Quarterflash - Girl In The Wind (1991).rar
Guillermina Bordner
The original copy, which I'd reviewed for a newspaper around fifteen years ago, was a repackaging for the US market. Didn't look at all like the UK version. This one had a photo of Harry James, the drummer, dressed in a tutu and, I think, was made up to capitalize on the video for "Dirty Love." Anyway, the reissue is the original UK cover art.
"Dirty Love" was a tremendous party tune, even included 'na-na'-na's', and at least half the record is just about on a par with it. It probably saved Thunder from being totally wiped by grunge in the US market although they lasted here until '95 and never seemed to be able to build on what "Dirty Love" furnished them.
It's all meat-and-potatoes very hard rock and pop. Thunder could write nice hooks and not humiliate themselves in the lyric department. "Englishmen on Holiday" is fairly amusing for its story of Brit hooliganism at Euro resorts. "Distant Thunder," which closes the album is great metal boogie. "Love Walked In" was the obligatory ballad, something Thunder did well without much sop.
Also great over the holidays were SPV's reissues of the Aynsley Dunbar Retaliation, one of the pieces of the British blues boom that didn't make it. Surprisingly, four albums on two double CD sets. Sometimes they imitated all the people that did last, for a couple songs you swear it's Savoy Brown, for another Ten Years After. Cover art by Hipgnosis, production made to sound like Mike Vernon. The first album has "Chevrolet," retitled as "Watch and Chain." Foghat would get much more use out of it years later. Dr. Dunbar's Prescription was their most second and most successful album. It looks a psyche LP but it's still mid-tempo white boy blooz with a heavy Hammond sound. If you're a fanatic for this Brit stuff, these reissues hit the spot.
Aynsley Dunbar is one of the Zelig's of hard rock. He seems to have been in many really big bands just, infrequently with indifferent results, most notably Journey, I think (although he seemed to be in the right place at the right time for Whitesnake). Notable Frank Zappa sideman, also on some Jefferson Starship LPs.
Repackage of Iron Butterfly's last two mid-Seventies albums, Scorching Beauty and Sun and Steel. Great album art but only two original members, guitarist Erik Braunn and drummer Ron Bushy. Not at all like the psych organ 25-million sold In-a-Gadda-Da-Vida Butterfly.
Completely different, showing some yen to do Brit-style glam pop. Almost unbelievable.
Guitarist Erik Braun sings, sounds like a poor man's Brian Ferry or someone in Badfinger's back line, or Cockney Rebel with loud guitar. One or two things sound like early Yes or Badger, the rest interspersed with US-centric boogie so they could still entertain in the bars without frightening people screaming for the oldie. Makes for a diverse listen in the 70's hard rock genre. Utterly panned. Didn't sound like anything else in the market at the
time. If you liked the odd mid-70's losers like Captain Beyond or Pavlov's Dog, this stands a good chance of scratching that itch.
16 weren't properly heard in their prime. Chalk it up to poor distribution and a mighty sound that didn't exactly fit the style, being far more violent in riff and concussion than the great stoner mean. 16 smoked in an unfastened way, like the guy with an irrational number of burning cigarettes stuffed in his maw on the cover of their first album, Scott Case.
Bridges to Burn is their new one. Because it's on Relapse, it will have better play than anything they did in the intervening fifteen years or so. And, wowza, they haven't aged a bit, being just as pounding and enraged. Good album, see here for a longer write.
got the new vines album in the mail the other day. you remember them, right? saviours from the last "rock" "revolution" along with, um, i dunno, the datsuns and the white stripes or whoever. anyway, it's unlistenable. in the red oversaturated horror show. i literally can't listen to it cuz of the sonic hell it puts you through. and it's reason enough to listen to old iron butterfly albums. lord knows, the snowboarding highlight clip industry needs rock bands like the vines to keep them in montage music, but no ordinary human needs them anywhere or anyhow. singer supposedly was diagnosed with asperger's syndrome a while ago and i would have given them at least a smidge of cred if they had named their album *Welcome To Ass Burger, How May We Help You?* but they are too lame to be funny.
A little write-up on hearing Patto's "The Man" from their 1970 debut as part of trailer music for Seth Rogen's mall cop movie, "Observe and Report". Here. Good band, good album, vanished without much trace. Good to see someone in Hollywoodland listens to it.
So what is the general consensus on Cold Chisel? I'd never listened to them before, at least not consciously, but I paid $1 for a copy of their 1980 Elektra LP East (their only LP ever to chart in the U.S., went to #171) at Austin's citywide garage sale a couple weeks go, and I have to say that -- in terms of my experience with usually much more brutal late '70s/early '80s bogan-rock -- I'm kind of disappointed with it. At least half of it seems like medium-rock attempts at meaningfulness somewhere in the vicinity between the Police and Midnight Oil (with obligatory white-reggae bent and fetishes on Asian girls). But I like "Rising Sun"'s Faces-style rockabilly (Faces being a big Rose Tattoo influence too I suspect), and the tough Viet-vet AOR drama of "Khe Sahn," and esp. the killer surf-to-Police-to-Slade closer "No Time To Cry."
Jasper and Oliver, though, peg East as sort of a sellout: "changed style...to a radio-bias AOR sound." They call their earlier stuff "Australian hard rock with r&b tints," which might land them closer to AC/DC/Rose Tattoo/Angels territory. Or is this just wishful thinking on my part -- just like I assume Elektra was thinking wishfully by giving them one shot in the States in the wake of Back In Black's blockbusting. (What other Aussie bands get released in the States then? Looks like Midnight Oil didn't chart hear until 1984, a few years later. Though Angel City did first chart twice in 1980, before Back in Black but after Highway To Hell, which was AC/DC's commercial breakthrough. Rose Tattoo also only charted at the tail end of 1980, fwiw; Rock N Roll Outlaw got to #197.)
Also, new albums I've liked this year that might somehow pass muster as "hard rock" (though some are probably more "past-expiry" than others, and some of the country ones are inconsistent about rocking). Order of preference, more or less, and leaving out some less explicitly old-school-oriented metal stuff:
Hell, maybe toss in the new Buckwheat Zydeco album Lay Your Burden Down on Alligator, too -- includes songs previously done by Led Zeppelin ("When The Levee Breaks," originally Memphis Minnie), Brownsville Station ("Let Your Yeah Be Yeah," originally Jimmy Cliff), Gov't Mule (the title track), and Captain Beefheart (his long-ignored-probably-due-to-its-normalness Southern soul move "Too Much Time," always one of my favorites by him) -- though only the five-minute "Levee" really sounds like hard rock, at least so far. Anyway, I never cared at all about Buckwheat before (he's been around forever it seems, and his voice seems pretty average), but I like this record. Best original so far: "Throw Me Something Mister," which basically sounds like mid '60s funk-band instrumental with party-chant interjections.
By "mid '60s funk band" I guess I mean Meters, duh. Who didn't actually chart til the late '60s. Also, I get the idea that, in general here, Buckwheat employs his accordion like an organ, so I'm not sure how "zydeco" any of it really sounds. (Not that I'm a zydeco expert myself, and not that anybody reading a hard rock thread might care one way or the other.)
Skyhooks were an Aussie band with a release schedule in the US around the same time as Cold Chisel. They were an odd glammy band with an unusual look. Big in Australia, they went over like a lead balloon here. I have a lot of their stuff, dig it out once in awhile. Iron Maiden covered one of their songs. Skyhooks required an unusual sense of humor to 'get', which is why they got no traction in the US heartland, which took them for fags if they took them at all.
Yeah, no idea how the Living Things lasted to see another release (on the same major label); it's not like their debut (which took years to come out in the first place) even came close to taking the world by storm, and the live sets I was seeing a few years back didn't exactly suggest guys who seemed destined to survive as a band, or maybe even survive as human beings. New album seems more compromised, somehow, and forces their protest angle even more incoherently, but still works as catchy semi-punk. Could become either a major annoyance or a revelation if modern rock radio picks any of it up.
And right, that's a Zero Boys debut reissue; had never actually heard the album before, and was surprised by how much I like it. Secretly Canadian also just put out a singles-etcetra comp by them called The History Of which is not nearly as tuneful in its paint-by-numberness; they seem to have subsequently gone more slamdancey, which didn't make them sound more urgent, just more average.
OK, a friend saw The Sweet last year (on a bill with Showaddywaddy and The Rubettes!) and said they were appalling. Nowhere near as appalling as the Brian Connolly-led version (when he was still alive), but at least he had the excuse of being a human trainwreck.
So anybody know what the deal is with this other LP I bought for $1 a couple weeks ago -- a Kansas album called Bringing It Back on the Design Ltd. Music (whatever that is) label, copywritten 1980 though all of its titles seem to be drawn from Kansas' 1974 debut album, except in a different order and without "Death of Mother Nature Suite"?
Hadn't listened to the debut (which I've got on CD) for a while, so I relistened, and decided "Belexes" (erroneously spelled "Believes" on the LP cover) and "Journey From Mariabronn" are by far the hardest rocking songs, with an almost Zep type kick to them. "The Pilgrimage" and "Apereu" are wimpier, but it's charming how Kansas managed to work sorts of hillbilly fiddle hoedowns into their Yes imitations, like they instinctively realized (which for all I know they may have) that lots of that high-flown British classical foo-foo started off as jiggy dance music to begin with. And then there's the J.J. Cale cover "Bringing It Back," a kind of rustic choogle that doesn't really fit at all with what people think about Kansas. Let me know if I have this wrong.
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