MELOMANIA with a solid summer six-pack taking you from Teen Pop to NOISE!
to quote Stephen Furst from Animal House "Oh boy! This is great!"
ARLIE - BREAK THE CURSE [CD](Atlantic)
Apparently, it has been a long four years of gestation for the Pop band (it's really Teen Pop, but their content and ideas are actually more advanced.) "BREAK THE CURSE" is the sign of that time spent crafting songs and production paying off. Listen to their singles and watch their videos, and one gets a very Monkees-like energy from their mixture of hooks, looks, and clowning for the camera. A good Pop song to me has to be like a sucker punch. Their best track is the sparkling "crashing down" with its instantly memorable chorus and the brilliant mixture of grim lyrics sung through smiling faces. Like Wallows, Arlie is practicing a less-is-more functionality on this record where several details really leap out."poppin" is a standard modern Pop song slowly building and bubbling up, while tricking you with its gender-bending narration. Then there is a pop-chorus Phoenix-like hang ("Tell me what yoooooooou really think of me,") and genius-level hiccuping pauses through its curse word. Now, the song itself is a light confection - but Arlie clearly has a direct interest in actually writing the smallest new conceits. Elsewhere, "icetrays" starts out teasing with its typical Eighties SynthPop stomp rolling strong through several chord changes, "wait a minute" is another effervescent Sixties-style Pop production with a thunderous intro and Seventies Pop style chorus. "BREAK THE CURSE" has a lot that favors the current flavors of Pop for sure, but they have a wealth of novel ideas that lead me to hope they break through with the minimal heartbreak of "sickk" enough to earn the stripes to actually make more guitar-based Pop. However, we are not their target audience - but - we still see the potential for success.
SOCCER96 - Inner Worlds [LP](Moshi Moshi UK)
Danalogue (on synths from The Comet Is Coming and producing the excellent debut from Snapped Ankles) plus Betamax (on drums from The Comet Is Coming and others) explore the Jazzy side of SynthPop. Their songs are stark synth vs. drums either in battle or wash. Betamax's live Drum N' Bass style ("Speak More Of Love") keeps "Inner Worlds" so kinetic and consistent. Danalogue's sound manipulation and noodling free up a wealth of space for their legion of guest singers and some seriously inventive fills from Betamax. When the duo turns it on they present such depth ("Inner Worlds" and its Coltrane-esque turnaround) and almost Musik Kosmiche-level hypnosis (the brilliant closer "Double Helix" with Tom Skinner of Sons of Kemet and now The Smile.)
RALPH HEIDEL - Modern Life [LP](Kryptox GER)
Ralph Heidel is a saxophonist and synthesist (among other instruments as well.) However, Heidel actually synthesizes all of his sounds together but never allows them to sound the least bit unnatural. On the beautiful "HULO," Heidel starts with the amazing feat of making his saxophone speak through his synthesizer. Unlike Laurie Anderson or even Kanye West for that matter, it is so humanizing to hear. As the electronics bubble up around it, so does the natural sound of the saxophone and its moving chords. "Radical Matter" re-evaluated EDM around live drums (and the breaks between), and "Admiring" with Plateau Green could be a Notwist song newly lit by his glowing saxophone. "Modern Life" is Heidel's tableau of compositional ideas brought together to demonstrate his range - and most importantly defy categorization.
CHROME CANYON - Director [LP/CD](Stones Throw/Redeye)
As long as working musicians have been scoring films they search for a different level of emulation than they would on stage or even from their normal output. The level of imitation can sometimes get in the way. Neil Young's guitar is ever-present in "Dead Man" but its well-timed strikes work. Chrome Canyon is an artist who wants to exclusively make film music. His second album of prospective (sorry, cannot say imaginary) film scores works its magic without visuals. His synths either chirp along in neat, subtle sequence(r)s, beautifully roll through Bach/Mozart level arpeggios and/or color the sky neon with one colorful burst of sound. Inspired by Tangerine Dream ("Snow In The Headlights,") Walter/Wendy Carlos (the beautiful opener "Broken Theme" which had me looking up what film it actually was from), and the just lost Vangelis (the stunning "Knife's Edge.") Chrome Canyon finds the strange intimacy of those early synth-only scores (that worked, many did not - and sound awfully dated.) The Goblin-esque "Looking Back Is Blinding" starts off as close enough to match a few Eighties Argento movies, but his rubbery bass and the looseness he employs in the long ending actually make it his own. While the Eighties-style Moroder bubbler "Synthetic Dopamine" is almost too exact in its sonic extraction, yet Chrome Canyon's use of that small envelope of distortion underneath makes it irresistible. Hire this man to score your film!
MERZBOW/LAWRENCE ENGLISH - Eternal Stalker [LP/CD](Dais)
A Merzbow record is generally one that you never wander into unprepared. As we have discussed before, outlasting the gale-force winds of a track and "squinting" to hear the small random details Masami Akita throws into the frenzy is part of the process. In his first collaboration with Australian noise sculptor Lawrence English, the pair achieve a level of blistering white noise that is at times hair-raising fright and at others cathartic. Derived from field recordings at a factory, the sounds here go beyond industrial to the point of making you feel like you are trapped beneath a screeching rollercoaster with a track aligned to each ear. Based on Andrei Tartakovsky's classic film "Stalker," these tracks match both the movie's purposeful slow grind and sense of otherworldliness. "A Gate of Light" is a ball of flaming existential rage. First, you feel it in your head, then in your whole body, until you are so gripped by it you cannot reach over to stop the track if you must. While the brilliant conclusion "A Thing, Just Silence" is a literal wall of noise that makes you feel like your hair is on fire until it finally takes its beautiful long dovetail fade out. "Eternal Stalker" is again not for everyone.
BUFFALO - Dead Forever.... [LP](Akarma ITA)
Say what you will about the Beatles in the Sixties. One of their most important contributions to music in the world at large was how their slew of inspiration-fueled imitators quickly found their own sound, method, and delivery of similar blends of Pop/Rock. In the Seventies, that worldwide rocket fuel was Heavy Metal. In its vicious bluesy strain of Proto-Metal, bands became alchemists concocting their own blends of Psychedelic, Biker Rock, Boogie, and pre-Doom/Stoner Stomp. In Japan, one man's revelation from listening to Jimi Hendrix spread to an entire subgenre of Proto-Metal. However, the most significant early export of the Ur-Metal that resulted from the long tendrils of Sabbath, Uriah Heep, and Deep Purple was in Australia. Like the British Blues Bands of the early Sixties that became the Hard Rock kings of the later decade, Australia's most seasoned musicians wound their way from making music "so people can dance," to diving so deep into the underground that you took those same listeners to destinations unknown.
Buffalo (who took the moniker so they could be next to the Beatles in the alphabet) is the prototypical Aussie Proto-Metal band. Their music is the beginning of it all. With the also-underrated Billy Thorpe (see "Mama" not "Children of The Sun,") Buffalo churned out several burning records as Rock was getting its footing Down Under (and co-existing with the "Sharpie Music" - that's for another day.) The best description of Buffalo comes from Australian musicologist Ian McFarlane who once described the band as "nothing subtle about Buffalo's primal, heavyweight sound, but it was delivered with a great deal of conviction ... combining the dense, occult riffing ... with the progressive blues chops ... the band certainly captured the arrogant disposition of the times in a bold and thunderous fashion."
Their 1972 debut "Dead Forever...." gives you all the pieces they had to assemble and the ability to hear how well they start to fit them together over the course of one album. Their debut single "Suzie Sunshine" is the earliest blueprint of their transformation from strutting Blues to guitar ragers. The riff guitar is actually mixed hottest of all, leaving the wailing vocals to occupy as much speaker space as the swirling lead. Midway through, the track changes to its headbanging tempo and vocalist Dave Tice reaches scream-level vocals. The unidentifiable Free cover "I'm A Mover" hearkens back to Sixties blues it is a massive riff and swollen lope. However, the Paul Rodgers-esque vocals immediately go as high as possible establishing a standard that Buffalo must keep their energy peaking even as its stomps like Sabbath. Again, like "Suzie Sunshine," "I'm A Mover" uses its chorus for a taste of tempo change - namely, the boogie that is swiftly growing in popularity. The Blues Image cover of "Pay My Dues" is so thunderous that Buffalo reveals that they use TWO vocalists. These fast changes become what sets Buffalo far apart and likely led to their becoming the first Australian act signed to Vertigo.
Their originals show ingenuity too. The slide-driven boogie-to-shuffle "Ballad of Irving Fink" sounds like a Biker Blues yowl with a great chorus. "Bean Stew" carries that same simmer Biker jam into a great resolution where they get to shout the title. However, it is the six minutes of "Forest Rain" where you really see Buffalo carrying their sound into the expanses of their island home. The deep percussion and its almost Prog-ian structure are lost in the raw emotion of the early almost-Vedder-like vocals and the wah guitar build-up (the sound effects might deter from its impact, however.)
"Dead Forever...." was deemed unplayable by most Aussie radio stations, so it is also important that the demand for more music like it led to more adventurous stations. 1973 will be their year as "Volcanic Rock" is around the corner (along with the all-important Sunbury Pop '73 festival) to blow the doors open on Aussie Heavy Metal. Then called "Pub Rock," the success of Buffalo (whose debut moved 25,000 units without radio support,) Billy Thorpe & The Aztecs and the Sunbury festivals led the brothers Young to start their own band in November 1973 and anoint it AC/DC.
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