The Ambassadors – Somewhere To Hide
by I have been meaning to write up the notes I had on this mini album for quite some time. I love small run, self funded …
Album Reviews
Band’its At 10 O’Clock
The 101 Club in Clapham, South London, was a hugely popular and influential venue for music in the 70s and 80s and a lot of up and coming bands found their way on to the stage here. Alas, as can be seen below, it has long since closed down.
Toah Dynamic – Movement
I absolutely love this record – I have only played it through twice but I am really impressed. This is avant-garde experimental at its best and it is either a wonderful accident or, as I suspect, these boys know what they are doing all too well. Either way this one is a keeper and I am going to shout it from the rooftops until it gets the attention it deserves.
The LDVs – Video It!
Followers of Revival Records over on mastodon or various other social media sites will have seen me mention this obscure oddity before. It was found …
The Decemberists – The Hazards Of Love
The interviewer was incredulous that an ambitious concept album, let alone a rock opera of all things, had been considered a good idea for release in these modern times. I think he used the word ‘brave’ a lot.
Tenacious D – The Who Medley
“Who better to deliver a tribute to the greatest rock opera of all times? Who? The D! That’s Who!! We’ve been working on this medley …
Dexys Midnight Runners – Searching For The Young Soul Rebels
Forget Come On Eileen and Too-Rye-Ay, forget dungarees and floppy hair. Dexys Midnight Runners underrated classic is a raw, lyrically brilliant, musically innovative masterpiece, and a debut album that deserves wider recognition and acclaim.
Roxy Music – Manifesto
The album has elements of all the best of early Roxy Music, but never quite captures the same brilliance. Manifesto starts well, the intro is appealing, but it quickly fails to live up to the promise. A fairly tame, middle-of-the-roader really. Not the phrase you would normally associate with 1970s Bryan Ferry. Listening through again I can’t emphasise enough how much Trash sounds like the Mod Revival records of this era.
The Who – Who’s Missing
Who’s Missing is undoubtedly the better of the two, and side two of that album contained some of my most played Who tracks back then. Fast forward 10 years and the ‘Great Vinyl Cull’ of 1995, as I like to call it, was the last time I saw that record out in the wild. I needed the money and vinyl was dead, right? So I took all my vinyl to Selectadisc in Nottingham and they bought almost all of it, but that’s a story for another day. Suffice it to say it wasn’t that long before I was earning proper money, had seen the error of my ways and started re-collecting all my old LPs, and lots of new ones!
Manic Street Preachers – The Ultra Vivid Lament
The first thing to mention is this was written after Nicky Wire lost both of his parents just before the pandemic, and continuing into lockdown the album, or at least its lyrics, reflects sadness, insecurities and loneliness. The loneliness of being an orphan is real even well into middle age. Been there myself. But more than that it makes you reflect on and see the world altogether differently, probably due to the heightened sense of your own mortality.