London's The Attack had gone through quite a few personel changes by the time they started work on what was to be their first album, the subtly titled Roman God of War. By this point they'd lost Davy O'List to The Nice and the insufferable camp of "Created by Clive" and buckled down to power out psychedelic heavy rock in the vein of The Yardbirds and Pretty Things.
By the time they made their third album in 2002, Leicester's freakbeaters Bronco Bullfrog had relocated to London where they had access to a number of pro-studios, but they were a little light on material. So Andy Morten broke his monopoly a bit to allow bandmates Louis Wiggett and Mike Poulson to get more involved in the songwriting. The results were somewhat mixed. Although the album was very consistent with the group's deliberately retro vibe, that retro-ness was wearing thin for the band's leader, who felt that too many of the songs were derivative. When you hear how the Beatlesque "Barnaby Slade" and "I'm Not Getting Through" both recycled offbeat "Taxman" guitar accents and "Last Chance to Smile" begins with a "Pictures of Lily" descending chord figure before finishing with a substitute "Substitute" lick, you'll agree he has a point.
You know rock and roll has lost its bite when it becomes the subject of a big picture book for tiny little tots. What hand-wringing dads and moms once considered hymns of Satan is now fit for toddlers in Luis Demano and Susana Monteagudo's Illustrated History of Rock.
This year the studio behind such watershed pictures as The Jazz Singer, Gold Diggers of 1933, Casablanca, White Heat, Bonnie and Clyde, A Clockwork Orange, Superman, and Malcolm X turns 100. Mark A. Vieira marks the event with an illustrated history of the studio called Warner Bros.: 100 Years of Storytelling.
Legal obligations have resulted in such memorable albums as Marvin Gaye's Here, My Dear and (allegedly) Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music. They're sometimes bitter, like the former, or unlistenable, like the latter (or in the case of Van Morrison's oft-reissued "contractual obligations sessions" for Bang records, both).
When last ABKCO reissued The Rolling Stones' Beggars Banquet on stereo vinyl, the record arrived as the usual black plastic disc but with a sly slipcover depicting the bowdlerized white-invitation cover and a bonus twelve-inch single featuring "Sympathy for the Devil" in its rare mono mix. That was for the LP's fiftieth anniversary. For its fifty-fifth, ABKCO is rolling the Stones' best out again but without the slipcover, the single, or the blackness.
Paul McCartney was the most exacting Beatle, the guy who wrote such classically structured perfections as "Yesterday" and "Martha My Dear" and such imaginative yet insightful lyrics as "Eleanor Rigby" and "You Never Give Me Your Money", and the guy who steered the band's most classically artful production, Sgt. Pepper's. So it was certainly more than a shock when he began his solo career with the utterly offhand McCartney and decided to cut his first album with his new band, Wings, without getting together many actual songs first.
Sometimes I get a bit concerned that regular Psychobabble readers might be under the impression that I'm so dazzled by free records that I tend to go easy on them when it comes time to write my reviews. The truth is, most of my reviews skew toward the positive because I almost always review records by artists I really like and I've rarely encountered bungled pressings. Some mastering jobs may be too bass- or treble-heavy, or may feature some unwanted distortions, but such problems are rarely egregious, so I'll mention them in my reviews but refrain from harping on them.
Violent Femmes managed to find an unexplored nook of punk's potential when they filtered Buzzcocks sexual angst and attitude through a sieve of gauzy acoustic instruments. The sound was invigorating and fierce but also deeply textured and quite beautiful, spectacularly new yet antiqued. Plus bassist Brian Ritchie proved that punk and virtuosity were not mutually exclusive. Few debut albums are better or more fully realized than Violent Femmes, and forty years down the road, I still can't think of too many bands with the audacity to cop its "folk-punk" sound (although you could probably convince me that Belle & Sebastian would never have existed without "Good Feeling").
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