Let Me Save Your Lame Ass Party for a Second Year

Holy Fuck.

It's been a whole fucking year.

Y'all need more Fleshtones in your life.

Hexbreaker! (1983)

This is a party album by a party band.

Keep this handy when your New Year's starts to get lame.

You need to be fully prepared in the event a Toga Party should break out in your vicinity.

(Especially if you're the one who realizes the absolute need for one if there is any slight hope of salvaging any occasion)

It's too late for me, but you...I pass this on to you....Use it well, my children.

The Link

Still of minor interest, but I like linking things together. Make me feel like I'm actually accomplishing shit.
I'm not really, but it feels better than like I'm wasting my life on the internet.

Let me waste some of yours too.

Something Broke (1984)

Here is a nice three piece band from San Francisco called the Contractions.

This is the full length that followed a pair of singles. (of which I have one and I'm considering holding out until I get the other to go with it.)

They looked like this in the flesh.

This Lp was also produced by the same Lisa Wexler as the previous Boxing Day post and she adds percussion on it as well. 

Small world.

Kathy Peck who played bass and wrote the material is also the founder for H.E.A.R. Hearing Education and Awareness for Rockers  which I'm going to have to give a shout out to just on principle. I've already got tinnitus. It sucks.

It's too late for me. Don't let it be for you.

Boxing Day 2019

 Yeah, it's Boxing Day

This isn't a box.
It's a record.
It's square though.
(at least the cover is.
the record itself is
a flat disc shape.
Not a square.)
Perhaps, though
the cover could
in a pinch serve
as one side of a cube
of some sort
then it would be part
of a box.

So then this is
a potential part
of a box.

Revere (1980)

All signs point to this 12" slice of rhythm & new wave point being a New York City creation. I'm basing this on the label address and where it was recorded. Of a minor bit of interest is that it was produced by session musician (for folks like Brian Eno) and touring band member for Talking Heads, Busta Jones. (He also played bass with Jerry Harrison's side project the Escalators)

Of further minor interest will follow in the next post and concerns the drummer, Lisa Wexler.

 A quick google turns up that she is the daughter of Jerry Wexler, famed executive and producer for Atlantic Records. I did not put those dots together until just now, but isn't actually the thread I'm looking at to link to the next post....

Running Low on Holiday Themes

Because I fucking hate Christmas music.

Holly and IV (1993)

A themed single on Sunday Records.

Womb Man (1989)

A single by Ellie Marshall. Not holiday themed, but she plays with the band Christmas.

It' a stretch, but it's all I got for you.

Onward

Here we go again

Bops on the Head (1981)

Here's the other release by Someone & the Somebodies.

It's 12" elongated player. 

It's from Boston and is the avant-Nu Wave people warned you about.

Unfortunately for them while they do a fine job with a reworked version of Lee Dorsey's song "Working in a Coal Mine", they'd get overshadowed by Devo presenting their own version as a single ahead of  their  "New Traditionalists" lp which is unfortunate even more so because they actually do a better cover.

I also spent a considerable amount of time trying to figure out where exactly was the singular time I saw Someone & the Somebodies was. 

The best I can figure is as either part of an epic week in August of 1982 where my friends and I saw the Clash twice, Elvis Costello & the Attractions at the Cape Cod Coliseum and ended with the Talking Heads at the Orpheum. 

We actually found the Talking Heads to have been the least show of the week and I remember that the opening band was kind of boring. That was where I'm thinking it may have been there.

I mean, I know it was at the Orpheum anyway. But I also got to thinking that in 1984 we also went to the Orpheum to see Siouxsie & the Banshees which was also kind of dull and I got momentarily confused. Online databases were a bit of a bust, so here we are.

I can't say as I actively dislike S&tS.

But I'm more or less kind of indifferent to them.

I mean, I have the records as part of my effort to complete a Modern Methods records discography, but they're not going to be the first ones out of the stacks when I'm playing them.

Where Were We...?

The cat is in my lap. She's hungry and wants dinner.
I'm also hungry and want something to eat.
We'll both have to wait.

My Ex (1983)

Yes, this is where we left off.

The follow up to their previous effort by the Sex Execs yielded this further gem.

There's even video for "My Ex" 

The chorus of which goes:

"...When I think of you

I think of sex

then I think it through

and I'm glad you're my ex..."

Words I'm pretty sure we can all relate to.

Newvo (1982)

For the lack of better ideas I'm throwing the second release by Someone & the Somebodies on the back end of this post.

They were the group spearheaded by a character who went by the moniker Tristram Lozaw (After the Dada Artist) following the fucking brilliant single by the Molls that you'll see here someday.

To my ears though, this is much less entertaining. 

It just kind of exists for a number of minutes but is very much of its time. It really doesn't make me feel much any way or the other.

Your mileage will vary.

Mine hasn't for many years

Keeping With a Certain Theme as of Late

Still at it.
Had to dig a little deeper though into the folder to find the appropriate compilation for this day.
Here it is

Claws! (1985)

The third compilation of local Boston bands brought to you by the auspices of Throbbing Lobster.

A number of heavy favorites here for me. Chiefly the Turbines who I saw as much as I fucking could and the inaugural vinyl appearance of Classic Ruin's "Geraldine, I Need Money More Than I Need You" which is a song of epic proportions and beauty.

There are also a few bands that released nothing else. So there's that archival value to it as well.

This is just otherwise a nice state of the city map of a small sector of the Boston Music Scene at the time.

As it is, I don't actually have this Lp, though I did make this digitalitization. I ordered a bunch of stuff from a dude on Discogs who fucked my order up and then a week later proceeded to send me somebody else's order on top it. This was in it. But being the upstanding citizen I am I straightened things out and sent the package on its way to the proper purchaser pausing only to make this dub for my trouble and personal enjoyment.

Now it's available for your edification. 

Pass that karma along, dude.

This Disease is Contagious

Yep, still at it.

Still 80s Boston records.

The curse of Middle Age is Nostalgia

Sex Execs (1982)

I never saw this band. I'm really not sure to what I'm supposed to make of them.

There's certainly a very tongue in cheek quality to them. I mean, they come across as the very horny teenage love child of Bryan Ferry and, I don't know, Duran Duran (?), but the songs are tight and well assembled. If you don't pay attention to the lyrics they're a nice tight New Wave-y Pop band, listen and the band's name makes much more sense. 

That's the essence of the Sex Execs

I do however know one thing for certain. "Tammy-itis" is an earworm of epic proportions. I've already listened to it a few times while typing this. It's a pleasure and curse.

Try it and you'll see.

Back Again Soon After

Less talk, more rock.

Cloud Factory (1987)

The second elongated player by Boston's own O Positive.

A bit tighter and with some of the edges sanded down. Much more commercially minded release. They'd go on to make one record for Epic which didn't get much support and would limp along until the middle of the 90s before hanging it up.

I have much less invested in this one than the previous. 

I'd moved on to other things by the time this was released.

My blood sugar is fine.

The Universal Donor

I'm out of ideas...

Looks like I went on some kind of nostalgic binge for local Boston area things at around the same time so the SSC to post folder has a bunch of them clustered together from around the same creation date.

I suppose I'll just go with it.

Only Breathing (1985)

O Positive and their particular brand of emotive chorus pedal abuse were a pretty big fucking deal in the area when they first appeared. The women I hung out with were certainly quite enamored of them and their sound. I ended up seeing them more than I really cared to at the time, but I went with my friends and there was beer. I like beer.

It's hard to tell which was the bigger song for them at the time of this release, "With You" was certainly a panty dampener but "Weight of Days" was a pretty normal closer.

All in all this is a very pleasant romp and chock full of weird sense memories of things like the bathroom at Spit/Metro or the smell of the Paradise from days long long gone when I was young and dumb and didn't know enough to appreciate it.

And here we are at a distance looking back with gray hairs not even fully remembering it, just the vague feeling of remembering.

I should probably eat something.

Melancholy nostalgia is usually a sign of low blood sugar.