Trying to Stay Awake. Trying to Stay Ahead

 

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.

Playtime (1990)

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.

If that makes any sense to y'all.

Triple Play

 

Listening to records. Typing about other records.

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.

 

 White Mice (1979)

Their first single was an indie chart hit right out of the gate with a cheap video made and everything.

There is nothing to dislike about that

Paint It Black (1980)

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.

Tonight (1981)

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.)

I Did This Wrong

 

I intended to post in the other blog, but somehow got here instead.

No biggie. I'm distracted. I need to grocery shop and I'm hungry.

I may order a pizza.

(Food again. it's always food.)

On the positive side, it's been above freezing the past few days four months ago.

I started thinking about stuff and I wonder if I followed through on any of it....

Among the Wandering (1987)

So without any further ado, here's 15 60 75 again with their third long player, "Among the Wandering". 

The band has been around for half a fucking century at this point is very high on my list of reasons I might actually go to Cleveland besides crossing Progressive Field off the baseball stadium list. I get stuck occasionally in Youtube holes watching clip after clip.

I really haven't spent as much time with  this particular Lp though.

It unfortunately suffers, at least to my ears anyway, of a bad case of 1987.. The sounds and recording/production techniques kind of date it a lot. The songs themselves are up to snuff and as evidenced by some live versions on Youtube quite good stuff with the 80s scraped off of them.

Your mileage will vary and I hesitate to say it's a "bad" record. 

It's not, but choices that seemed good at the time to update a sound don't precisely work as intended a couple of decades later. The updated version sounds more dated than previous recordings. It's a paradox. Go into it with open ears and a bit of caution and you'll be fine.

There are still other things to find and discover by them. If I had a record label there'd be a nice box set. But I don't. 

And I'm hungry.

The end.

Noise Noise Noise

 I'm killing some time while rice cooks.

I  may take a shower as well.

I have nothing otherwise.

Radiation (1995)

Michael Morley & Bruce Russell from the Dead C doing their thing.

Your mom wouldn't like it very much unless she's also some kind of pretentious record collector type who listens to noise because it's so much more visceral than than all that bland popular crap you people listen to.

Your mom is a bitch.

Stadium of Light (1998)

More NZ noise stuff

Discogs sez : "Extremely limited unauthorized remix [out of sync, panned stereo] of track 1 from K-Group - K-Group. One side only"

K-Group is the avant garde handle of one Paul Toohey.
The RSW Lundon in question is the owner of the Imperial label.

It's good background sounds for washing dishes.
Use this opportunity to clear out your sink.

One For the Road

 

It's after midnight.
I got tacos to eat and a nice warm whisky glow from the glass I poured like three queued posts ago.

Let's keep this brief again

2000 - Tokidoki

Mostly acoustic duo consisting of Peter Schaefer & Nora O'Conner recording painfully sweet little pop ditties that you could play for your grandmother if she wasn't more into Motorhead or something. (Well, you could probably still play it for her, but she'd just give you the finger behind your back for being such a wuss)

This was released unto the world by Sunday Records.

Google also tells me that Tokidoki is Japanese for "sometimes", so there, we both learned something today.