// Category Archive for: Music Reviews

Music Review: The Fun Boy Three, The Fun Boy Three

By Melissa Bratcher

The re-release of The Fun Boy Three’s eponymous debut album makes for fascinating, exhausting listening. A mix of musical styles—ska, rocksteady, jazz, dancehall—primitive percussion, sharp horns, and smart harmonies, it all seems so light and pleasant. Until you listen to the lyrics. Politically aware and a capsule of the fear and paranoia of Thatcher’s Britain in the early 1980s, these are not songs for a blithe singalong. Which is good.

Hatching fully formed from the forehead of The Specials after feeling creatively stifled, Terry Hall, Lynval Golding, and Neville Staples created something bold. These songs didn’t need to be arranged for horns and female vocalists (though on several tracks they are joined by Bananarama, to great effect) and the result is stripped down and innovative. The Fun Boy Three sounds immediate still.

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Music Review: Scared To Get Happy: A Story of Indie-Pop 1980 – 1989

By Stuart Myerburg

Scared To Get Happy takes on the daunting task of documenting the evolution of indie-pop in the 1980s. Given the diversity of styles that can fall under the indie-pop umbrella, a comprehensive study of all facets of the genre would be nearly impossible, especially in the span of five discs. But the compilation makes things more manageable by limiting its scope. Focusing exclusively on British artists and evoking a particular time and place in musical history, it endeavors to tell a story rather than be a definitive guide.

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Waxing Nostalgic Cover Albums: Replicants, Replicants

By Jeffery X Martin

Take the guys from space-rock band Failure, Tool’s first bassist, and a kick-ass keyboardist and set them to deconstructing and rebuilding some of the finest rock songs of the 1970s and 1980s. The result is the band (and their eponymous 1995 release), Replicants.

It’s, well, a little weird. Therefore, I love it.

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Music Review: The Garden, The Life And Times Of A Paperclip

By Less Lee Moore

My introduction to The Garden was the video for “I Am A Woman.” I was immediately taken with the band’s sound and the low budget, nonsensical video that featured one member wearing women’s clothes and makeup. Music that sounds like Killing Joke and The Minutemen? Guys in drag? Sign me up.

The Life And Times Of A Paperclip is the Burger Records debut of the duo known as The Garden, 19-year-old identical twins named Wyatt (vocals, bass) and Fletcher (drums, drag) Shears, who started making music a couple of years ago. Although the album has 16 tracks, it’s only 19 minutes long, but the songs are so good, you’ll be happy to listen to it on repeat for a couple of hours at a time.

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Waxing Nostalgic Cover Albums: Bulletboys, Rocked & Ripped

By Jeffery X Martin

I don’t know what a Bulletboy is. I might have heard one of their songs late at night while driving. Someone might have mentioned the name at a bar. That seems right, because I was more than likely drunk. I don’t remember things so well when I’m drunk.

Here’s the funny thing.

Now that I’ve listened to a cover album by Bulletboys called, aggressively enough, Rocked & Ripped, I have to go back and listen to their entire catalog. If Bulletboys is as wacky, bluesy, and just flat-out good as this record is, I have some catching up to do.

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Music Review: Soft Metals, Lenses

By Less Lee Moore

Soft Metals is an appropriate name for a band whose members initially bonded over analog synthesizers. The music of Patricia Hall and Ian Hicks has a hypnagogic quality that’s both solid and liquid. Their newest album, Lenses, continues this liminal exercise with various lyrical visions of love and lust. How you interpret the songs can depend on your mood or point of view.

Rather than relying on harsh textures, the washes of synths on Lenses are mostly fuzzy, sometimes squishy, but rarely piercing, and even then, only when it’s most effective. Hall’s chilly, voluptuous delivery is appropriate for music that’s overflowing with icy sensuality, frequently sounding like the lost soundtrack to a sci fi film from the late ’70s or early ’80s.

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Music Review: White Fence, White Fence (Reissue)

By Less Lee Moore

If you’ve become a fan of Tim Presley’s loopy, psychedelic White Fence but haven’t yet heard the eponymous debut, you’re in luck. Drag Records offshoot God? has reissued the album on vinyl. It’s probably the best format for a White Fence album.

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Music Review: Tommy Boyce and Bobby Hart, I Wonder What She’s Doing Tonite

By Melissa Bratcher

Both the liner notes and the back cover of I Wonder What She’s Doing Tonite posit that Tommy Boyce and Bobby Hart’s association with the Monkees hurt Boyce & Hart’s legacy—that by having written for a “made-for-TV” pop band somehow diminishes their songwriting credibility. Every Monkees album, save for the soundtrack to Head, had at least one Boyce and Hart song on it. And most of those songs were perfect little pop diamonds, carefully crafted and catchy as anything.

I Wonder What She’s Doing Tonite is a collection of the best of Boyce & Hart. Full of complex pop songs with amazing production, these songs will make you wonder just why they aren’t revered like Goffin/King or Mann/Weil. It’s pure joy in your ears.

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Waxing Nostalgic Cover Albums: Powerman 5000, Copies, Clones & Replicants

By Jeffery X Martin

When you die and go to hell, and Satan forces you and the other souls doomed to eternal torment into an aerobics class, the only album your sadistic demon instructor will ever play will be Powerman 5000’s cover album, Copies, Clones & Replicants. You will scream in agony and beg for relief. It will not come.

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Music Review: The Blow Monkeys, Feels Like A New Morning

By Melissa Bratcher

The Blow Monkeys have returned and I didn’t even know I’d missed them. The aptly titled Feels Like A New Morning is a collection of hopeful songs, sung by a man who is clearly at a crossroads, and who sounds pretty damn comfortable with himself. I dig it.

In the eighties, The Blow Monkeys were known for their jazzy, poppy confections with thought-provoking lyrics (and Dr. Robert’s hair, because that was amazing). Now older and wiser, Robert Howard is still writing thinky lyrics, and knows his way around a hook. But these songs aren’t confections; they’re a bit more savory.

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