Two More From Boston

I've been spending a big chunk of my morning setting up posts to go through the next couple of months. I'm rapidly wearying of trying to come up with clever shit to say about records. These are from the Boston Area.

 the Loners (1980)

This is the new wave-y one. There's a farfisa on "Inanimate Objects". "Neighborhood Kids" is more power pop. If they weren't on the same single I might otherwise have thought them by two different bands.

Infliktors (1979)

This is the first record on Ace of Hearts and is notable (to me anyway) for how fucking good the guitar sounds on the A side. There's another song on this record, but it's not nearly as good if not rather crap in comparison to that guitar tone.

Choose Your Band Name Carefully

In the annals of bad band names for actually quite good bands, Balloon Guy has to be really high on the list.

They existed for a chunk of the mid-90's in Minneapolis, managed to get signed to Warner Brothers in the frenzy to find the next big thing that was supposed to follow grunge, squeezed out a long player and an ep onto cd and then dissolved into nothingness.

 

Before they left they did manage to leave a quartet of seven inches in the pre-Warner Brothers period. It was sometime around 1994 or so that I think I first encountered them. I was heading into work by Loring Park and there was a band playing in the park. I stopped to listen. I liked what I heard. I sought out the records. The rest is as they say history.

 

Theirs is a fuzzy tense brand of so called "indie rock" that a lazy person might point to Pavement as  sonic brethren. I'm even lazier. I won't do that. The songs are structured. The lyrics pointedly impressionistic and leave themselves open to interpretation in multiple ways. There's layers on layers here and some really nice drumming throughout holding it all together.

 

As it is, I'm still a bit groggy this morning and finding that squeezing descriptive phrases for music to be rather difficult right now. You'll just have to trust me on this. Try it. You may like it. 

Balloon Guy

Someday enough people may discover this small cache of goodness and prompt a reunion show or two so that they may live out their days basking in the warm glow of vindication. Until now. There's these as well as used copies of "West Coast Shakes" & "Soundbull" to be found cheap.

I Hate Christmas Music

I really do.

I find it to be perhaps the lowest form of the novelty song. (and coming from someone who is a big fan of novelty songs, is saying kind of a lot) Nevertheless, there are a great many people who quite enjoy it and for some reason aren't covering their collective ears from the day after Thanksgiving until New Year's just waiting for the tide of shitty music to blow over for another year.

This post is for them.

Because the truth of the matter is that part of being an obsessive collector type is that when one does spend the countless hours searching out complete discographies many of them are littered with crap that you need to have anyway to cross one more thing off the list for better or worse.

 the Greedies (1979)

What happens when the less interesting half of the Sex Pistols hook up with Thin Lizzy to cash in on a fast One-off Christmas medley? This stuff. It's one for the completists. These lazy fucks couldn't even be bothered to come up with a b-side. It's just some kind of backwards remix of the front. Pure bullocks!

 

Morphine (1993)

I love Morphine. This is one of those rarities that sputtered out in all kinds of odd places during their way too brief existence. The Christmas side is certainly not one of Mr. Sandman's better efforts, but I can't really argue with having the song "Cure for Pain" on a vinyl format at least somewhere in my world.

More Compliations

Kids today forget how essential compilation records used to be. (And stay off my lawn while you're at it.)

In the dark ages before the internet and google, youtube and wikipedia a person had to find out about music on the streets like an animal through actual human interaction with like minded individuals who a person would have to talk to in order to share information about music that either of you enjoyed and the other may or may not have heard of. You'd also have to listen to something called a "radio" and more specifically ones attached to colleges which weren't bound by commercial concerns so the kids who ran them could play pretty much whatever the fuck they wanted and did. There might also be xeroxed 'zines around that would also have articles and interviews with bands you might not know of, but may find interesting.

And then there were always compilations. These could be a goldmine of introductions to things. You'd get one for one song by one band you liked and you'd discover a couple more and the cycle of life would continue until you're old and sitting on a shit ton of records and wondering if you've wasted your life.

4 Now

So what we have here is a compilation of four bands from the Buffalo, NY area circa 1981. There apparently was a small but robust music scene in the area with enough stuff to cobble together a "Bloodstains Across" lp. This little slice is probably most notable for an appearance by the Vores, one of the vanguard of punk bands in Buffalo, who put out a pair of well regarded singles and who have existed periodically long enough to have a Facebook page. 

It's some decent stripped down rock and roll all the way through perfect for drinking beer and shoveling snow. It's not likely to change your world, but it's certainly not going to ruin your day.

Arizona Disease

This is an entirely different beastie. It came out on Subterranean Records also in 1981 and features some half baked recordings of bands that seem to have been from Arizona. (It's in the title of the record and I'm not going to argue.) This is very much in the vein of starting the band before learning how to play an instrument school of rock and roll primitivism . It's one two three Go!

There's not really much information on either bands to be found beyond a mention of their existence here and there and this page about Jr. Chemists from somebody who cared enough to type it out. Read it at your leisure.

SF Underground

I have nothing much to say. I want to post something.

 SF Underground

 

 Here's both of the SF Underground compilation seven inches. You're welcome. 

Flipper Rules, Ok?