Archive for the 'Mp3s – Other Artists' Category

06
Oct
11

The BellRays probably like themselves more than I do

By Great Southern Steve Leave a Comment
Categories: blues, Double Take, Mp3s - Other Artists and post punk

And I do like the BellRays quite a lot. At one point I was even considering getting a t-shirt. And I bought and album of theirs. From a store.  Serious stuff.

But I get the feeling the band, particularly the guitarist and singer, already have all the top spots in their fan club taken.

I came across them a while back on an mp3 blog and was struck with the vocals and playing on “Hole in the World”, from an early album. Then I got hold of a later album Have a Little Faith and liked the single, “Third Times the Charm”, for totally different reasons. I was all prepared to buy into the band wholsesale when I started reading their  press releases and promo guff…

Blues is the teacher. Punk is the preacher. It’s all about emotion and energy, experience and raw talent, spirit and intellect. Exciting things happen when these things collide. Bob and Lisa made the BellRays happen in 1991 but they weren’t really thinking about any of this then. They wanted to play music and they wanted it to feel good. They wanted people to WANT to get up, to NEED to get up and check out what was going on. Form an opinion. React. So they took everything they knew about; the Beatles, Stevie Wonder, the Who, the Ramones, Billie Holiday, Lou Rawls, Hank Williams, the DB’s, Jimmy Reed, Led Zeppelin, to name a very few and pressed it into service. It was never about coming up with a ‘sound’, or fitting in with a scene. It was about the energy that made all that music so irresistible!

Wow! Really? Hmmm. Does a soul garage band really need a manifeto? Do they need to state their raison d’etre so explicitly? Can’t you just, y’,know…form one and play? It’s only rock and roll, after all.

Subsequent reading on the internet has only backed up this impression that good ole Bob and Lisa and co take themselves WAY too seriously. I know this shouldn’t matter to me as a listener but it does. I can no longer hear a bunch of good musos and a big black lady who happens to have a very good voice. All I can now hear is a bunch of musos who think they’re doing this incredibly serious revolutionary thing and they’re not, led by a big black lady whose ego is so big it probably needs its own dressing room, separate to hers.

In summary: Listen to BellRays, they are good, but do not engage them in conversation or ever, ever read anything they say about themselves. If you want manifestos, try Marx.

Hole in the World

Third Times the Charm
28
Jun
11

Whinging for Perfection

By Great Southern Steve Leave a Comment
Categories: blues, Double Take, Mp3s - Other Artists and post punk

I am always going on about Australian band HUNTERS and COLLECTORS to people, and they do not always get me.

Often, they are fellow Aussies who only became familiar with the band in the 90s, and they either know for their more commercial stuff, or they dismiss them for being too commercial. (It’s true, they became very pop-rock in the 90s, and even had a particular single that became very popular with Australian Rules TV broadcasters.)

Or, they are from outside Australia and haven’t necessary heard them, or, don’t realise how good they were.

So, I am here to solemnly swear and attest that circa 1986, this band were the best live band in Australia, and maybe one of the best anywhere. During that long and dubious decade where fads and synths and haircuts ruled, these guys chose to do pub rock, blues guitar and horn driven, melodic and percussive, rhythmic and funky, arty and loud, angry and funny and dangerously weird, and all fronted by Mr Mark Seymour, one of the best singer-shouters my country has yet produced.

The lyrics were Australian, and intriguing - holding down a D, fanging home to your girlfriend, girls with fingers like green ginger roots, all trucks and beers and memories spread out on the road – and this meant a lot to me, and it still does. So many “Australian” song-writers are basically just generic American-style country artists who bung in the name of an Australian town every so often, and they don’t actually sound like suburban Aussies at all. But everything about this music smelled of Footscray, the Hume Highway, and Cartlon Draught. Somehow they just got it.

I saw the band four or five times at the ANU Union Refectory or the upstairs section at the Uni Bar in Canberra, and once at the Trade Union club, and every time, they totally blew my face off.  I have never seen a tighter band which somehow had such a loose, jamming energy. They could build tension like no other band I have ever seen (except maybe the Breeders  and that could have been a fluke).

Don’t believe me? Well, first off all, ignore pretty much everything past Human Frailty (1986), which is their last fine studio record. There are other people who will buy their later work, so you and me can concentrate on buying the older stuff.

You should start with this record, The Jaws of Life, from 1984.  The modern re-release includes the entire Payload EP, from 1982, Trust me, this is one of the finest Australian rock albums ever made. If Amazon are out of stock, keep trying, anywhere you can.

Here’s some sample tracks to pique your interest.

TOWTRUCK (from the Towtruck EP, 1982)

I COULDN’T GIVE IT T YOU (from the Jaws of Life LP, 1984)

 

 

10
May
11

after a brief 31-year hiatus…

By Great Southern Steve 4 Comments
Categories: Mp3s - Other Artists and post punk

…legendary British post punk band Local Heroes (SW9) are back in the studio and recording a third album, this time going by the name Commoner.

This site is often pretty sleepy, but since singer-guitarist Kevin Armstrong has been hanging about here lately, site stats have jumped, and I am getting a lot of hits on my original SW9 post in which I sang the praises of their first two albums from 1980-81.

Who reforms a band after 31 years? A certain ode springs to mind….

They shall grow not old, as we grow old:

Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.

Although photographs of the trio on Kevin’s website do show the  lads looking somewhat more aged than their previous incarnation but they ain’t no MTV boy band so who cares, right? Is the music any good?

The preview track from the forthcoming third LP can be accessed by going here.

What do I think? Hard to tell from only one track but I like it so far. The guitar and voice reminds me of King Crimson on the albums Beat and Discipline, which is a fair turn-around from the trio’s first two records, but who knows what they’ve been listening to in the last 31 years? Generally, the song has the same melodic intelligence that the first two records had, but the bass is playing less of a role, I miss that personally, I loved the bass playing on the other records.

Looking forward to hearing more to see how the whole thing is going to fit together.

Steve.

26
Feb
11

Hayes and Cahill: P. Joe’s Reel

By Great Southern Steve 2 Comments
Categories: clunky folk, Mp3s - Other Artists and Single Track

Martin Hayes and Dennis Cahill look like a couple of old geezers, don’t they?

Apparently they met in the eighties playing in a jazz fusion band – go figure – but found a mutual love for Irish music. I haven’t heard their first album The Lonesome Touch but I’d like to. I have this, their second album, on high rotation in the house and car. It puts me in a good mood most times I put it on. They have done other records, but not together, so I believe.

Hayes’ playing is kind of slower and less flamboyant than a lot of other Irish fiddle stuff I have heard, but there are soulful swoops and touches to replace the sound of the virtuoso’s burning fingerboard. But for me, Cahill’s playing is what really makes it work out. It’s all voicings of the same five or six chords we all play, but Cahill always picks the perfect inversion for the particular moment in the tune. And the sound he gets brings out echoes of harp, lute, and banjo, and goes well beyond the standard steel string strum-along that sits behind so much Irish fiddle playing.

All up, these guys are really worth a listen. It’s all instrumental and all quite slow and soft, but it’s groovy, too.

This particular tune is apparently a Scottish dance set but to me it sounds kind of American. I can see it as the instrumental track to some coming to America story, the first time an immigrant sees Boston, or something of that sort.

P. JOE’S REEL MP3
12
Feb
11

Weaver’s Ghost Demo

By Great Southern Steve Leave a Comment
Categories: clunky folk, GSS Home Studio, Luker and Southern news, Mp3s - Other Artists, Single Track and Single Tracks

Another Luker and Southern demo for ya. This one is a slow tune for Emma to do some more of her WALL OF VIOLIN work with multiple distorted violin parts.

The beginning has a verse straight away in this version, but if we do a full version, I’d like an Irish whistle solo before the singing starts.

Vox on the demo still a bit dodgy but other than that I kinda like the boomy sound and would want to do something similar on a proper version.

The Weaver’s Ghost mp3 to download

Incidentally, the chords / melody at the end of each verse are from an English trad tune called the Weaver and the Factory Maid. I love this song immensely, probably my favourite Maddy Prior tune. It was important to me at around the time my Dad died so I think that is why the lyrics to my version have ended up being about that.

Steeleye Span – The Weaver and the Factory Maid mp3 to download

Cheers,

GSS.

04
Dec
10

Time’s Up for Howard Devoto

By Great Southern Steve Leave a Comment
Categories: Double Take and Mp3s - Other Artists

A while back I made the mistake of downloading a “rare” previously unreleased Buzzcocks album from 1976, called Time’s Up, dating from when Howard Devoto was still singing for the band.

Why the hell do I do things like this?

Let’s look at the facts:

  • Devoto can’t sing as well as Pete Shelley and I really only like a few songs by his other band, Magazine.
  • The band had only been around for a year or less and the songs are all hasty demos.
  • The band chose to put out all the best stuff from this early period on the Spiral Scratch EP, including better versions of four of these songs.
  • The band chose not to release the rest of this recording, but instead went back into the studio to re-record the same songs from a full length album, with Shelley singing.
  • Howard Devoto left the band saying he was bored of their music

So, bad demos with a bored lead singer from a band who hadn’t really found themselves yet, and which they chose not to release. Obviously the smart thing to do would be to AVOID this record. So naturally I downloaded it and listened to the whole thing.

It is terrible.

Don’t believe me? Try these.

ORGASM ADDICT

LOVE BATTERY

Believe me now?

It’s time to go, Howard Devoto

 

03
Dec
10

Use a Kleenex, Solve World Problems

By Great Southern Steve Leave a Comment
Categories: Double Take, Mp3s - Other Artists and pop punk

OK, so, I admit to liking Billy Idol’s first band, Generation X. They were fun and “punky” and all about the hair, and generally they were not to be taken seriously and there’s a place for that. Their first record (the only one worth a mention) came out in 1979, as the band cheerfully rode that wave of second-rate commercialism that came through after the fist wave of English punk bands had either given up or gone arty. And personally I do not blame them at all. Someone else would have done it, and probably done it much worse. At least Idol can actually sing, his lyrics were kind of funny and cynical and took the piss out of commercialism while also embodying it, and, the band wrote decent power pop tunes to back it up.

They got semi-popular in the UK but never made it in the US or Europe, and although they always feature on those interminable ‘Spirit of Punk’ singles compilations, they are otherwise not referenced that often in the history of the times, probably because they were so utterly inconsequential.

That is, until Green Day started covering their ballad “Kiss Me Deadly” in concerts, and that same song got put on the end of a major summer movie, SLC PUNK.

Now, the U.S. is full of geeky teenagers learning to play that riff on acoustic guitars, and talking about the original Gen X version as “the SLC version”, and getting paid out by “real punks” who still have the thing on vinyl, and can remember when Billy Idol’s sneer hadn’t set and become permanent.

How funny, to think of this cheesy commercial pop-punk band being held up as “old school”, and potential new fans of the band being called poseurs. I wonder if anyone has actually said “I was into Generation X before they were cool!” yet.

Dudes, they were never cool. Just look at them for godsake.

Anyway, I chose not to put Kiss Me Deadly on here, but two other tracks from that record, both in player and mp3. Enjoy.

GENERATION X -From the Heart

GENERATION X –

GENERATION X – Kleenex

What you gonna do next
What you gonna do now
Use a Kleenex!!!

Wipe out sex – Kleenex
Better than love – Kleenex
John Paul George – Kleenex
Governments use Kleenex!!!

Use a Kleenex, solve world problems
Better blow your nose right now!!!

02
Dec
10

Glenville Reel

By Great Southern Steve Leave a Comment
Categories: clunky folk, Double Take, GSS Covers and Mp3s - Other Artists

Now that all my own musical aspirations are focused on various live / jamming projects this blog here can return to our regular “mp3 of bands what I like bulk good” type of blog.

First one up isn’t a band per se but a singer song-writer by the name of Loudon Wainwright III who I was introduced to back in 1992. My housemate Hickey produced this battered old 2 dollar LP from 1971, with a funny looking geezer on the cover, and we listened to it about once a day for about six months. I think I was particularly entranced by the guy’s voice. Back then he sang in this high-pitched anxious, slightly pathetic wail, that makes him sound not feminine but definitely not masculine and almost like he belongs to some separate third gender of angsty singer-songwriter. I late found out he was married to a McGarrigle and Rufus Wainwright is his son, so maybe this is why.

I got a hold of it recently and realized I had forgotten all but three tunes – Baby in the House (which is good but formulaic), Motel Room Blues (which I used to cover), and, the 3-part medley ending in Glenville Reel. I had forgotten the other two parts of this but always remembered the end of Glenville Reel:

Take off her clothes and throw ‘em in the river

Wash her body and stick it in the sun

Give that gal everything that you can give her

You can give her the bullets if you can give her the gun

Great song. I don’t know why it’s called Glenville Reel, though. Glenville is in West Virginia and Loudon isn’t from there, and it sure isn’t a traditional song so I got no clue. Maybe he just wrote it while he was there.

Anyway I have lately been working on my own version, Glenside Reel, which takes its name from an Adelaide mental hospital. I’ll post a demo on the L and S site sometime in the next few months, maybe, and those who listen to both will be able to hear the resemblance.

MOTEL ROOM BLUES

MEDLEY – UNHAPPY / SUICIDE / GLENVILLE REEL

I’m trying out the audio player, just for this post.

26
Jun
10

SOYE – Love, Drugs and Supermarkets

By Great Southern Steve Leave a Comment
Categories: Mix CD / Podcast and Mp3s - Other Artists
Tags:

SOME of YER ENGLISH:A PODCAST

TRACK LIST:

  • X-Ray Spex – Warrior in Woolworths
  • The Raincoats – Fairytale in the Supermarket
  • The Au Pairs – Love Song
  • The Stupids – It’s Gotta Be Love
  • The Slits – Newtown
  • The Pop Group – We are all Prostitutes
  • Crass – Smother Love
  • Adam and the Ants – Kick
  • The Damned – Drinking about my Baby
  • The Lurkers – Love Story
  • Ultravox – WrokWrok
  • Generation X – Day by Day
  • Orange Juice – Blue Boy
  • Gary Numan – Bombers Way to Zero
  • The Jam – DreamTime
  • The Clash – Lost in the Supermarket

Total running time 47:12


“I saw the lights and the pretty girls
And I thought to myself what a pretty world,
But there’s something else here that puts me off.
And I’m so scared dear, my love comes in frozen packs,
Bought in a supermarket.” (The Jam – Dreamtime).

13
Jun
10

Still, The Kill, and other words that rhyme with Fill(er)

By Great Southern Steve 2 Comments
Categories: Minipod, Mp3s - Other Artists and post punk

J0y Division: The Kill, Walked in Line (1978), Walked in Line (Still), Ice Age, (1978), Ice Age (Still)

No-one really likes Joy Division’s third album Still, do they? It’s never listed as a favourite, and often panned as a botch-job which probably shouldn’t have been released, as though somehow it’s very existence sullies the purity of the other two records.

I returned to it recently to see if there was anything there worth including on a Joy Division / New Order compilation I’m making for a friend, and while I was there, I tried to put my finger on exactly what the problems are. And there are three pretty big problems.

  • Curtis sounds bored. Don’t argue, he does.
  • Hannett’s production. What was beautiful on Unknown Pleasures and challenging in Closer is downright annoying on Still. It’s almost as though Hannett was bored by the songs and tried to use trickery to turn them into something they’re not.
  • The song selection. And this is really they key thing. Most of those songs on Still are old ones. I do not believe Curtis had written anything new.

To be specific:

- They Walked in Line and Ice Age are both on the unreleased Warsaw album  from 1978 and probably date from 1977 or earlier.

- Exercise One and The Sound of Music are both on the 1979 Peel Sessions.

- Glass, Dead Souls, The Only Mistake and Something Must Break all exist on studio recordings from earlier in 1979 made during demo sessions in various places (and recently released as disc 3 of Heart and Soul).

Basically, this leaves most of Still looking a lot like a bunch of filler tracks that weren’t good enough to make it onto the first two records, and which the band only recorded because they didn’t have any good new songs.

‘The Kill’ is the main exception. It’s a good song, and it’s going on my compilation. I do wish I could go back in time and turn up the vocals up while Hannett wasn’t looking, though.

Also: just for the sake of comparison, listen to the different versions of Ice age and They Walked in Line from Warsaw and Still . The earlier versions are just much better.

Mp3: J0y Division: The Kill, Walked in Line (1978), Walked in Line (Still), Ice Age, (1978), Ice Age (Still)

(This was made using a program called mp3 merge which I kinda like…)

STILL (1981)

Side one
  1. “Exercise One” – 3:06
  2. “Ice Age” – 2:24
  3. “The Sound of Music” – 3:55
  4. “Glass” – 3:56
  5. “The Only Mistake” – 4:17
Side two
  1. “Walked in Line” – 2:47
  2. “The Kill” – 2:15
  3. “Something Must Break” – 2:48
  4. “Dead Souls” – 4:53
  5. “Sister Ray (7.36)
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Southern Steve is…

...the online alter ego of S.J. (Steve) McKenzie.

I am an Australian guy who likes and plays lots of different styles of music, mostly for kicks.

There's samples of my own stuff here as well as lots of mp3 goodies from other bands I love; folk, punk, jazz and just whatever sounds like it has its own thing going on.

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