting: The most perfect painting of a boat. Thanks Odilon Redon.
Well I always think Yawning Man are like the best SST band never to record an album for SST. That's mainly because on their debut album, Rock Formations (2005), they are musically like a cross between Meat Puppets and this group the underrated Pell Mell.
American Eagle opens Flow their second LP for SST.For an instrumental it is incredibly catchy and that sums up the beauty of Pell Mell, despite lacking a vocalist their tunes are incredibly lyrical with hooks galore and a thick atmosphere...
This one's pretty fuckin funky and upbeat with occasional sequences of dark twangy jangles that threaten to engulf the tune but the almost unhinged exuberance cannot be stopped as it destroys everything in its path. This goes off like a frog in a sock and gets to highly ecstatic levels, achieving similar results to that of a top rave tune.
Pell Mell - Nothing Lies Still Long [1995]
It was crazy times and a few years later they were releasing cds on Geffen. Get this straight, a quirky instrumental group that came out of the early 80s post-punk underground were now label mates with Counting Crows, Beck and Nirvana.
Make no mistake, despite the fact that I got this cd for $4 new not long after it was released, Interstate is a lost 90s classic. Its got all the driving psych instrumentals and mysterious atmospheric rock that was adjacent to happening genres of the time like slowcore, American post-rock, indie, math rock and the renewed interest in 70s Krautrock.
Thisstill sounds remarkably fresh today with its exquisite expansive production. Nothing Lies Still Long is a driving twangy instrumental rock jam that gets pretty mesmerising with its wide vistas, compulsive rhythms and dark dreamy atmosphere.
Speaking of Yawning Man here's a coupla tunes from 20 years ago, yes 20 bloody years...
This one's a pretty cool tripped out surf rock track. A bit of an eerie psychedelic summer atmosphere perfect for driving down the ocean highway, then through the secluded dessert to your secret destination. Mysterious.
Is it just me or are there are moments during this tune when it sounds like The Shadows covering Boards Of Canada? That's pretty strange when you think about it...
Yawning Man - Buffalo Chips [2005]
They up the ante on Buffalo Chips for some totally rockin' psych-surf action. This dessert dwelling trio cook up an absolute storm here. All three are on fire creating one hell of a smokin' unit. Definitely music for getting in your car at midnight and seeing where the tropical hotdog night takes you.
New music alert! For the second time in 2025 I'm bringing you music from the current year. I mean this tune coulda been made in the 80s, maybe even the 70s...
A pretty cool trippy surf rock jam. Puts me in mind of Pell Mell or maybe Yawning Man.
An outsiders downbeat vision. A really original lo-fi abstract echoing trip out that gets into a haunting yet breezy groove. An uncommon mysterious tone becoming sublime.
All around a parade of clowns
*The rock-crit consensus goes that this is from the Wipers demise era. We're supposed to believe Wipers started out with three top records then the rest were crap. Only problem is Land Of The Lost (1986), Follow Blind (1987) and Silver Sail (1993) are sterling LPs.
A fairly unknown post-punk group from Richmond Virginia who are a forgotten or perhaps a never even known influence on post-hardcore, indie math rock etc. The likes of Drive Like Jehu, Rocket From The Crypt, Fugazi and Superchunk acknowledge their influence and you gotta think Slint, Don Cabellero, Disco Inferno, Polvo, Unwound maybe even Eddy Current Suppression Ring along with many others benefitted artistically by listening to Honor Role.
Here's a few tunes from their 1986 LP on Eskimo/No Core Records where guitarist Penn Rollings was beginning his purple patch of progression on the six strings. The Pretty Song is more classic shadowy post-punk merging into lo-fi slacker rock as opposed to Honor Role's 1989 follow up Rictus on Homestead Records which was more on the experimental noisey math-rock tip.
*I get there's some lazy, atemporal and reading history backwards zoomer-like retardedness going on in the snippet reviews below but for just one day only I don't care.
Throwing Rocks [1986]
Bringing you all the 90s slacker talk-singing and lo-fi in 1986.
My Place (1986)
That lost bewildered sound filled with regret and defiance, wait for exciting classic guitar bit at 1:37.
.
Six [1986]
Layers of gloom like if Rowland S Howard collaborated with Slint.
.
Present Conditions [1986]
Downbeat 80s eeriness with Galaxie 500 (who didn't even exist yet) levels of reverbed guitar for maximum blissful day-dreaminess. Hard not to think this is a lost classic.
Care Taker [1986]
Desolate 80s. Dilapidated visions. Cold war fear. Enveloping ominousness. Tenebrous tones sonically somewhere between Gordons, Tactics and Wire circa 154.
She's kinda of forgotten these days but she ruled the charts for a year or two, having five top 40 hits in a row from 1979 to 1980. Then she promptly disappeared from the industry.
This song takes on a dark tone when you realise she left the music industry after having an abusive relationship.
You know what was wrong with Kraftwerk and British electro? Not fuckin' bogan enough!
Never fear Antipodean new wave bogans are here to give you dystopian electric dreams from down under.
I'm so future I work in an office where I nearly died of computer print out, I just finished rugby training, drank a six pack, been smokin' some Winnie Blues and now I've put on my best trendy sleeveless t-shirt, wrist band and some eyeliner.
Another one I haven't heard since it was on the radio when I was a kid.
I'm assuming this was a cash in on the success of The Buggles Video Killed The Radio Star unless it was just the vibe in the air as the 70s turned into the 80s. We were kids so we didn't care if it was a cynical cash grab or not.
On the surface this tune seems like a quaint bit of lost futurism but dig a little deeper...
The lyrical theme is a surprisingly angst fuelled existential crisis as the cold bleak future threatens our cozy old world of disco and rock'n'roll.
A futuristic synthetic dance-y pop tune with some use of old school guitars too. There's mucho use of vocoderized vocals and dodgy primitive drum machines. Like a cross between the disco-rock excursions of ELO of the time and the brutally cold electronics of early Human League or Cabaret Voltaire.
This video is pretty bizarre. An old dude sings nonsensical paranoid lyrics from his bed in a mental asylum. He is then aided in in an escape and is seen being pushed around in a wheelchair by a couple of teenage girls in Kiss make-up. Towards the end he dies, I think, as the girls look around in a state of bewilderment as they continue singing. Pretty strange...
The other surprising thing here is the two teenage chicks in Kiss make-up lip syncing to the catchy chorus. It turns out these two are identical twins Gayle and Gillian Blakeney soon to be stars of Wombat then Neighbours. They would go on to a failed pop career in the 90s as their producers Stock, Aitken and Waterman began their demise. There you go, Thank you.
Totally forgot this one. Haven't heard this since I was eight years old and in primary school.
Apparently there's an entire LP by Player [1] based around this computer game theme, niftily titled Game Over (1980).
Not a hit outside of Australia but many would be familiar with the bass-line here because it was sampled on On And On (1984) an early Chicago house classic by Jesse Saunders (which I wrote about here).
[1984]
On And On - Jesse Saunders
Where I wrote: "Some people don't realise that house wasn't always a lame genre so here's some house before house got defined. No piano riff-age or acidic squelches here. On And On is still rudimentary and raw utilising specific disco elements but rearranged for maximum pleasure. Unhinged synth lines, primitive drum machine hand clap breaks galore and loops into the future."
A Euro trash synth-funk jam where the American ghetto is relocated to some suburb in Austria where the only crime was not cleaning up after your dog because you were too coked out of your brain. Was Falco the first guy to rap in German... is it even rap? It might be the invention of some other form of singing altogether. Wait for the really cool synthwave bit at 2.28, absolutely brilliant. The whole thing is is an undeniably great state of the art 80s synthetic production.
Check out this video. Look at these guys. Absolute creepy dorks but overly confident creepy dorks who think they are such spunks, so 80s. The 80s where everyone was hot, all you had to do was believe. These psychos are obviously from 80s LA and surely Bret Easton Ellis based a few characters on them.
Then again maybe they were just being hilariously ironic and maybe they were just fucking cool... I mean they aren't that cool but those absurd bass lines are so funny they have got to be a little in-joke right.
Whether it's cool, daggy or swathed in layers of irony is kinda beside the point though as Obsession is just a whole lotta undeniable fun. So much so that it's just fun.
Who do you want me to be
to make you sleep with me
The actual tune Obsession is like Giorgio Moroder on crack. Insane in your fucking face dance rock that sadly didn't make it to Number one in Canadia only reaching number seven and reaching number twelve here in Australia.
This covers so much sonic 80s ground it's astonishing that it works!
Its new wave atmospheric synth pop with all these other elements like hard rock, sophisto-pop, mor ballad, there's a bit of jangling, talk-singing that's almost rap, a dubby bassline, ethereal female backing vocals all captured in one big dreamy soundworld. With all that going on it is a testament to Idol and co. that it gets a chance to send chills down your spine with a pretty touching delivery.
*Perri Lister of Hot Gossip fame is the woman doing the proto-dream pop backing vocals here and she really makes the song.
The roots of Lynchian dream pop. A bit of bossa with the ba ba ba ba. Sorta proto-00s too with a hypnagogic/indie surf vibe...
Pretty cool... so cool in fact that it only ever appeared on a b-side to their smash hit hit single, the more commercial new wave synthy-dance-pop tune Since Yesterday.
I guess this horrifying scenario could be the continuation of the story from her previous single Nothing Comes Easy where she follows a guy around, he falls for her then she gets bored of him but then he starts following her around. All a good bit of stalking fun with cool 60s arrangements.
Nothing Comes Easy - Sandie Shaw [1966]
There are some things that people need Someone so badly they will creep All I wanted was someone I have him now, it is done Nothing comes easy Nothing comes easy I had a hard time getting him And I'm regretting it now
Each place he'd go, there I'd be I made each move so carefully And all my scheming did work well In the end, for me he fell Nothing comes easy Nothing comes easy I had a hard time getting him And I'm regretting it now
He was just as I expected Nothing lasts too much He gave me everything that I asked for At the start, everything was fine I was filled with every touch Then one day when I was with him I realised that I didn't want him any more
Now he won't leave me alone He follows me each place I go He says he don't want anyone new There must be something I can do Nothing comes easy Nothing comes easy I had a hard time getting him And I'm regretting it now
Outstanding wobbly psychedelic sonic recontextualisation.
Leyland Kirby and some other bloke do exotica plunderphonics Hawaiian style. If you love your Residents, Christian Marclay, Tom Recchion or whoever else this is right up your alley. However Mr Caretaker himself somehow injects his own viewpoint onto these sound manipulations and surprise surprise some of it is eerie and uncanny as well as also being woozy, jaunty & fun.
Top obscure British new wave single. Some insane twisted keyboard action amongst the high energy power pop riffage and awesomely daft catchy chorus. Euro-peans! Out of Bristol on Heartbeat Records.
