I have a shit ton of 7"s. This is simply an excuse to get off my lazy 21st Century ass and make them more easily listened to as 1's & 0's. I then share. It's a symbiotic relationship. I may even toss in an occasional lp or something.
If it's your OOP record and you don't want it posted, Just let me know. I'll gladly take it down. I'm easy.
So another quickie as it's the middle of the working week and my sole night off and there's only one thing queued up. I want to finish this, play some guitar and some Witcher 3 in my free time tonight.
This is what happens when you take Country and Western and meld it with 80's synthpop.
An actually quite nice version of "Jolene" as written by US National Treasure Dolly Parton. (I may not personally always be a huge fan of her music, but there's no denying that she's an amazing and admirable human being.)
Admittedly too this may not appeal to the purist of either genre, but that's their problem not mine.
I said it the last time I posted stuff by the Jean-Paul Sartre Experience but these dudes deserve a reconsideration in the kind of passed over second generation of Flying Nun bands.
This is their third and final album release.
Savor it slowly while contemplating your own existential crisis. Mine involves some leftover Korean in the other room. Yours may vary.
Getting ahead of a single queued post because I still have a lot of crap to do in order for this new apartment to resemble a place that people currently live rather than one where people are actively moving out of with piles of boxes everywhere.
I like others have really no idea what to say about it. It's all over the place. And there's kind of something for everyone here in a jumble of styles and sounds. Most will probably come for the loud fast hardcore-ish songs, but I'm not you.
I'm not even sure how I feel about it except that it's sat in the "SSC To Post" bin for a couple of years now since I picked it up on a wonderful trip to the nation's capital seemingly a lifetime ago.
This imaginatively titled record is compilation of bands from the state of Iowa.
01. Drednex - Sally Anne
02. The Hollowmen - Never Ending Ceiling
03. Full Fathom Five - Why Their Faces Are So Worn
04. Dangtrippers - Sidewalking
05. Claude Pate - My Turn
06. House of Large Sizes - One and a Half on a Hill
07. Cursing Birds - Popey Sally
08. Shellgame - The Dam Has Broken
09. David Brooks - Music Boy
10. The Shy Strangers - Heat Ray
11. Moveable Feast - Teddy Through the Grass
12. The Eclectics - When I Was Young
13. Four Million - War and Peace
Unlike the state itself, it doesn't generally smell like pig shit.
(I'm sure that there's a lot of Iowa that is lovely and smells wonderful, but my experience driving through a vast flatness with the stench of porcine manure pits wafting through the air vents. So take that assessment with a grain or two.)
An early appearance by House of Large Sizes is always welcome in my neck of the woods.
a comment on a different blog's post of this says that this was the first in a series of five compilations put together by the a University of Iowa college radio station from its yearly Battle of the Bands.
Ok, I couldn't find anything concrete about this band in the scant five minutes of google searching I did and the actual record is still in packed a box in the other room so I can't refer to that either.
The band's name is also really easy to miss on the cover so a lot of times you the actual name, the Agents (one of over a dozen bands that have used the name) gets lost and they're called TV Sex Star.
But it's a perfect storm of 1981.
You have Ronald Reagan on the cover and the presumed subject of the song "TV Sex Star". A bit of white boy reggae that gets mixed up in the NYC punk pop of the rest of it. A whiny synth that makes an appearance. The last three songs are all recorded live.
And it's all surprisingly good.
It feels like one of those records that just never fell into the orbit of the right people who are interested in and reissue these kinds of things. I mean, the song "No Name" about an L.A. acid casualty with it's
super cheesy synth hook is a stone cold classic that ought to be rescued
from the ash heap of musical history and brought into the light.
I originally stumbled across it on somebody else's music blog years ago and liked it enough to track down my own surprisingly cheap as fuck copy.
I've been on "vacation". We moved to a new apartment. Things have happened and come and gone and I've let this particular venture sit for a long while with the idea of catching up a little closer to real time for posts rather than setting things up months in advance.
And here we are. There's only one more post in the queue and I feel like I need to make a cushion or two between myself and the disappointment of the dozen people who stop by here if there's not something new to listen to.
Plus I flipped my sleep schedule to more normal people time for the last couple of weeks and I need to unflip it back to a nocturnal schedule before I go back to work in a couple of days. I'm mostly there, but I'm using this to keep myself occupied and awake for another hour or two so as to lessen the inevitable wrenching horror that will be trying to get back to my normal sleep habits.
The other thing is that I'm running out of the free space on the Mediafire account and I'm thinking I might have to start deleting things. I mean, nothing was ever meant to be permanent but so long as I had the space and nobody got their panties in a ruffle about it I was willing to keep them up given that the internet is just rife with dead ends when it comes to these kinds of blogs. I figure seven or so years is a good long time. I probably won't do any reposts. I've got plenty of other stuff to go up. Consider it a heads up.
This is one of those things I've had kicking around for a while without listening to. It came as a bonus record or extra packing or something with a package of other records. I had no idea what it was so it languished until a day when I was curious about whether I was going to listen to it or sell it or toss it or something. I listened to it. I kinda liked it.
It turns out that Marc Jeffrey was previous to this solo effort in Band of Outsiders whose beginnings are in that Power Pop/Punk rock nexus that was New York City in the late 70's in a band which morphed into Band of Outsiders in the early 80's and limped along through several albums before dissolving at the end of the decade. (though they apparently reformed in the teens of this century for one more album) Based on some of the things I found in the last ten minutes it feels like they were much more enjoyed by a European audience than over this side of the pond.
Which is neither here nor there where this particular Lp is involved. This is a Marc Jeffrey solo Lp produced by Ivan Kral (of Richard Hell and the Voidoids fame) and with a secret uncredited appearance by Nikki Sudden which makes perfect sense when you listen to the record.
All in all I'm going to call this one a pleasant surprise for a "free" lp. It's not ever going to be the first thing out of the stacks when I'm thirsty to listen to something, but I'm not going to be getting rid of it anytime soon.
I still have a pile of nearly 50 singles in the "New Arrivals" pile in front of the turntable going back to last Fall. There was a solid couple of months when I was sick that crap like that took a back seat to convalescence. Then I went on a couple of stress buying binges and found a lot of NOS copies of local stuff for the other blog (Swinging Singles Club MN) which I've been concentrating on mostly because this one was queued up so far in advance that there wasn't any sense of urgency to add to it.
Then there's the obsessive collector problem of things being incomplete which has started plaguing me more in my heightened stress levels from the past few years. I've had stuff sitting around waiting until I found those last few items that would make complete discographies. As a consequence there's a bunch of good stuff waiting around for that other single or the sole Lp.
Tonight's a "Fuck it" night.
These have been sitting around and it's all I've got, I can't find copies in the US and UK imports are much more than they're worth. And I'm not going to sit on them any longer. If I eventually find the rest, I'll post it then.
So here's three out of five singles by the Mo-Dettes.
Third single was a stab at the Rolling Stones chestnut which was nice.
(Especially since the Stones themselves were in the first stages of what would become a slow descent into the pits of suck that would eventually culminate in horrors like "Harlem Shuffle" (which in itself is a cover) and that bane of dollar bins everywhere "Bridges to Babylon")
I like this better than anything on the contemporary "Emotional Rescue". Suck it, Mick.
Their penultimate single, though it was the last of new music and just following their sole Lp release. There'd be a live single as a last hurrah.
They're very 1981 fashionable on the cover though. I dunno. I got nothing.
You'd never know it but this whole post has taken well over an hour to get together to even this point because I'm digitizing singles at the same time and have to get up every few minutes to flip a record and run it through the restoration software so future posts don't sound as shit as previous ones like this one.
Plus I'm getting hungry.
I think I'm going to finish up the Spectres "This Strange Effect"(featuring former Sex Pistol Glen Matlock covering the Kinks) and call it a night knowing that now that I have both Spectres 45s they can finally be posted at some point in the future I feel like it and get back to the bulk of the 45s where it lies in state in "Sp". (I last left off at "Mo" and need to catch the 12" side up to it as well and that's a lot of Mancini records in between.)
