Waxing Nostalgic: Failure, “Wonderful Life”

By Jeffery X Martin

The college rock scene was disintegrating in the mid-Nineties, and the Alternative Nation was annexing everything. Think of it as the Continental Drift of rock and roll. Bands had one leg on underground radio and the other on the set of a blue-tinted video with spinning chairs and dystopian decay, hoping to get some MTV rotation. But the college scene and the MTV kids started moving away from each other, both sides saying, “It’s not me, it’s you.”

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Waxing Nostalgic: The Five Eighties Bands You Should Still Be Listening To

By Jeffery X Martin

I’ve been writing this column for a year now, completely immersing myself in coming up with new words about old music. A lot of it, frankly, just doesn’t hold up. It’s the aural equivalent of parachute pants. Why did we like it? Why did we buy it? What were we thinking? Were we all mad? Nobody would be caught dead in parachute pants these days.

Some bands still make the grade, though, and are still insanely listenable after all these years. Following are the bands I implore you to listen to again, or maybe for the first time.

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Music Review: Giallos Flame, Archivio Giallo, Volume One

By Jeffery X Martin

Fans of horror movies from the 1980s know that half the fun of those flicks was the crazy synthesizer-heavy soundtracks they all seemed to have. Haunting melodies, strange electronic sounds, and spatial effects only served to accentuate the atmosphere, making the blood and guts more shocking.

It’s a weird groove to fall into, being a fan of music like that. You start bringing up musicians like Claudio Simonetti, Fabio Frizzi, Riz Ortolani, or Alan Howarth and most people stare at you like you’ve lost your mind. Then you start bringing up the movies those people have scored. Have you not seen Zombi? The Beyond? Buio Omega? How about The Fog? The original Dawn of the Dead, for cryin’ out loud?

You get a lot of blank looks and sympathetic nods, lots of people silently blessing your heart.

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Waxing Nostalgic: In Front of a Live Audience

By Jeffery X Martin

I’ve talked to people who can’t get into live albums. The recording is rarely clean. The crowd noise can be a distraction. It’s obvious when someone screws up. They don’t like to hear the in-between song banter.

I understand how those things could detract from one’s enjoyment of the music, but man, when a live album is done right, it’s pure dynamite. That aural snapshot of a band at a specific point in time fascinates me. It’s a time capsule. When the crowd is into it, clapping and screaming at all the right times, a live album is truly the next best thing to being there.

In chronological order, here are some live albums from older artists that stay on rotation in my personal earholes.

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Music Review: Suzanne Vega, Tales From The Realm Of The Queen Of Pentacles

By Jeffery X Martin

Suzanne Vega is one of the few survivors of the Great Folk Uprising of the Eighties. Her career hit its heights with her single, “Luka,” which was later covered by The Lemonheads. The British producing team, BNA, turned her a capella tune, “Tom’s Diner,” into an international dance hit. You know. “Doo do doo DO doo do-doo DO.” That one.

As it happens with some artists, as Vega matured as a performer and songwriter, her presence on the music charts decreased. Some of her best works went practically unnoticed (why people never caught onto her album Songs in Red and Gray is one of the great mysteries of our time).

After a seven-year break, Vega is back with Tales from the Realm of the Queen of Pentacles, a fascinating mix of bitterness and release, spirituality and despair.

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Music Review: Various Artists, Warfaring Strangers: Darkscorch Canticles

By Jeffery X Martin

The earth is scorched and jagged, and at night the wolves come. The Christian gods have come to battle the Elder gods for supremacy, but that war has yet to be won. Every move could be your last, for the land is beset with traps. This is a land of magick and superstition. This is where the arcane is commonplace. This is a land filled with thieves and sorcerers, warriors and demons. This is the 1970s.

This is the strange world of Warfaring Strangers: Darkscorch Canticles, a collection of 16 rock and roll songs, plucked from the dank dungeons of obscurity by record label Numero Group. Every song is based in a quasi-Tolkienesque fantasy world, easily recognizable to anyone familiar with Dungeons & Dragons or other such tabletop games. In fact, the double vinyl edition comes with its own RPG called “Cities of Darkscorch.”

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Waxing Nostalgic: Cheap Trick, “Dream Police”

By Jeffery X Martin

It’s difficult to gauge just how popular Cheap Trick really got. Even though their live version of “I Want You to Want Me” hit the top ten and the album At Budokan sold millions, most people seem to think of them as “those guys that did that one song.”

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Music Review: Doomsquad, Kalaboogie

By Jeffery X Martin

It takes a certain amount of balls to name your band Doomsquad. It sets up myriad expectations. What kind of music do you expect when you hear that name? Totalitarian anthems, denouncing self and praising the Motherland? Some heavy-handed comic book villainy? Angry Norsemen with long hair and corpse paint?

Wrong. Try again.

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Waxing Nostalgic: The Bolshoi, “Books on the Bonfire”

By Jeffery X Martin

There was always an undercurrent of darkness beneath the neon veneer of the Eighties. We just weren’t sure how to label it. We had Gothic music, we had dark alternative, we had the beginnings of darkwave, but those left a pretty wide berth. We had to listen to music without necessarily putting a label on it.

I wish we did that more often, now.

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Waxing Nostalgic: Braniac, “Fucking with the Altimeter”

By Jeffery X Martin

I spent a lot of time in Ohio as a kid. I’m sure there are people who really love that place and there is nowhere else they would rather be. Cool. I’m not one of those people. Even hanging out in Cincinnati like I did, most of the time there was just nothing to do.

Ohio comes in three dehumanizing flavors: generically urban, run-down industrial, or flatland farming. Any of those situations can seem oppressive, and that kind of oppression is enough to make a creative person yearn to break out and do the craziest shit possible to get their ideas out there into the Universe. To get noticed. To get the hell out of Ohio.

The band Brainiac, formed in Dayton, Ohio, certainly felt the backhand of the heartland. In an interview given in 1997, lead vocalist Tim Taylor said, “It might give you the illusion that there’s a happening scene, but there’s not at all. As of right now, there’s not even a record store where you can buy our records in town. You have to go to Columbus to buy a Brainiac record, it’s ridiculous.”

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