“They released a few albums and a pile of singles, but for me Frijid Pink will always be just the one thing – that band whose full roar garage take on House of the Rising Sun was (short of Jimi Hendrix) the heaviest thing ever heard on AM pop radio back in that strange, extended season of stormy and endless summer that happened somewhere between 1969 and 1972 (the rear view is always confusing).” (Philip Random)
“I would’ve first heard of the New York Dolls when they were still pretty new, 1973, early Grade Nine. A friend pointed out a picture of them, probably in Creem magazine, guys in dresses, even freakier than Alice Cooper. No mention of their music. In fact, I wouldn’t hear any of that for at least another five years. A mixtape heard at a punk rock party. I’d say they fit right in, but they didn’t. They stood out. Like the Rolling Stones at their sleazy early 70s best, except harder, trashier, sleazier. Who cared what they were wearing?” (Philip Random)
“Guadalcanal Diary generally got compared to REM back in the day, because they were also from Georgia and their guitars had a tendency to jangle. But their songs always felt more direct to me, less concerned with being Art, more with melodies that tended to get stuck in your head for days afterward. Their first release, In The Shadow Of The Big Man, was jammed with such stuff.” (Philip Random)
On one level, the Crazy World of Arthur Brown was the definition of a one hit novelty act. Light your hair on fire, howl like a crazy person, give the kids something to scream about. But listen closely to that debut album and you’ll realize there’s depth beyond all the surface craziness – a singer who can work four octaves and a band that can cook for sure, but they can also play the changes, turn a mood on its head, tear your head off in the process.
Jerry Harrison being the other guy from the Talking Heads (also the Modern Lovers), Worlds in Collision being one of those tracks that employs whatever means are necessary (including big mutant funk, Adrian Belew’s fully animalized guitar, even a little Adolph H railing on about blood and soil and whatever) to drive home its point. Which is yes, we’re in trouble, all of us, every living thing really, this Apocalypse being not a thing that’s coming but a thing that’s here, on top of us, all around us, even inside us, and it’s not going away, such is the wild, weird, stretched-out historical moment into which were born. Just don’t stop dancing.
As debut albums go, the Violent Femmes gave us one of the all time best – teen angst cranked to eleven, nothing held back. But their second album Hallowed Ground was probably even better; certainly bigger, darker, more dangerous. Yeah, they were still all horned up, but now there was also the very real problem of apocalypse, which in the mid 1980s was never further off than the edge of town. Or were those just rain clouds?
Randophonic 