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It is with a heavy heart that we must suspend the Ruby Tuesday feature indefinitely. But fret not, gentle readers. We hope to resurrect the series in the not-too-distant future. Until then, enjoy that Lilac Time track while you can, because it’s coming down a week from now. D’oh. |
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That boiiiing sound you just heard was BE Associate Editor Will Harris. He introduced me to this song, you see, and in the process introduced me to one of my favorite albums of all time, so he is surely enjoying this post. Truth be told, I’m generally not a pastoral pop kind of guy. Yes, there are Kinks and XTC records that I will defend to the death, and I even have a healthy amount of Belle & Sebastian in my CD collection – something I am loath to admit after being shamed by my former coworker Katie a few years ago – but if you’re going to be precious, you damn well better make it catchy, and hooks are the one thing on which the Lilac Time does not skimp. For me, the key is the backing harmony of Claire Worrell; without her, lead singer Stephen Duffy’s clever lyrics and the pedal steel guitar land on deaf ears. Interesting fact: Duffy agreed to co-write songs with Barenaked Ladies singer Steven Page after Page sent him a demo tape. Whether Duffy has made more money from his association with Page than he has on his own, however, is unknown. |
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Let’s keep this one simple, shall we? It’s a holiday, and we work during enough holidays as it is. Merry Christmas, everyone. Here’s to hoping that Ben Watt and Tracey Thorn will grace us with a new record sometime before we die. |
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After tumbling down the remix rabbit hole in the mid to late ’80s, the unthinkable happened: the scene changed on me. By the early ’90s all hell was breaking loose in the clubs. House music pretty much wiped my favorite kinds of dance records off the map (mostly dance oriented rock, or DOR as they once called it). That, combined with my remix hero Shep Pettibone’s sudden retirement, left me in no man’s land. EMF producer Ralph Jezzard made some nifty mixes, but he didn’t make enough of them. I slowly stopped paying attention to remixes at that point. Then one day my old DJ buddy Paul MacDonald sends me a dozen cassettes with assorted remixes and such on it. One of them was called Techno Mixes. Techno, at one point, meant New Order and Nitzer Ebb. By this point it meant Orgy and Moby. This new techno frightened and confused me, but I pressed on. Most of the tunes were pretty harmless, really. They stole lines from movies, TV shows, educational films, what have you, and surrounded them with shrieking synthesizers. There was a tune called “Sesame’s Treat” that amused me. “LSD is the Bomb” had a cool drum track, and someone even sampled the theme to “Halloween” for a song. Meh. And then I heard “It’s Grim Up North,” and my jaw hit the floor. Officially credited to the Justified Ancients of Mu Mu, “It’s Grim Up North” is the KLF in disguise (though not really in disguise). Released in late 1991, the band had made some inroads on the American charts earlier that summer, but “Grim” was playing a completely different sport than their Top Five hit “3 A.M. Eternal.” Those songs were bouncy: “It’s Grim Up North” was industrial grit, complete with screaming steam whistles. Bill Drummond’s lyrics are nothing but lists of cities in northern England (you can find a list on the song’s Wikipedia page), spoken in bleak monotone. And then, after pummeling and pounding the listener for eight minutes, the drums give way to the hymn “Jerusalem,” steam whistles still screaming in the background. Hell, yes. The song didn’t convert me to the then-new techno scene, but it did serve as one hell of a last hurrah to my golden age of dance. “Sesame’s Treat,” on the other hand, hasn’t held up so well. Filed under: Pop and Alternative and Electronica and Songs and External Music and Ruby Tuesday Comments: None |
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Rare is the girl that has been able to positively school me on music — no offense, ladies, but most girls simply don’t have the passion for it that I have — so when one comes along that can teach me a few new tricks, the lessons have been memorable ones. It is with this piece that I salute Jen Mueller, a onetime college sweetheart who made me one of the best mix tapes I have ever received. Yes, it was an actual tape. Hey, it was 1987. We didn’t even have CD players back then. No, we didn’t add using an abacus. Shut up. Anyway, to make things even more interesting (for her, anyway; frustrating as hell for me), she covered the track listing in blue marker so I could not read the names of the songs or the artists. Listen and learn, that was the lesson. Luckily, I knew most of the songs or artists — The Cure, Echo & the Bunnymen, Tears for Fears, World Party, Paul Young, Dream Academy, The Stranglers and a killer Thompson Twins mix spring to mind — but a couple of them left me positively baffled. There are songs called “Dark Intentions” and “Deep Blue Sea” that I’m still trying to track down 20 years later, but I was able to weasel the artist name out of one of the unknowns: The Bluebells. Never heard of them. Little did I know, they had broken up two years earlier, though the song she gave me, “Will She Always Be Waiting,” sounded light years ahead of its time. Big, technicolor strings, lotsa jangling acoustic guitars, and harmonies by the pound. It was wonderful. Still is, in fact. I recently came across a copy of the record that “Will She Always Be Waiting” called home, the 1984 album Sisters. It’s clearly a vinyl transfer — I’m pretty sure there’s even a small skip towards the end — but that actually makes it sound even better to me. Thanks, Jen. My life’s a little better for having you in it, even if for a brief period. I hope you’re doing well. |
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The ’90s were flooded with a ton of UK-based bands who made precious little impact on the U.S. charts…mostly because the few of them who scored Stateside release for their debut albums rarely got a chance to build an audience by getting to put a second album on our shores. But if it was bad for the British bands who were just getting started, you can imagine how rough it was for the artists who’d already been around for awhile and still couldn’t get an album released over here. Such was the case for Mega City Four, the pop/punk/grunge band who got rolling in the late ’80s and went on a three-year streak of releasing an album a year - Tranzophobia (’89), Who Cares Wins (’90), and Terribly Sorry Bob (’91) - yet with none of them finding American distribution. Finally, in 1992, high-profile indie label Caroline Records cut the band a break and delivered Sebastopol Rd. onto our nation. Were we grateful? Not so much. Those who actually heard the album were thrilled; unfortunately, their numbers were few, and that was the last America heard from Mega City Four. (The Brits, meanwhile, were gifted with two further studio albums, a live record, and a collection of the band’s Peel Sessions.) One of the highlights of Sebastopol Rd. was a unique love song, one sung to - of all people - Mrs. Mel Brooks, a.k.a. Mrs. Robinson herself, Anne Bancroft. We’ve all had an unrequited and ultimately pointless crush on a movie star at some point in our lives, but MC4 frontman / songwriter Wiz put pen to paper and, in three and a half minutes of bouncy pop bliss, captures the feelings that might happen if you never had that inevitable realization, “I am never, ever going to actually meet this person.” To put it into prose form… I get some second looks, but they can’t hold a candle to you. Alas, Wiz isn’t waiting any longer: he passed away from a blood clot on the brain on December 6, 2006. But if there’s any justice in the afterlife, he and Ms. Bancroft have already had a good laugh over how she inspired one of the finest moments of his songwriting career. Filed under: Rock and Pop and Alternative and Songs and Artists and Downloads and Ruby Tuesday Comments: None |
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It’s August 2005, and a press release lands in my inbox about an upcoming Simple Minds album, Black & White 050505. I’m rightfully skeptical, since the last album I had bought from the band, the 2001 covers album Neon Lights, was up there (down there?) with Duran Duran’s Thank You as one of the worst covers albums (worst albums?) of all time. But my love for the holy trinity of New Gold Dream, Sparkle in the Rain and Once Upon a Time ruled out, and I requested a copy, hoping against hope that they would not disappoint me yet again. And holy smokes, was I glad I did. The album is amazing, easily their best work since Once Upon a Time and quite possibly better. Suddenly, I can’t wait for this album to come out so I can set up an interview with Jim Kerr, even though I knew that even if I were able to score such an interview coup, there’d be no way in hell I would be able to translate it. Seriously, have you ever heard him speak? For as crystal-clear as he sings, his speaking voice is a riddle wrapped in an enigma wrapped in a drowning Scotsman. Alas, my hopes were dashed when the album was bumped to January of the following year, and when January arrived…it was removed from the schedule altogether. Dude, not cool. To date, the album has yet to grace US shores, and that is nothing short of tragic. Witness today’s Ruby Tuesday selection “Stranger,” which combines the present-day ideas of a couple aging divas (Madonna’s song, Cher’s vocoder) and gives them an old-school Simple Minds once-over. Sha la la la, indeed. |
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When I first heard Bis, I was pretty sure I hated them. I mean, it was on a tribute album to the Smiths, fer crissakes. What on earth were they doing there? I still don’t have a good answer to that question. Bis, after all, were the ‘90s equivalent of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, which means they were the ‘80s equivalent of Berlin and the Human League. Do any of those bands have a single thing in common with the Smiths? No, which is what made their version of “The Boy with a Thorn in His Side” both fascinating and maddening. On the plus side, they gave the song the danceable beat that it begged for all along. On the other hand, they also stripped Johnny Marr’s lovely chord progression out, effectively turning the song into a dub mix. Not what this Smiths fan was looking for. Fast forward three years, and Bis releases their second album Social Dancing. Somehow, it catches my ear – I’m guessing they landed a track on a CMJ compilation, as I was a subscriber at the time – and I find a promo copy cheap…and in the process discover a song that still pops up on Medsker mix discs. Short, fast, funny and insanely catchy, “I’m a Slut” gleefully pokes fun at gender roles – “Have I done something to upset you / Was my dress a bit too see-through” – but had a Shirley Manson badass-ness to it as well. In a musical climate that was still suffering a hangover from what Alanis Morissette hath wrought, it was a most welcome breath of fresh air. The band’s 2001 EP, Music from a Stranger World, was even better than Social Dancing, but it wasn’t good enough to stop them from breaking up two years later. Wikipedia says that they recently reunited for a few gigs in England. You have to think that they’re watching this whole ‘80s retro thing and thinking, “WTF?” Filed under: Rock and Pop and Alternative and Rock Babes and Songs and External Music and Ruby Tuesday Comments: None |
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My childhood idols are releasing a new album next week, and I am fearful that it is going to suck donkey donkey donkey donkey. I base this concern on two things: the flat-as-a-pancake lead single “Falling Down,” and the album’s title, Red Carpet Massacre. One of these days, Duran Duran will learn not to write the punch lines for their critics. You’d think they would have learned that lesson after the dismal 1995 covers album Thank You, but no, they called their 2000 album Pop Trash, to which most reviewers said, “Yeah, that sounds about right.” The band’s last album, 2004’s Astronaut, was better than it had a right to be, since it had been almost two decades since the original band had written together. We should have known not to get too optimistic for a second helping: Andy Taylor, once again, wasn’t happy with the direction the band was headed – and anyone who’s heard “Nite Runner,” the band’s collaboration with Timbaland and Justin Timberlake, knows exactly where those fears surfaced – and he left in the middle of recording. Hello, 1985, nice to see you again. Your hair seems…bigger than I remember. Nevertheless, I will eagerly await the arrival of Massacre in my mailbox, hoping against hope that the band merely chose the wrong song as the lead single. It’s happened before – “Electric Barbarella,” wow, was that song awful – so you just never know. In the meantime, I’m paying tribute to my favorite song from the band’s 1993 second eponymous album, a.k.a. The Wedding Album. Unlike anything the band has recorded before or since, “Breath after Breath” shows the band dabbling in Latin music a good three years before it was trendy to do so. Plus, Milton Nascimento has a voice like butter. |
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Oh, that silly Stuart Price. Not content to see the French get all of the headlines and hit singles during that big wave in the late ‘90s (Daft Punk, Air, Dmitri from Paris), the Reading, England native christens himself Jacques Lu Cont and records a French house music-style album under the name Les Rythmes Digitales. It would be years before anyone was wise to his ruse, even though he left a pretty big clue at the very beginning: one of the collaborators on LRD’s only album, 1999’s Darkdancer, was…Nik Kershaw. Yes, that Nik Kershaw. Our Ruby Tuesday selection, “Soft Machine,” was not released as a single, a decision that baffles us to this day. Perhaps its mid-90s BPM (that’s beats per minute, by the by) was considered too slow for a club scene that was all about speed – go back and listen to the remixes for Madonna’s “Music,” where the warp-drive beat track renders the song unrecognizable – but damn, check out that drum track. Stop, start, thump, backwards snare, fat-ass keyboard squawk. It’s like Sly Fox’s “Let’s Go All the Way” on steroids. Take that however you like. |
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Talk about star-crossed bands. Ft. Worth quintet Sugarbomb freaking rocked, dude. They could sing, they could play, and most importantly, they could write. The only thing they couldn’t do, it appears, was win the love of their label, RCA. After receiving instructions from the label to dumb their music down, Sugarbomb singer and main songwriter Les Farrington gave them “Hello,” a Vertical Horizon-ish slice of generic pop/rock. “You want dumb? Here you go!” Les said. The label loved it. Uh oh. The song was a minor hit, popping up on a couple soundtracks, but it was not at all indicative of how talented Sugarbomb really were. Worse, the song gave RCA an idea of how to sell the band, but it would mean turning Sugarbomb into something they were most decidedly not: a generic pop band. Soon after the album was released, RCA dropped the band (the album came out two weeks after 9/11, so RCA was cleaning house). Infighting soon followed, and a few months later, Sugarbomb were finished. Tragic. Submitted for your approval is “After All,” the final track on the band’s fabulous album Bully (you can find it for a couple bucks on Half.com) and as grand a tribute to Queen as you’re likely to find outside of “Knights of Cydonia.” The last I heard, Sugarbomb singer Les Farrington was playing at piano bars. Why he doesn’t have a MySpace page, I’ll never understand. Filed under: Rock and Pop and Alternative and Songs and External Music and Ruby Tuesday Comments: 4 Comments |
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There were few straight men that pimped Rufus Wainwright quite like I once did. From the second I heard “April Fools,” the stunning first single from his Jon Brion-produced debut album, I was hooked. Yes, the voice is an acquired taste, but DAMN, man, listen to that climbing hook in the verse! And while I quite liked Want One, his 2003 meditation on drugs, desperation, 9/11 and family, I have been non-plussed by everything he’s done since then. I haven’t hated any of it, mind you, or even disliked it: I just found it, well, deathly serious. Even the concert I saw him give in the summer of 2004, an acoustic tour with Ben Folds, was a drag. We left before he was finished. I never do that. Well, almost never. It is with that thought that I’ve decided to go back and pay tribute to one of the songs that made me like him so much in the first place. “Shadows,” a song from his 2001 album Poses that was produced by onetime Propellerhead Alex Gifford, is unlike anything else in Wainwright’s catalog. Where Wainwright is normally about what will work on the theater stage, this song is all about the groove, and Gifford, as any owner of the sole Propellerheads album Decksanddrumsandrockandroll can attest, knows a thing or two about grooves. This isn’t even a fast groove; it’s just a supa smoove white boy groove. Please, Rufus, I’m begging you: take off the lederhosen, put the opera records away, and make another pop album. If you could make a song like this once, you could easily do it twice, especially since you’ve had six years to do so. |
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Bob Geldof’s Boomtown Rats were originally pegged as Springsteen ripoff artists – and if you’ve ever heard “Rat Trap” or “Joey’s on the Street Again,” you know exactly where that rumor got started – but their US debut, A Tonic for the Troops, was much more than a series of “Rosalita” rewrites. And while the band came to prominence during the punk scene, let’s face it: the Rats were no more a punk band than the Clash were. They could rock, sure (“She’s So Modern,” “Blind Date,” “Mary of the 4th Form”), but at heart they were a pop band. A very strange, wonderful pop band. Thus, “Me and Howard Hughes,” a harmony-drenched song about a guy who fancies himself a self-loathing eccentric. Lock yourself up in your room and enjoy this criminally overlooked band. |
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If you scoured CD bins at any point in the mid to late ‘90s, chances are you saw dozens of copies of Babe Rainbow, the album that spawned this Tuesday’s ruby, “You Don’t Understand.” The song serves as House of Love’s answer of sorts to the Charlatans UK’s “The Only One I Know.” You can almost picture singer/songwriter Guy Chadwick saying, “Oh, you’re gonna steal Deep Purple’s ‘Hush,’ are you? Well, I’ll steal Spencer Davis Group’s ‘I’m a Man,’ then! How ya like them apples?” Actually, them apples is pretty sweet, if you ask me. |
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Back in 1989, when Cameron Crowe rounded up John Cusack, Ione Skye, and John Mahoney and produced one of the greatest teen romances of all time (duh, of course we’re talking about “Say Anything…”), he also found time to compose a rather memorable soundtrack as well. The film’s money shot, of course, belonged to Peter Gabriel’s “In Your Eyes,” but songs from The Red Hot Chili Peppers and The Replacements were used to great effect as well. Hiding way, way at the end of the soundtrack album, however, was a song that I fell in love with about as hard and fast as anything I’d heard in awhile: “Keeping the Dream Alive,” by Freiheit…or, as they’re more commonly known in their native Germany, Münchener Freiheit.
I didn’t know the first thing about Freiheit when I discovered “Keeping the Dream Alive,” but, damn, that song was such a gorgeous, sweeping ballad of ELO-sized proportions that I immediately knew that I’d have to seek out more of their material. As it happens, there wasn’t anything else to seek out…well, not in the U.S., anyway. Not long after, however, the band’s debut American release, Fantasy, found its way onto shelves and, almost immediately thereafter, into my collection. To this day, I’m still surprised that it never scored much in the way of success; it’s a highly enjoyable pop album that owes as much to Benny Andersson and Björn Ulvaeus as it does Jeff Lynne. The only real explanation I’ve ever come up with is that it’s a bit heavier on synths and electronic drum beats than the kids were listening to at the time, but it still features heavily in my regular playlist even in 2007. Unfortunately, Fantasy remains out of print in the U.S., and since that was the only Stateside release of the band’s career, Freiheit’s profile remains woefully low on our shores. Even the usually helpful All Music Guide gives them short shrift, with the bio in their entry simply reading, “This German band (orig. Munchener Freiheit) played power-pop music from 1982 to 1988.” That’s it. Talk about your inglorious retrospectives! If you’re curious about the band, there are several import best-of collections available via Amazon, but you should be prepared to find them almost completely free of English-sung material. If you don’t speak German as fluently as the members of Freiheit, however, here’s a song from Fantasy that you might appreciate a bit more: Filed under: Pop and Alternative and Deep Cuts and Lost Bands and Songs and Artists and External Music and Downloads and Ruby Tuesday Comments: None |
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