New Oldies For Ear Canals

What once felt like a gridlock of rock albums during the Seventies and Eighties now appears to be an embarrassment of riches in terms of new albums and bands to discover now that there's very little new product grabbing your attention. I've just begun to discover all kinds of old treasures, and while I come off looking like Johnny-Come-Lately, I'll gladly accept that title with a smile on my face. What great new sounds await!

Here are some finds, some you may have enjoyed through the years, but new noise for my pink ears:

Fanny Hill (Fanny): Yes, I've always known about them and even bought their Casablanca Records single Butter Boy when it came out, but never really looked further into their albums. Big mistake, there's some great stuff going on here. Fanny Hill may be their best album of the bunch, featuring some great original songs and a legendary cover of The Beatles' Yellow Submarine song "Hey Bulldog".

Among the great originals are the Glam-Bowie /Suffragette City sounds of Borrowed Time, Nickey Barclay's great keyboard playing and soulful vocals on Blind Alley, and the overwrought soap opera drama of Knock On My Door. Great lyrics on that one! There will never be a complete Fanny reunion ever (Barclay's turned down several offers) but we'll always have this entertaining album to enjoy.

Faust IV (Faust): This may be their most accessible album (that's a good thing) and I hear a lot of Frank Zappa in Giggly Smile and some Joy Of A Toy-era Kevin Ayers in It's A Bit Of A Pain and Jennifer. Tracks definitely have more of an acid-drenched picnic vibe to them than on their other albums, and if you're normally afraid of Krautrock this is a good place to start. There's even a jazzy reggae number called The Sad Skinhead.

Huffin' Rag Blues (Nurse With Wound): How do you follow up several decades' worth of industrial skronk? How about releasing a lounge album with enough curve balls to drive you crazy? Well, Huffin' Rag Blues is all that and more. Favorite tracks include Thrill of Romance, Cruisin' For A Bruisin' for the car crash set, and the David Lynch-Julie London nightmare Wash The Dust From My Heart.

Other tracks I like from other scattered albums are The Bottom Feeder and Beetles Crawl Across My Back, definitely not so loungey as the Huffin' album but still pretty amazing stuff. Not for the weak of heart but ultimately rewarding, nevertheless.

Nurse With Wound is the brainchild of Steven Stapleton and he has collaborated with other legendary artists such as Stereolab and Faust, who really get around.

Black Antlers (Coil): It's feels weird hyping an album with a set of testicles on the cover, but when it sounds as outstanding as Black Antlers, nothing's going to stand in your way. A synth & electronics duo featuring Jhonn Balance and Peter Christopherson, the sonic landscapes created by the dearly departed duo have a cinematic intensity to them that you definitely need to check out.

Favorite tracks include Departed, Things We Never Had, the somber Teenage Lightning, and the title track. This is great music to get in your car and fly down the dark highway in the dead of night. This is very moody music best enjoyed for those days when the sun is nowhere to be found.

Subliminal Sandwich (Meat Beat Manifesto): Jack Dangers' electronic soundscapes run the gamut from downbeat to jazz to dubstep and beyond. Tracks like Transmission and She's Unreal have a sexy trance dancability to them, while tracks like Cancer offer bleak, dark urban soundtracks in the Blade Runner mode. Future World indeed!

There's some great listening to be had from these bands, and it's pretty sad that these artists never got the attention they truly deserved. Look into these albums or any other ones by these artists and you'll discover a brave new world of insane sonics guaranteed to crack your brain open like a pink porcelain piggy bank!

Einsturzende Neubauten

The hottest punk band from Germany in the early Eighties was called MDK (Mechanik Destruktiv Kommando) and they had a great song called “Werewolf” and they had a blazin’ skronk sax player. I saw them play at a cool gay bar in Echo Park, when such things were done, called the Other Side. I thought they were wicked.

MDK disappeared and the next big thing from Germany was an industrial band that combined no-wave anti melodies with power tools blasting in the background for percussive and extra sonic dissonance. The band looked like lager-gutted construction workers named Horst and were fronted by an emaciated jumbo haired glam-fop junkie creep named Blixa Bargeld. They were called Einsturzende Neubauten. Translated in English it’s “Collapsing New Buildings”. Scheiss!

I heard they were the opening act for a bogus glam act from England called the Specimen at a forthcoming show in Pasadena at an old-time theatre called Perkins Palace. I wanted to see the boys from Berlin but didn’t have any interest of sitting through a clownish drag-pop joke like Specimen. What would you do?

Half a day later I got a call from Ella, my platonic girlfriend. We met at the Dick Grove School of Music in North Hollywood, a jazz music school where we shared classes in Music Theory and Harmony (Harmony is the science of building chords, Theory is basically the study of everything else). We tried to make a go of being lover boy and girl but it didn’t work out. When we kissed she had the coldest lips of any girl I’ve ever kissed, and she even smelled like an aquarium. When she told me her sign was Pisces the Fish I wasn’t surprised.

When she was in Europe she met Neubauten and got to be chummy with them, so on the day of the show she got a frantic phone call from them, asking her in their 1st grade Englisch if she had a chainsaw they could borrow. Ella said her Daddy had a well-stocked tool shed, but needed a hot thug to carry the Makita for her. “Do you want to go to the show with me? We’ll get in for free”, she said.

“Yeah, let’s go!” I said, my inner hot thug emerging from my wiry wood-worker’s frame.

3 hours later: We got out of Ella’s car with her carrying little V8 tomato juice style canisters of petrol while I carried the heavy chainsaw that didn’t have a case nor a blanket around it. As we made our way past the goth crowd standing in line waiting to get in I glanced over and saw the most terrified vampire kids I’ve ever seen. Haven’t they ever seen a 6 foot tall hot thug carrying an enormous chainsaw in the middle of Old Town Pasadena in the dead of night before? Poseurs!

We walked up to the backstage door and saw an even more nervous bouncer in front.
“Whoa, whoa, whoa, where do you think you’re going with that thing?” the bouncer barked.
“The band requested a chainsaw for their show”, Ella responded.
“No way. Is this a joke?”
“No, we’re on the list. This thing’s pretty heavy. Could you get somebody in the band to pick this up right now?”
The bouncer called for another guy. “Hey, Smitty!”
Smitty walked over and did a horrified double-take at the ominous tool in my hands. “What the fuck is that?”
“They say the band requested the chainsaw for their show?”
“Uh…are we insured for this?”
“Fuck, I don’t know…get those Germans”, he yelled. A minute went by and there was nervous silence. “Do these guys play music?”
“Yeah”, I quipped, “but they might build a table by the end of the show”.
The bouncer gave a sarcastic, nervous laugh. Three minutes later and 2 perky guys from the band showed up.
“Ella, Ja, you brought der tools!” they laughed. “Gut! You are die freundlich gut!” they grabbed the chainsaw from my aching arms.

Showtime: The band took the stage and while guitars and basses were howling other guys from Neubauten were manning noisy power drills and circular saws with sparks flying all over the stage. For their (what ended up being their) last number, the chainsaw finally got pulled out and growled all through the next noise-fest. The fans were on their feet and tearing their poorly dyed hair out and screaming. Finally a fire broke out on stage and the band’s amps and mikes got turned off and the curtain closed on them. Everybody went crazy. Specimen were fucked; they couldn’t follow this – nobody could! And I was a part of musical history…AGAIN.