Girls, Guitars

Three from an Ace Records compilation, Girls With Guitars, which recycles some of the tracks from the Girls in the Garage series (with better sound quality, obviously). It's a fun listen, though far from comprehensive (where are, say, The Luv'd Ones?), and a couple of the choices are a little questionable (the Lonnie Mack and the Charmaines track = male guitarist rocking out with occasional femme backing vocals). I was hoping a second volume would remedy some of the omissions, but it's yet to emerge.

The Girls - My Baby
Denise and Company - Boy, What'll You Do Then
The Daughters of Eve - Help Me Boy

1000 Violins

Big-voiced, vaguely psychedelic pop from Sheffield. Songwriter/guitarist Colin Gregory went on to mine a similar seam - unwieldy titles, gratuitous Summer of Love references, irresistible choruses - in The Dylans, to slightly lesser effect (to my mind, anyway). Here's three songs from Hey Man, That's Beautiful:

1000 Violins - If I Were a Bullet (Then For Sure I'd Find a Way to Your Heart)
1000 Violins - Locked out of the Love In
1000 Violins - Halcyon Days

...and three more from a German EP compilation, Locked out of the Love-In:

1000 Violins - All We Need is Cash
1000 Violins - I Was Depending on You to be My Jesus
1000 Violins - Lost to the World

Butterflies of Love week! part three

Two from The New Patient, one from Famous Problems, both available from Fortuna Pop.

The Butterflies of Love - Dream Driver
The Butterflies of Love - She's an Heiress
The Butterflies of Love - Ghostride

Comet Gain + Velocette

'Hideaway' is unlikely to make it onto Broken Record Prayers, I suppose; there's probably not much love lost between D Feck and the first incarnation of his band. They went on to become Velocette, of course. Here's two by them, including a Paris Angels cover that's on the Japanese version of Fourfold Remedy.

Comet Gain - Hideaway
Velocette - Get Yourself Together
Velocette - Perfume

Butterflies of Love week! part two

Two singers, Jeffrey and Daniel Greene (unrelated). Mark Mulcahy of Miracle Legion contributes the occasional spectral backing ooooh, but not live, sadly. Not in Blighty, anyway.

Jeffrey is the tall, gangly, mumbly-sounding one, prone to lengthy disquisitions between songs ('ladies and gentlemen the supersonic Butterflies are about to perform another smash' etc etc) which drag on to disquieting effect.

Daniel speaks less and is the leader of the band, as Jeffrey frequently reminds us. He's the vaguely tremulous-sounding one, and looks a bit like a young Jack Nicholson.

There are other members of the band, some with hats, some without. Their keyboard player always looks uncertain and starey-eyed, as if recently released from some form of confinement. Perhaps New Haven does that to you.

If their debut album had come out in 1988 (when wry young men with reverb pedals roamed the alluvial plains) rather than 1999, they would have straddled the world of indie like a gangly colossus. As it is, they visit the UK every few years to play for the benefit of various Track and Field bods in murky backrooms. You can buy How to Know the Butterflies of Love on Amazon for a derisory sum, and you certainly should, because it's great.

The Butterflies of Love - Mt. Everest
The Butterflies of Love - Wild
The Butterflies of Love - Amethyst

The Butterflies of Love week! part one

One of my favourite bands, for reasons I'll go on to discuss, or perhaps not. American's Newest Hit Makers was their first album. They didn't advertise its existence for a while, perhaps understandably. There's a lot of what musicologists might term 'arsing about'. There's some good stuff, too. It's kind of surprising to hear Jeffrey Greene singing out so much, if you're familiar with the honeyed mumble he adopted on later records.

The Butterflies of Love - I Try Too Hard
The Butterflies of Love - I Read Her Diary
The Butterflies of Love - Walking the Dog

"We're flattered if you dance, we're not insulted"

The Modern Lovers - 96 Tears

Teen Blast USA! Vol 2

I'm particularly fond of The Gnomes track, the perfect encapsulation of teen loserdom. The husky-voiced singer sounds implausibly cheerful about his miserable existence.

The Gnomes - Something's Going On
The Underground Balloon Corps - (Heart) Made of Soul
The Green Beans - Superstition

Teen Blast USA! Vol 1

A nice garage comp that mixes minor chord melancholia with more stomping stuff. Even if the Jolly Roger and the Poppiteers track sucked, I'd feel compelled to post it here purely because of the band name.

Jack Bedient and the Chessmen - Double Whammy
Jolly Roger and the Poppiteers - Beautiful Lady in the Sky
Six Minus One - Other Side

The Feelies

Line Records. Were they legit? The muffled sound quality of their products suggests not. Regardless, they made a bunch of Feelies, Modern Lovers and dB's albums available at a time when they were otherwise out of print, so we'll spare them a season in purgatory. Their CD of The Good Earth appends a couple of cover versions from the No One Knows EP. Here they are for your delectation, together with one Feelies original. The album proper is due for reissue sometime soon (in an unambiguously legitimate form).

The Feelies - She Said, She Said
The Feelies - Sedan Delivery
The Feelies - Slipping (Into Something)

Luna

I always like finding second-hand Japanese import versions of albums (pretty much the only way I can afford them). Partly because of the inevitable mistranslations in the lyric booklet, but mainly because there are always bonus tracks. Sometimes the tracks end up detracting from the album proper - what should end with a bang peters out with some B-side frippery. In the case of Bewitched, I think the bonus track (otherwise unreleased) forms the perfect conclusion - I much prefer it to the (perhaps appropriately) somnolescent 'Sleeping Pill'.

Luna - Sucking Ice Cubes

Girls At Our Best

Cherry Red have been threatening to reissue Pleasure for a couple of years now. In the meantime, here's 'Go for Gold', the perfect confluence of post-punk, disco and proto-twee.

Girls At Our Best - Go for Gold

American Spring

Now that Pacific Ocean Blue is back in the racks, this is the Beach Boys-related artefact that most needs reissuing. 'Sweet Mountain' might be my favourite 70s Brian Wilson song. I love the girls' airy, mournful / resigned-sounding vocals, the twinkling synthesized backing, the doo wop-inspired chorus, Brian's curious accent ('it rained on de mountain') on the closing vocal tag. Their covers of two Dennis Wilson songs aren't exactly shoddy, either. This version of 'Fallin' in Love', powered by a tick-tocking drum machine, is different to the one on Pet Projects.

American Spring - Sweet Mountain
American Spring - Fallin' in Love
American Spring - Forever

Brilliant Corners week! part five

A History of White Trash was their last album. It tones down the swagger of Hooked somewhat, with the exception of Automatic-era JAMC pastiche 'Electric Slam'. Good stuff throughout, although it never stood a chance in the post-grunge, pre-Britpop days of 93.

The Brilliant Corners - Get It Up
The Brilliant Corners - Around the Bend
The Brilliant Corners - Gushing

Brilliant Corners week! part four

1990's Hooked was their shoegaze moment, according to TweeNet and Allmusic. It's nothing of the sort, of course; if anything, it's unabashedly RAWK...sometimes. If you can cope with something more muscular than The Fat Tulips, it's probably their strongest set of tunes outside of Somebody Up There Likes Me.

The Brilliant Corners - The Pope The Monkey and The Queen
The Brilliant Corners - Sandy Knows
The Brilliant Corners - Heaven Inside Her

Brilliant Corners week! part three

1989's Joy Ride was mainly a mid-paced and pensive affair. I don't find myself returning to it too often. Thankfully, the CD appends the snappily-titled 'Why Do You Have to Go Out With Him When You Could Go Out With Me' and its B-side, 'Shangri-La'. Both feature Amelia Fletcher, in accordance with then-current EEC Directive 86/123 Re: Compulsory Female Backing Vocals in Lovelorn Indiepop Records.

'Anticipation' is from the BBC Sessions album. Sounds a bit Josef K-ish to me.

The Brilliant Corners - Why Do You Have To Go Out With Him When You Could Go Out With Me?
The Brilliant Corners - Shangri-La
The Brilliant Corners - Anticipation