Music Review: Roger Taylor, Fun In Space (Reissue)

By Tyler Hodg

Queen drummer Roger Taylor, along with Omnivore Recordings, has dug into the vaults and re-mastered his first solo record, Fun in Space. Initially released on vinyl in 1981, the album was previously only obtainable on CD as part of a ten-CD plus DVD collection titled The Lot, but now, it has been packaged with three bonus tracks (“I Wanna Testify,” “Turn on the TV,” “My Country [Single Version]”) and made available on a single disc. Generally, the album may not be considered a classic per se, but it’s definitely underrated enough to deserve the reissue treatment.

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Music Review: Various Artists, Beale Street Saturday Night

By Melissa Bratcher

Beale Street Saturday Night is a historical document that you could dance to, if you were so inclined. In 1976, James Luther (Jim) Dickinson (who played with loads of people, from the Stones to the Cramps, and produced Big Star, The Replacements, et al) set out to document the music and the musicians that played on the storied street where rock and roll arguably began. He recorded blues musicians at home, at clubs, and at the Orpheum theater, creating a sonic trip with spoken reminiscences from the artists cut in to their songs. The resulting album, Beale Street Saturday Night, was released in a limited run in 1978 and fetches astounding prices for original copies.

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Music Review: Jellyfish, Bellybutton and Spilt Milk (Deluxe Reissues)

By Less Lee Moore

Like Big Star before them, Jellyfish developed a cult-like fandom that’s far exceeded not only their rather limited output, but also their impact on music charts. Omnivore Recordings, who recently released the soundtrack to the Big Star documentary Nothing Can Hurt Me, has now given the same loving treatment to the Jellyfish legacy with two new reissues of their studio albums—1990’s Bellybutton and 1993’s Spilt Milk—that include a ton of sensational extras, like 51 bonus tracks, full color gatefold sleeves with rare photos, two essays by Ken Sharp, and song-by-song commentary on the original albums from Andy Sturmer, Roger Manning, and Jason Falkner.

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Music Review, Game Theory, Real Nighttime

By Chelsea Spear

The earlier Game Theory EPs gave us a Portrait of the Artist as a Young Band. As the band tried on and discarded aesthetic approaches and made basement recordings on less than ideal equipment, a musical persona began to emerge: sunny Californian pop with fillips of experimentation and flashes of intelligence, pitting melancholy lyrics against jangly melodies. On Real Nighttime, the band’s first official LP, Game Theory’s sound comes into sharper focus.

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Music Review: Game Theory, Dead Center (Reissue)

By Chelsea Spear

Among the first run of American New Wave bands, the story of Game Theory is among the most quietly heartbreaking. While the ambitious musical and lyrical output of creative mastermind Scott Miller was never destined for an arena-sized audience, a combination of questionable management and bad record deals kept their music from an audience larger than the most ardent true believers.

Omnivore Records’ lush and expansive reissues are bringing Game Theory’s shimmering, melancholy pop to the widest audience it’s received to date. Dead Center, the second album they’ve repackaged and remastered, finds the 1983 iteration of Game Theory at an interesting point in their musical evolution. The production sounds more polished than on the home-recorded Dead Center, with a stronger low end and a greater sonic balance. Their arrangements show a greater sense of ambition, as well as the musical skill to back it up.

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Music Review: TV Eyes, TV Eyes (Reissue)

By Less Lee Moore

Fans of Jellyfish and Redd Kross will already know about TV Eyes but what about the uninitiated? That’s who really needs to read this review.

The storied history and devoted fanbase of both groups would take at least two books to describe fully (someone get on that please, by the way), but you may be familiar with three names from those bands: Roger Joseph Manning, Jr.; Jason Falkner; and Brian Reitzell.

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Music Review: Old 97’s, Hitchhike To Rhome (Reissue)

By Melissa Bratcher

It’s been 20 years since the Old 97’s released their debut album Hitchhike To Rhome. Listening to Omnivore’s reissue, I’m struck by how it sounds like The Old 97’s are a seemingly impossible creation: the bastard son of Merle Haggard and Roger McGuinn. Ken Bethea’s jangly guitar is there and Rhett Miller’s boozy, yelpy delivery is too, along with his witty lyrics that are chock full of wordplay. They’ve refined their sound, only just, over the years, but there’s something remarkable about a band that knew who they were and what their sound was from the get go.

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Music Review: Sid Selvidge, The Cold Of The Morning

By Cait Brennan

The great Memphis folk blues legend Sid Selvidge, who we lost last year, left us so much treasure that it almost seems criminal to try to lay the “great lost masterpiece” idea on him. While he surely didn’t get all the recognition he deserved in his lifetime, most everything he brought us was its own masterpiece. But The Cold Of The Morning, his long-unavailable 1976 album, just might be his finest.

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Music Review: The Three O’Clock, The Hidden World Revealed

By Cait Brennan

“You like pop, right?”

The grizzled, ancient record clerk—god, he had to be at least 28!—leaned over the counter.

“What, like Phil Collins?” I asked. Oh, it’s 1984 in Phoenix, by the way.

“God, no, that’s like—bubblegum or something,” he coughed, like he ate a big black bug. “Here,” he flips through the in-store play copies and pulls out a record with some weird pasty kids making kissy faces under a dilapidated pagoda. This crazy sugar-crash stomp comes storming out of the store speakers, swirling keys and guitars ringing in my head like the bells of Notre-Dame. And then the singer, with a voice like none other: “sitting complacent, are you there where I see you, with a cantaloupe girlfriend . . .” What?!

“They’re the Three O’Clock, man,” says he. “A little twee for my taste, but I kinda figured you’d dig it.”

The clerk got my $4.98 and I got Baroque Hoedown, the first EP by the Three O’Clock. It’s at least 20 years later before I even begin to suspect what a cantaloupe girlfriend might be, but I dive headlong into this “paisley underground” thing, rifling through record bins until I have all their stuff, which at that time included their album released as The Salvation Army, and their full-length LP, Sixteen Tambourines. They would go on to release great albums on IRS and Prince’s Paisley Park records, but for me, their stuff on the brilliant Lisa Fancher’s Frontier Records is still the greatest.

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Music Review: Big Star: Nothing Can Hurt Me Soundtrack

By Cait Brennan

There’s a part of you that gets wistful sometimes when you see some secret treasure you love finally get its day in the sun. You think back to the day, seven worlds ago, when a friend of a friend handed you a cassette tape of some band you never heard of called Big Star, on an obviously fake record label called PVC Records. The friend gives you a knowing look and you don’t know; you don’t know you have a universe in your hand, that this grubby little tape is going to change your life, it’s going to detonate some ecstatic explosion inside you, and you will never be that person ever again. And a thousand miles later you chance across another copy in the cutout bin of some strip-mall record shop and you buy it for 49 cents and you put it in the hands of someone you love who’s never heard it, and you look at their uncomprehending expression and think “that was me, once upon a time.” And if you’ve chosen wisely and the quantum entanglement is aligned just so, the chain reaction goes on.

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