Hello, It's Me (Again) -- Artists Cover Themselves

I thought of writing about this as I was listening to The Move's B-side to "California Man," "Do Ya." Of course, it became more familiar when it was a single five years later by Electric Light Orchestra. In and of itself, not a surprise. Plenty of covers, like remakes of movies, become far more famous than their original incarnations. Even those of us who know often forget there were two versions of The Maltese Falcon before Humphrey Bogart's, because the others just pass out of the public conscious, even when they might be preferred by many who see or hear them (which isn't the case there, barring some random dissenters, but the point remains).

The Move

 

Electric Light Orchestra

It's in the Past...And Now, We Toast -- At the Drive-In

While I can't say that mixed emotions, hormones, and a bit of over-thinking weren't at the root of the final outburst, there was only one band's end that brought me to tears. Yeah, it was high school. Yeah, it was one of the rougher years of high school (though my years in it were not all that bad, to be honest). Still, I never saw them live, and I likely never will, unless their reunion turns into something more than a handful of festival shows. I've known other fans without having to seek them out, converted various friends, and even know someone from their hometown--with all of this, no one has ever (if I recall correctly, at least) recognized my (rather minimalist, to be fair) shirt advertising them. That's not an exclusive claim, of course, but for a band that got this big--even if it was a flash when they were big--it's a bit surprising all the same.

They basically had one, one-and-a-half big hits that went around the country and the world openly. They were both off the same album, and it came out twelve years ago. The band has faded to a footnote (similar to how The Skids--see poll on the right, if you haven't--are mentioned, despite the impression I've gotten that they were well-thought of during their existence) in many ways, to the acts that followed in their wake from the splintered elements they left behind them. It's weird, really, as they feel more lost and faded than a lot of the much older (and also defunct) bands I listen to. Not in the sense of ingenuity, so much as the feeling that their impact on the public conscious, even the "indie" one, was minor, and more of a name than an associated music.

Doubtless, at least a few people who know me could guess exactly who I am talking about right now. It's possible, too, that some people will guess with some semblance of dread, though I don't think one ought to. Still, tastes are tastes, and there's no accounting for them, etc., but I ask--as always--that you approach this music, new, loved, old, hated, with an open mind and listen to it to hear what there might be in it to love for those of us who do, if you don't know already.

Here's that seemingly unrecognized shirt:

I Gotta New Sensation in Perfect Moments, So Impossible to Refuse -- Discussing Music Before It's Digested

For about a year of my life, I wrote movie reviews of all kinds, always after watching a movie, almost always for the first time, and usually while watching or listening to its special features if there were any. I had a passion for movies that was not quite the same as the one I've had for music, though it may simply be that it's a younger one. Or maybe it relates to the ability to chop up a lot of music into separate songs and break up an experience, or the ease of switching, or the fact that a lot of those things make them more readily accessible--certainly, there ought not to be anyone watching movies as they drive to and from, well, anywhere.

Yet, interestingly, in contrast, I write about music at about the same rate but at nowhere near the same "return" rate. Sometimes "you have to listen to it a few times" is code for "it's not that good but you get used to it," though I personally wouldn't swear to this being a majority or minority split (or even an even one). My experience tends to be that it's generally something true on some level for most anything. Once in a while new sounds reach past your ears to your brain--heart, if you must--but often they are just so foreign as to be too difficult to quite process the first time around, and the is a sense of conditioning involved.

In light of this, I very rarely write on bands new or old that are new to me until I've spent time with them for a while. Music-wise, of course. If I were out hanging about with some of these bands...I don't even know how that sentence ends. I'd be too away from computers too long and too often to be writing here? I'd be a life-mangled drug addict? I don't know. Nor does it much matter--the point is that it makes it hard to write about them when I'm still getting past that first point where, sometimes, all the songs might sound the same, or my brain might be clamouring for this or that familiar sound from a band I already know, or even simply to do something other than listen to music (though that isn't very common at all).

The Dangers of Obsessive Detailing

Normally, there's a huge affair to be had in a post I make--I set aside time, I focus on whatever artist, genre or concept I'm going to talk about by listening to it, and build from there. Right now, I'm taking a sentiment intended to be a brief blurb on my (personal) Facebook account and realizing it was simply too long to fit there reasonably (even if they've removed the limitations that used to exist).

This, however, is merely to sort of let anyone who happens to read this in on how intensely, obsessively, and ridiculously in-depth I can get with arranging my digital music collection (physical music less so, though I have my days there as well).

So, I was working from TheWho.info in order to parse out the tracks from the Thirty Years of Maximum R&B set I recently found exceptionally cheap and used (even though much of it has been overtaken by deluxe edition reissues of the Who's albums, there are exceptions, even some not on Odds and Sods or anything). It's a lovely site, with a pictorial discography of every Who release you could possibly imagine--down to minute differences between international releases, re-releases and so on. It's kind of scary, really, but it's building a public database, isn't it?

Now, having gotten a set of 'cover art' for all my Who (digital) 45s, I decided that my other "45rpm" MP3s ought to have nice images of the sleeved labels, rather than the 45 Catalog approach of labels with cropped grooves. Uniformity, and all that.

So, this is already sounding bad enough, no?

It gets worse.

And It's Something Quite Peculiar... -- The Church

"They're Australian?" -- My father, with some measure of incredulity, reflecting not a low opinion of the Australians, so much as the fact that their country of origin had not shown through to him.

"Yep," said I, knowing that the country I'd identified as my "favourite" in my youth (due to my affection for its peculiar wildlife, including my favourite animal, the platypus¹) was responsible for a number of artists I had, by then--a few months before today--identified as quite enjoyable. My love of INXS is no secret, but I'd recently discovered not-Aussie-but-Kiwi Split Enz via Gillian Armstrong's Starstruck (that is my own review of the film, though I make no mention of the band responsible for writing the songs, and it's not exactly my finest movie review--to be clear and avoid angering residents of either island, they are from New Zealand, but were on major Aussie label Mushroom), an accidental discovery years ago of X, not to be confused with the far more famous Los Angeles band, some years ago, AC/DC (though a bit garbled, as the Youngs were born and mostly raised in Glasgow, Scotland), the Bee Gees (similarly to AC/DC, they emigrated to Australia, albeit from England), and milder interests in Men at Work. Recently, I've decided I might give Midnight Oil a shot as well, and have been pleased so far.

But those bands aren't, any of them, the band I'd just informed my father had come from the furthest hemisphere from our home in the United States. No, that band is one that is generally known for a single song or not known at all: The Church.

Now, if your immediate reaction is "Who?" then I can give you the only answer likely to make sense to you--if this doesn't do it, you're not going to get it (or possibly from, say, Australia, and know their first hit, "The Unguarded Moment" better).

Everybody Get Random, All Gal-Dom, All Man-Dom -- Bits and Bobs

Over the course of time, whether it's reading around the internet, reading liner notes on album reissues or talking to people, I pick up tons of weird trivia. Now, of course, I could insert it into discussions of other concepts or the bands or artists they relate to, but that's very artificial, or, sometimes, would require editing existing entries.

So, instead, here's a bunch of random bits of fluff I've found interesting over the course of time recently. Think of it as a sort of memory dump, preserving things here and there to fill the heads of anyone reading with strange points of information that will likely never serve any useful purpose...

Listen: Do you want to know a secret? -- Aspera (Ad Astra), My Unknown Love

I went out gallivanting again (one more XTC box down!), and perused the endless supply of $1 discount CDs strewn about (but neatly) the Greensboro Edward McKay figuring I could spare $1 here or there.

Surprisingly, I found this:

This is a compilation released in 2000 called Post Marked Stamps. Tree Records released a series of 9 7"s in the late 90s, independent bands of varying stripes (mostly in the realms of what might be termed "emo" and "post rock," I guess). I'd barely interacted with it when I downloaded the track I gathered from a legal source (which has changed enough that I don't mention it by name here), I didn't get the rest of the compilation. Now, later, I did manage to end up with one of the songs, "Lighthouse in Athens, Part 1" by Cerberus Shoal (one of the more obscure post rock bands I took up in the early 2000s), but mostly I'd gotten it for one track: "Black in the Eye" by Aspera Ad Astra.

Normally, this is where I'd link you to that song via YouTube.

I Need the Noises of Destruction When There's Nothing New (Or: I Like It When Voices Grate)

Vocals in a band can be something of a peculiarity. I listen to a number of artists that at least primarily lack them, and enjoy many of those artists on into the "upper echelons" of my taste in music. My affections for Goblin, Aphex Twin, Mogwai alone are enough that when they come up with some people it's with the acknowledgment that their appreciation stems from my own and the sharing of it. But instrumental music isn't always for everyone--heck, all three of those artists have used vocals in one way or another¹.

But vocals are more likely to be a splitting point for people, it seems. Sure, the 80s are maligned in general for their drum sound a lot of the time, it having become so dominant that The Church had their third album, Seance, rendered with gated reverb drums basically without their knowledge, let alone their consent. That, however, tends to be more association and generalized preference, and it hasn't had a major effect on things like popularity of songs overall. In a sense that might confuse the issue, it's similar to the usage of heavily auto-tuned vocals in the modern era, which tends to bug a lot of the same crowd that hates gated reverb. No judgment here, incidentally--but there is truly plenty of crossover there.

Unusual, especially off-key, non-melodic, grating, unusually pitched, or strangely toned or timbred voices can rapidly put people off an entire body of work. Some will even forego an artist's work until someone covers it, simply because the original author's voice is inexpert, amateurish, or just plain weird. Respect is occasionally given to these artists by folks who can't stand their voices, because it has nothing to do with the song itself.

To ease us into something that will eventually start annoying the hell out of some readers, let's start with the voice of one Tom Waits:

What's the Point of Holding on to What Never Gets Used? (Or: Why Negative Reviewing Does Not Belong Here)

While I am unsurprised that my least acknowledged post continues to be my confused and rambling "mission statement" (I mean, it has no pictures or music!), there's something to the whole idea. If I had to stop the rambling and confusion and take it to a single sentence: I want to talk about the good, the peculiar and the interesting in music.

I thought of this as I was listening to limbo band (somewhere between independent and 'mainstream,' and with derision and praise arriving from either end) the Whigs. I was attempting to decipher a word here or there in the song "So Lonely,"¹ and I couldn't actually find the lyrics posted anywhere, which is relatively unusual for a band on ATO Records (a division of RCA) and all. They've released two albums, no less, both even distributed on vinyl (indeed, because it was a ridiculously good deal for including the actual CD, I have the vinyl of Mission Control), meaning there's some force behind them.

What I did find were a bunch of dismissive reviews, quoting the lyrics I was attempting to filter by as means to decry the band as "cliché-ridden" or derivative (though I did also find a brief entry on one blog from someone who stumbled into the song after liking their first album and losing track). The two foremost reviews--which quote the chorus of "So Lonely"--are from PopMatters and SputnikMusic, sites I've run across in the past, though I admit that I really don't read reviews too much, unless I'm feeling anxious about a new album from a band I already like.

Now, just to give us a frame of reference before I launch into the whole point of this entry, here's that song and its accompanying video:

That Make a Small Portion of the World Cry -- B-Sides

There are, I don't know four or five major types of bonus tracks included on reissues and special versions of albums: studio out-takes and "alternate" versions, live tracks, b-sides, BBC sessions (which are occasionally live), and non-album singles. Similarly, there are about four major types of compilation: the best of or greatest hits, which typically collects singles with an occasional popular deep cut;the live album, which may contain a concert or two, or tracks excised from a variety of performances, either on a single tour or throughout a band's career; rarities albums that contain a mix of the "bonus tracks" I've just listed, and occasionally focusing exclusively or almost exclusively on one of them like b-sides or BBC sessions; and "comprehensive" (sometimes!) anthologies of a band's entire career that typically contain all of the above, though they're sometimes just pretentiously named "best of" compilations.

Now, there's debate, concern, wariness, and about every negative (and probably every positive) attitude you can think of when it comes to these "extra" or "bonus" tracks. Some people are annoyed when they interrupt the repeat flow of an album, when playing it numerous times in succession on a CD player or the like. Others think it's a cheap gimmick to gouge people for money. Some people just find them extraneous junk and trim them away in digital form or just eject the CD when the album proper ends. Some artists or labels acknowledge this and program in an extra bit of silence to separate the album from its errata, often using the "negative space" that CD technology allows (I'll talk more about this some other time, as it's actually quite interesting), or doing like Rhino did with their 2008 Replacements reissues, and sticking in an audio cue, which, in that case, was the sound of someone walking to a door and locking up to leave (which I appreciated at the end of "Here Comes a Regular," but was disheartening to find on every other album, including the far more raucous Sorry Ma, Forgot to Take Out the Trash or Stink, where it was less appropriate to the song it followed). They're a mixed bag in "anthologies" and the like, too, being seen in the same light as "valueless filler" to some, and the entire point to others.

Me? I love them.

Indeed, for whatever it says about me, there's little I love more than dissecting these extra tracks--or, better yet, whole compilations of them!--and discovering where they came from, the context they originally appeared in, and how they were originally presented, if at all. My digital music database is filled to the brim with excessive information, like replacing an album title with the name and location of a studio for "unreleased" tracks, which I arrange by their recording dates. It's interesting to find a studio appear in common between seemingly disparate artists, or to find a studio that has seen a huge chunk of a genre come through it. Trident Studios in London, for instance, saw Harry Nilsson recording for Son of Schmilsson, David Bowie recording for many of his earlier albums--and the Buzzcocks, recording demos shortly after Howard DeVoto left to form Magazine.

But let's pare me down here, and for now, let's talk about my favourite of these options: The B-Side.