Review: Wings' 'Wild Life', Half-Speed Mastered Vinyl Reissue

Paul McCartney couldn't catch a break after The Beatles broke up. While he attempted to reset his perfectionist aesthetic with McCartney, a rough collection of finished and inchoate songs on which he played all the instruments, critics ran him down for being sloppy, lazy, cute, and glib. Okay, they had a point, but when they continued to pile on when he allowed his inner perfectionist to reemerge, and he made the delightful RAM, so full of lively performances and well-crafted pop nuggets, it became clear that they had it in for Paul McCartney. So either as a means to fade into a combo to prove he wasn't the control freak his former bandmates painted him as or because he genuinely missed the camaraderie and collaboration of band-work, McCartney decided to put his name off to the side and form a new group. 

Review: Jason Crest's 'A Place in the Sun'

Jason Crest (a band, not a guy) made some singles smothered in psychedelic phasing, wah-wahing, and Mellotron and got some decent exposure opening for the likes of The Who and The Moody Blues, but they just never cracked it. A few of their single sides, such as "Turquoise Tandem Cycle", the heavily Moodies-influenced "A Place in the Sun", and the audio horror movie "Black Mass", made it onto installments of the Rubble and British Psychedelic Trip series, but Jason Crest is definitely one of the more obscure British psych groups of the sixties. That's too bad because their songs are mostly appealingly poppy (well, maybe not "Black Mass"), their productions are imaginative, and well, any record that features the Mellotron owns my heart. 

Guerssen's new Jason Crest compilation A Place in the Sun mixes demos with studio recordings since the group's mere five singles do not provide enough material to fill an LP--and since notator David Wells assures us that the "Waterloo Road" / "Education" single stinks, both of those proper recordings are omitted (honestly, I don't know what the problem is. "Waterloo Road" is a bit corny but not egregiously so, and "Education" is a peppy, bluesy number better than a good deal of the tracks that made the cut). That leaves A Place in the Sun as a somewhat uneasy shuffle of buffed recordings and lo-fi ones. Some of the tracks are inessential. As I've already implied, "Black Mass" is interesting but pretty grating, and a by-numbers cover of (Here We Go 'Round the) Lemon Tree" won't make anyone forget The Move's superior original. However, tracks such as "Turquoise Tandem Cycle", "Two by the Sea", "A Place in the Sun", and "Good Life" should scratch my fellow British freaks psych itching for something relatively obscure to discover.

Review: 'A New Day Yesterday: UK Progressive Rock & the 1970s'

Prog rock was never exactly cool, but you can’t say no one liked it. Contemporary critics tended to mock it and sighed sighs of relief when punk blew in at the end of the seventies, but punk did not sell like prog did. Even my square-as-a-chessboard dad bought a copy of Aqualung because that’s what everyone else was doing in 1971.

Decades removed from questions of “what the hell was with Topographic Oceans?”, its now generally okay to just like what you like, especially if it’s pretty geeky. Though prog was never really all about Tolkien and complex mathematical theorems as the naysayers would have you believe, it was still pretty geeky.

What I’m trying to say in my confused, convoluted, proggy way is that the time is now right for a deep plunge into prog to both determine what it is and celebrate it. That’s what Mike Barnes does with his new book A New Day Yesterday: UK Progressive Rock & the 1970s. The UK designation in that title is fairly pointless since prog is such a distinctly British phenomenon (Rush being one exception, as well as a band that does not get so much as a single name-drop in this book. The author does cede precisely 1% of his book to a discussion of German prog bands, though).

Review: 'Night Comes Down: 60s British Mod, R&B, Freakbeat, & Swinging London Nuggets'

Despite a very specific origin in London’s jazzy coffee houses of the early sixties, Mod has gone through so many changes that it basically just means “British” at this point. That elasticity didn’t have to wait until Paul Weller and Phil Daniels reinvigorated the cult in the late seventies; it was already happening ten years time ago in the mid-sixties.

RPM Record’s new triple-disc box Night Comes Down: 60s British Mod, R&B, Freakbeat, & Swinging London Nuggets draws all incarnations of homegrown Mod music in a manner that implies a sort of sound progression by playing with chronology.  Had these 87 tracks been arranged chronologically, they would have sounded like a senseless jumble of cool jazz and R&B, bulls-eye power pop, underground-scene psychedelia, and sprinklings of other styles, such as the more mainstream pop of Twinkle’s “What Am I Doing Here with You” and the eccentric genre-shuffling of the two instrumentals from the soundtrack of the Marianne Faithful vehicle (tee-hee) Girl on a Motorcycle. Instead, the songs are more-or-less arranged according to style, so the set strolls from the kind of hard R&B (Lita Roza’s “Mama”), Booker T.-style work outs (The Mike Cotton Sound’s throbbing “Like That”), and jazzy slow-drips (Laurel Aitken’s “Baby Don’t Do It”) the original Mods dug to the red-with-purple-flowers detonations championed by The Who and The Birds to the U.F.O Club sounds that really have nothing to do with the movement except for maybe giving ex-Mods a spot to drop acid now that they were done popping purple hearts.

Needless to say, the real theme here is “smashing music,” so who cares what’s “real Mod” and what isn’t. That distinction sure doesn’t matter when tracks such as The Moody Blues’ soulful “And My Baby’s Gone” is rubbing elbows with The Attraction’s amp-slashing “She’s a Girl”, Fat Mattress’ trippy “I Don’t Mind”, and Twiggy’s magnificent “When I Think of You”, which somehow draws those three disparate styles together without sounding like some sort of hack-and-glue job. There are other familiar names too, such as Arthur Brown, Spencer Davis Group (post-Stevie Winwood), John’s Children, Chad & Jeremy, Alexis Korner, Mark Wirtz, and Mike D’Abo (as well as tracks featuring such future stars as Jimmy Page and Lemmy, who gets in on the thievery of a “Kids Are Alright” rip so blatant that the track is credited to Townshend), but none of the artists are represented by their best-known numbers, so there’s a lot to discover on Night Comes Down.