Thursday, September 12, 2013

Vol. 4 Episode 38

Preorders for the new Black Hearted Brother album has gone up at Slumberland Records. It will be a double vinyl on white. The cover is absolutely beautiful.

I have also heard that Girls Names will have a remix EP out soon. More on that when I have more info.

The Stargazer Lilies album called We Are The Dreamers is also up for preorder at Graveface Records. The members club will be on clear with lavender haze. First retail pressing will be on red-violet. I saw pictures and the members club version is very pretty the red-violet, not so much. Not sure I will be getting this one. The title track single is very pretty though.

I am going to try to get tickets to see My Bloody Valentine. If I do it will probably be the last concert I go to this year.

On with the show...
 


This is the first release from Washed Out. It was released on Sub Pop records. It was released in July of 2011. I recently made a multi-purchase of Washed out records and this was one of the records in the set. The copy that I got was on white vinyl but it was also pressed on a red-orange and blue. The cover is embossed with the title but the title is not printed on the cover. Because of this the shrink wrap has a clear sticker with the album title printed in black at the top corner. This album as a slightly different feel to it than the new album does. I think it is more synth where as the new album has a more organic feel to it.

I thought that this was interesting about the cover, from Wikipedia, “The cover for Within and Without uses an image that appeared in the May 2011 issue of Cosmopolitan magazine, accompanying an article titled "Is This the Most Satisfying Sex Position?". Washed Out told Exclaim!, "We licensed the image from the photographer Martien Mulder from New York. I had seen the image in this avant-garde photography magazine while we were on tour in Australia and it was just an ad for one of her exhibitions. I loved it for a lot of different reasons. When we licensed it we thought we had exclusive rights to it and then a month later she licensed it again to Cosmopolitan." He also stated he was disappointed to see the photo used in an article on sexual positions, "mainly because it undercut all of my ideas about what the image represented and what the album represented", as he felt "it wasn't sexual at all and it wasn't supposed to be provocative."”

There were two singles released from the album. The first is called Eyes Be Closed. The song has an 80s new wave sound that makes me feel good inside. It kind of reminds me of the song Chains Of Love by Erasure. It is more that it uses the same chords more than the sounds are the same, also that the vocals sound somewhat the same tonally. It is a very good song that I could easily fall asleep to.

The second single from the album is called Armor Fati. This track is slightly more up beat than the first single but not by much. This track also has that 80s new wave sound. I think that is why I like this album so much. All of the tracks remind me of that sound. It makes me feel warm inside like when I was a kid in summer time where I was free to do what I wanted and there always seemed to be music on weather I was listening to my radio head phones or my stereo in my room.

This is another great album that I am very happy to have stumbled on.





This is the first album from Baltimora. It was released in early September of 1985. Jimmy McShane supposedly performed the lead vocals, although there is some controversy surrounding who the actual singer is, while the songs were written by Maurizio Bassi and Naimy Hackett. It is a short album with only six songs on the standard version. There were other versions released with extra tracks, including a re-release in 1993 with extra remixed versions of some of the songs.

There were three singles released from the album, four if you count the track Juke Box Boy that was only found on the Canadian version and the 93 re-release. The first single from the album is called Tarzan Boy. It is a fun new wave song that used the Tarzan call as a melodic line in the chorus. This track was not one that I had recorded on my radio recorded cassettes but was a song that I remembered with fondness none the less. It is not a fast song but has a good beat and you can understand the lyrics well enough that one could sing along.

The second single from the album is called Woody Boogie. I had never heard this song on the radio before. When I did hear it for the first time on the record it seemed like a fun song that should have been a single. In doing the research I found that it was released but did not get the respect that it deserved. There is some tongue in cheek sounds that are reminiscent of the woody woodpecker sound which just makes me giggle all the more at the song. It is a pop masterpiece for its time. I recommend that everyone listen to it at least once.

The third single from the album is the title track, LivingIn The Background. This is a slower song that just didn’t work as a single. The song is very dated and I was not impressed with it when I heard it for the first time listening to the album.

The last single, Juke Box Boy, was not included on the standard album, which is what I have, so I can not talk about it here. 



This is a single from the first album from Salt-N-Pepa, Hot, Cool & Vicious. It is the first release with the song Push It. This single was released in 1987. And was the third single released from the album. The album Hot, Cool & Vicious was later re-released with the song Push It added as it was the only single that charted from the album in the US. That doesn’t include the R&B or the Dance charts though.

The A side of the record has three different versions of Tramp. There is the remix, the instrumental and the acapalla versions. It was the B side that I really cared about with this single though. The B side has Push It and an instrumental version of Push It. There is also a track called Idle Chatter. I had been looking for a physical version of Push It for years now and finally found a copy here with this single. I had recorded various versions of Push It from the radio in my recording days. A couple of years ago I listened to all of my radio recording tapes and made a list of the songs that I really liked from them. I then didn’t have a reason to keep the tapes but promised myself that I would look for the albums that these songs came from to flesh out my 80s collection. So far it has been a slow process but still effective. I don’t think there are more than 15 albums that I am still looking for.



This is the first album from Volcano Choir. It was released on JagJaguar in September of 2009. I had not heard about this group until their second album was about to be released. I bought this album with their first album from the record company. This album was released after Justin Vernon (Bon Iver) had released For Emma, Forever Ago. There was so much popularity put on Bon Iver that this alternate project was completely missed by me. It is a collaboration between Justin and the band Collections of Colonies of Bees (COCOB). COCOB is an instrumental group. The addition of Justin Vernon’s vocals is mainly an addition of sound, tone and textures. There are coherent words being sung but they are, for the most part, inconsequential in the songs. There was no single released that I know of for this album. If you are into the new album then you may want to check out some of the background to the new album. It is an interesting perspective into the group.

That is all I have for now...

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