Monthly Archives: December 2021

Celebrating Dan Hawkins who turns 45 on Sunday. —Ed.

Glam never dies. It predated David Bowie, Marc Bolan, and the New York Dolls, and its tradition has been carried on by the likes of Destroyer and, most importantly, Lady Gaga. But during the eighties Glam became associated with metal bands whose only claim to genre lay in the fact they wore make-up. The likes of Poison, Ratt, and Skid Row all have their attraction, but Glam they most definitely they ain’t.

England’s The Darkness are the real thing. They have musical similarities to eighties Glam metal, but they understand that Glam is an attitude, a pose, a way of looking at life. Fey, androgynous, witty, artificial, decidedly un-macho and essentially frivolous, glitter rockers adhere to that most famous of dandies Oscar Wilde’s famous credo, “Life is far too important a thing ever to talk seriously about.” And on their 2003 debut Permission to Land The Darkness stand up for that greatest of human endeavors–going pink flamingo flamboyant and having an ostrich feather lark while doing it. The Darkness’s name may well be an inside joke, because there’s absolutely nothing dark about them.

The Darkness stand apart from the pack on the quality of their music alone, but what really makes them one of Glam’s shinier gifts to the glamkind is lead vocalist and guitarist Justin Hawkins’ voice, which is so campy and outrageous he makes Freddy Mercury sound like Hoyt Axton. I invite you to listen to the way he goes for the high notes, stutters and positively warbles his way through the band’s big one, “I Believe in a Thing Called Love.” Hawkins goes for baroque every time he opens his mouth.

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Any good collection has a great number of different niches and subcategories: music and record collecting is no different. Some of us focus on rare soundtracks or hard-to-find instrumental music from Europe and the US that was released in the 1960s and ’70s. One could scour record stores for years and spend a great deal of money trying to chase down these revered sounds, or you could just pick up some releases by Frank Maston and be done with it.

Frank Maston—who goes just by Maston—is an American musician, composer, and producer who pays homage to those sounds, but through his own lens. In fact, Maston has chosen to live abroad in search of authenticity and finding musicians to work with who share his own visions. What’s most interesting is that, while Maston is a musician and composer, he appears to be most at home producing and arranging his projects much the way that record producers like David Axelrod or Jack Nitzsche did. While Matson creates the pieces of the puzzle, his true art comes to light in putting it all together.

Recently, Maston teamed up with the Swiss sextet, L’éclair to produce an album titled Souvenir which has all of the deep, funky, melodic grooves of those rare records we crazy collectors are always chasing. If you’re listening to us at The Vinyl District, you’ll hear our conversation, but if you’re joining us on the radio at WFDU, 89.1 FM, you’ll be treated to the music taken directly from vinyl. On this episode, Maston joins me from his apartment in Paris, France to discuss the makings of the new album, leaving his home to set out in search of his musical destiny, and how he sets the stage to bring his musical concepts to life.

Evan Toth is a songwriter, professional musician, educator, radio host, avid record collector, and hi-fi aficionado. Toth hosts and produces The Evan Toth Show and TVD Radar on WFDU, 89.1 FM. Follow him at the usual social media places and visit his website.

It’s that time of year again, when carolers stand a’caloring outside your house and just won’t shut up. It’s also the time when musical artists of all types release Holiday albums. Said albums come in three types. First, you have the ones who sing the hoary old classics, second (see Bob Dylan), and then you have the ones who write their own Christmas songs in hopes they’ll become hoary old classics (see just about everybody).

Finally we have those artists who release Yuletide albums that have fuck-all to do with Christmas, or any other holiday for that matter. This is where Unsane and Amphetamine Reptile Records come in. Everybody’s favorite noise rock label has given us many a grating band over the years—Killdozer, Cows, Unsane, the Jesus Lizard, Dwarves, the Melvins, the Boredoms, and Lubricated Goats to name just a few. Why not give us their own version of an unholy night?

Which they finally got around to doing with Unsane’s 1997 release Amrep Xmas. It makes for a great children’s gift: little Darcy is likely to run around the house screaming “Everyone must DIE!” while wee Todd plays it continuously until grandma suffers a fatal heart attack, sparing Santa’s reindeer the legal repercussions of trampling her to death. No maudlin sentimentality here. Just musical mayhem that makes Uncle Bob’s traditional shit-faced tumble into the Christmas tree the height of decorum.

First there’s the question of song titles. Nat King Cole never sang a carol entitled “Sick,” Bing Crosby one called “Body Bomb.” As for “Empty Cartridge,” not even that pair of psychotics the Carpenters would touch it. And the songs on Amrep Xmas are rather tame. Cows’ “Peacetika,” Melvins’ “Creepy Smell,” and Jesus Lizard’s “Puss” are enough to make you vomit in the eggnog.

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After a year and a half of concert postponements due to Covid-19, Blue October finally made it back to southern California for a handful of rescheduled shows supporting their 2021 “This is What I Live For Tour.” Justin Furstenfeld and company delivered a “welcome-back” performance that challenged the mind and stirred the soul on a crisp winter’s night here in Orange County. 

To be completely transparent, I was never a huge Blue October fan growing up. My brother Mark absolutely loved this band, but for some reason I just couldn’t get into them. He always told me, “You won’t get it until you see them in concert.” Lucky for me I took his advice, and immediately became a huge fan after witnessing my first live performance (and since have never looked back). Sunday’s show at the House of Blues was my first time seeing them in a few years and was excited to see if they were going to pickup up where they left off pre-Covid. Only time would tell.

Opening for Blue October was a Minneapolis based pop band called Yam Haus. I’d never heard of these guys before and the pessimistic devil on my shoulder kept chirping that I’d probably be underwhelmed (at best) by their performance. Boy, was I wrong.

This quartet, featuring Lars Pruitt (vocals/guitar), Jake Felstow (drums), Zach Beinlich (bass), and Seth Blum (guitar), hit the stage with fury and kept the energy high throughout an abbreviated set that I really wanted to continue. The chemistry between bandmates was palpable, and the crowd was digging every minute of their killer performance. I see great things over the horizon for Yam Haus and look forward to digging further into this up-and-coming band.

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VIA PRESS RELEASE | Danny Elfman has announced a brand new collector’s edition box set of his critically acclaimed new album Big Mess.

Limited to 1,500 copies worldwide, the stunning release offers fans the ultimate window into the creation of the groundbreaking project and includes four LPs on exclusive color variants, featuring all 18 songs from Big Mess along with bonus discs containing unreleased reinterpretations of tracks from the album. In addition to the heralded duet version of “True” featuring Trent Reznor, the bonus discs will be comprised of new remixes from HEALTH, clipping. and more, as well as never-before-released songs with featured vocalists including Rebekah Del Rio, FEVER333, Blixa Bargeld, and a second vocal collaboration with Reznor.

Each record is held in its own unique jacket featuring a 3D lenticular print on the cover and is accompanied by a 60 page, hardcover artbook containing never-before-seen renderings of the distinctively unsettling digital sculptures of Elfman done by Sarah Sitkin, who crafted the album’s original artwork.

The special box set also includes a 20 page stitched soft cover lyric book with behind-the-scenes photos, a 12” x 9” art print signed by Danny himself, a detailed life-sized light up model of Elfman’s peculiar hand designed to be a stand-alone showpiece or one-of-a-kind night-light, and a code which provides downloadable digital audio files and a behind-the-scenes mini documentary on the making of Big Mess. All components are housed in a high quality two-piece box with liquid embossing on the cover and spot gloss embossing on the cover and sides.

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Celebrating Donny Osmond, born on this day in 1957. —Ed.

I used to know this rather dim garbage head who gobbled a handful of pills he thought were opiates but weren’t, and he swore—on a stack of ludes!—they didn’t do anything but make his waist-length hair stand straight up in the air and vibrate. I’m pretty sure his story was bullshit. That said, if you’re looking for an album that will do the same thing, you could do much worse than check out The Osmond’s Crazy Horses.

You heard me right: The Osmonds. Because despite what you may have heard about Ogden, Utah’s finest, they weren’t a do-goodie, whiter-shade-of-pale tweenie-pop imitation of the Jackson Five but substance-abusing (they sometimes took as many as three aspirin at once!) Mormon mofos who took their Tang straight yet still managed to stand up on their hind legs and bray. And the culmination of their badassness was Crazy Horses, one of the greatest hard rock albums your ears will ever hear. And that’s not just me talking: in Stairway to Hell: The 500 Best Heavy Metal Albums, rock crit Chuck Eddy puts Crazy Horses at No. 66—which is too low in my opinion, but then everybody underestimates the Mormon Motörhead.

The brothers began their career as a barbershop quartet, The Osmond 5 (math is not taught in the schools of the Church of Latter Day Saints) before becoming worldwide superstars thanks to little brother Donny and the bubblegum classic “One Bad Apple.” Meanwhile, though, Donny’s older siblings were chomping at the bit. They wanted to write their own songs and play their own instruments and smoke fake cigarettes and change their name to The Gentile Killers. So they staged a coup of sorts, relieving Donny of lead singer duties to toughen up their sound while honing their protopunk chops by playing along to Hollies’ records until they were the five maddest, baddest, LDS-taking apples in the whole bunch, girl.

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VIA PRESS RELEASE | 1970 was a time for heady experimentation in popular music, but very few records—and even fewer on major labels—come close to matching the stylistic ground covered by William S. Fischer’s album Circles.

Composer/ arranger/ keyboardist/ saxophonist Fischer grew up woodshedding with the likes of Ray Charles, Fats Domino, Muddy Waters, and Percy Mayfield…and then took a sudden left turn by studying electronic music in Vienna during the mid-‘60s. There, he met Joe Zawinul, and ended up penning five of the six tunes on Zawinul’s groundbreaking 1968 album The Rise and Fall of the Third Stream.

Fischer went on to arrange for Herbie Mann, who signed him to his Embryo imprint for Atlantic Records; Circles was Fischer’s one and only release for the label. And he didn’t waste the opportunity; an utterly mind-blowing mix of Sly Stone funk, heavy Hendrix-y metal, southern soul, jazz fusion, and Stockhausen-esque explorations on the Moog synthesizer, Circles enlisted the same band (bassist Ron Carter, guitarists Eric Weissberg and Hugh McCracken) that Fischer had worked with while acting as Musical Director on Eugene McDaniels’ underground classic Outlaw, complemented by drummer Billy Cobham and a five-piece cello section.

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VIA PRESS RELEASE | 50 years since its release, the original motion picture soundtrack for Hal Ashby’s 1971 classic cult film Harold and Maude, made up exclusively of songs by Cat Stevens, will be released on 11th February 2022 in new 180g 1LP / 1CD / Digital release formats via Island / Cat-O-Log / UMC. The new edition of the soundtrack will combine Cat Stevens’ 9 original songs, as well as dialogue from the film, for the first time.

Hal Ashby’s 1971 film about the unlikely friendship-turned-love story of suicidal teenager Harold Chasen (played by Bud Cort) and 79 year old free spirit Maude (played by Ruth Gordon) is now widely praised as a bona-fide cult classic. Filled with dark humour and existential drama, the film represents the potentially glorious benefits that can arise from a balanced partnership between conservative pragmatism and colourful free-spirited idealism. It reveals the deep lying synergy that exists between seemingly opposing views and how, when united, they can flourish to their mutual advantage.

The movie’s success and cult status has in part been bolstered by its whimsical and poignant soundtrack, in which all songs are performed by Cat Stevens. Originally not wanting to release the soundtrack in fear of it being perceived as a “greatest hits” album in the early days of his career, film director Hal Ashby had to do some convincing. Having listened to songs from landmark albums Mona Bone Jakon and Tea For The Tillerman whilst editing Harold and Maude, Ashby knew from the start that he wanted exclusively Stevens’ songs to sonically narrate his film, and after a significant campaign, Ashby won Stevens over and thus, the soundtrack was brought to life.

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VIA PRESS RELEASE | In Winston-Salem, NC, the late guitarist Sam Moss is a legend. A superior, highly versatile musician whose advocacy for the blues and 1960s mastery of the nuances of electric soloing somewhat paralleled Mike Bloomfield’s in Chicago, Moss was an inspiring, charismatic mentor to generations of North Carolina rockers, including Let’s Active and The dB’s. Southern Culture on the Skids’ Rick Miller tells us: “Sam was one of the hippest guys we knew—our Guru of Groove, the Maharishi of Mojo.”

A larger-than-life character, Moss astounded local audiences in his club appearances, yet he never released a record in his lifetime. So producer Chris Stamey was thrilled to discover, in 2020, on the end of an old tape, forgotten masters of Blues Approved, a spectacular Stax– and Muscle Shoals–influenced solo record, made with Mitch Easter in 1977.

This “great lost” record reveals that Moss was also a soulful songwriter and singer. It has now been carefully remixed and produced for release, with a deluxe booklet featuring detailed liner notes and bio, session notes by Easter, and lots of vivid color photos. Peter Holsapple (The dB’s) explains: “Sam Moss was an inspiration to so many of us; with the release of Blues Approved, now people everywhere will understand why.” Blues Approved will be released on CD and digitally by Schoolkids Records on January 28, 2022, with a vinyl edition to follow in early summer.

Moss had made the first of several trips to nearby Chapel Hill to record his own original compositions in early 1977, with old friend Easter on drums (and engineering). Mitch recalls: “I had a ‘studio’ in my house, meaning a Teac 2340 four-track recorder, three or four humble microphones, and for monitoring, the home stereo system. For extra-fancy sessions, I’d rent a Tapco six-channel mixer. . . . Sam came down with two or three guitars, his Fender Twin. I played drums and Sam played everything else. And it was a really good session!”

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Paul McCartney The Lyrics: 1956 to the Present (Liveright), edited and with an introduction by Paul Muldoon, is a hefty, two-volume hardcover book, housed in a slip case and clocking in at nearly 1,000 pages. It covers 154 songs that McCartney wrote as a solo artist and while he was in Wings and The Beatles. In some cases, the songs were co-written with others.

The book includes such welcome discoveries as “Tell Me Who He Is,” an unearthed Beatles song discovered in the MPL Communications archives during research for this project. McCartney and Muldoon engaged in 29 sessions, comprising 50 hours of conversations, done between 2015 and 2020.

This book is beautifully laid out and offers more than just McCartney’s lyrics and his annotations on how songs were written, and in some cases, what inspired him to write a given song. The photos of handwritten lyrics, complete at times with McCartney’s playfully childlike doodles and basic chord sequences, are fascinating.

There are also family photos, postcards, letters, notebooks, scrapbooks, artwork, and other personal artifacts. Other items drawn from the MPL Communications archives include acetates, concert posters, tape boxes, and promotional items including curios from Apple, as well as a carefully collected handful of photos of some of McCartney’s contemporaries in the ’60s and ’70s—The Beach Boys, Bob Dylan, The Rolling Stones, and Joe Cocker.

The book has some of the same feel in spots as George Harrison’s book I Me Mine, where lyrics, memorabilia, photos, annotations, and other ephemera create a sense of the creative songwriting process and the man behind the music and his life and times.

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Observatory by Aeon Station marks the solo debut from Kevin Whelan. Along with material specifically written for this album, it offers songs that were long intended for the follow-up to The Meadowlands by The Wrens, the band where Whelan played bass and sang. That makes its ten songs something of a big deal in the indie rock scheme of things, for more reasons than one. Glistening and anthemic, the record delivers an unabashed continuation of indie rock’s sound as it thrived in the ’00s and early ’10s of the 21st century. It’s out on vinyl, compact disc, and digital formats December 10 through Sub Pop.

The saga of the follow-up to The Meadowlands, an album released by the small indie Absolutely Kosher in September of 2003 to unexpected widespread acclaim, has come to a partial conclusion with Observatory. In short, Kevin Whelan could no longer wait for The Wrens’ next album to be deemed as finished, and so, took songs intended for that record, added some more, recorded them with Jerry McDonald on drums and his brother Greg Whelan on guitar (both members of The Wrens), plus his wife Mary Ann Coronel Whelan on backing vocals, and released them as Aeon Station.

Still, the inescapable: 18 years in wait for a follow-up is a long freaking time. As someone who writes about music specifically due to a lifetime spent unrelentingly listening to music, it’s my perspective that records are generally best when they come to fruition in a timely manner, which is frankly the case with most of the releases now considered canonical rock and pop masterworks. Of course there are exceptions, as The Meadowlands itself took a long time to make, though it’s not like very many people were waiting for that one (as said, the record’s success was something of a leftfield breakout).

Prolonged anticipation ushers in mounting expectations, with the whole scenario likely to become a burden. Such is the case here, and it’s a circumstance Observatory can’t avoid, even as its existence means the end of the drawn-out waiting period with a narrative twist hardly anybody expected and that fewer fans hoped for, plus a possible positive spin: “Hey, now we get TWO post-Meadowlands albums.”

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