THE TASTY 80'S - post-wave '82 to pre-grunge '91 (ca.)

Various oddities...

AUSGANG A-GO-GO (UK?)
- "los descamisados" M-LP 87 (Shakedown)
Really great, percussive, rhythmic and original guitar alterno punk/? in the vein of NOMEANSNO and late DEAD KEN'S with some spinechilling, "praire-rock" bits a la WALL OF VOODOO. I seem to fall for any band using these kinds of rhythms and harmonies. (COP SHOOT COP is another great example) I'm having a hard time to describe them better than with the aforementioned references. They're not clones by far, but definitely in the same style. Awsome twangy guitars, mean baselines and great vocals - grows + grows + grows... The album is indexed AUS MLP 002 which could mean there's an earlier release. Please send it to me for free anyone. Prettyplease?

CARDIACS (UK)
- "archive" CD recorded 77-79 (The Alphabet Business Concern)
- "the seaside" CD (84) (The Alphabet Business Concern)
- "rude bootleg" CD 85 (The Alphabet Business Concern)
- "a little man, a house and the whole world window" CD 87 (The Alphabet Business Concern)
- "live" CD 88 (The Alphabet Business Concern)
- "on land and in the sea" CD 89 (The Alphabet Business Concern)
- "all that glitters is a maresnest" VID 90 (The Alphabet Business Concern) now on CD with bonus trax
- "of ships and irons" CD 94 (The Alphabet Business Concern) early EPs & stuff
(CARDIACS continues with their new line up in the nineties section.)
"The Seaside" was the 1st CARDIACS album I ever heard. Opener "jibber & twitch" is one of their wildest and most intricate songs and sent me through the roof in about 20 seconds. Nothing has been the same since. On "The Seaside" (originally a cassette-only release re-released years later) they still have their original harsh, new wave edge. "A Little Man..." is their first proper full-length album and epic masterpiece that, with the single "Is This The Life", even granted them a minor chart succes.

KILLDOZER (USA)

KUMIKAMELI (FIN)

L'AMOURDER (FIN)

NO MAN/NO MAN'S BAND feat. Roger Miller (USA)
- "damage the enemy" LP 89 (New Alliance)
- "whamon express" CD 90 (SST)
Ahh.... What an awsome band(person/guy/thing?..) this is! "Damage.." was the 1st album I came across. The "Band" side contains improvised, humorous, cyco-zany, home made, toy-instumental music with a heavy RESIDENTS-influence. Great, but not as brilliant as the creative and VERY original pop of Mr Miller's solo project. POWERFULL riffs and melodies, noisy guitars and programmed drums that actually heightens the quality and originality of the overall sound (!). "Into the ocean" and "States" with their jerky verses and one-in-a-million choruses, "nobody could tell you" with its SONIC YOUTHy pop-charm, The fast, wiggly chanting of "win! instantly!" and the rest are all pure rock art. Those bloody awsome songs come to you like waves on a shore and that special feeling that you've discovered some great hidden treasure is as present as ever. The classic catch-22 of discovering an artist like this is also there: You love the music, but you know this guy has done more albums and thinking of this and the fact that it might take ages for you to find them all makes your heart drop like a stone. Help! Mayday! S.O.S! Please somebody help me....

NOMEANSNO (CAN)

NO SECRETS IN THE FAMILY (SWI)
- "in a certain light we all appear green" LP 87 (Rec Rec)
- "play & strange laughter" LP 89 (Rec Rec)
- "kleinzeit" LP 92 (Rec Rec)
Quirky, happy, cabaré pop with certain prog-influences (for drama). They really do sound like a family with no secrets between them. It's happy, uplifting stuff for sure. No noise, no rocking-it-out, not as ochestral as CARDIACS, but truly homey and causally mad without falling into sheer insanity. Their cover of "que sera sera" is an experience on it's own. You'd never see that zany chorus coming! The duelling fem/male vox adds to the cabaré-feel and I suspect that's where they draw most of their influences from. Happy record!:-) More, please!

THE OPHELIAS (USA)
- "the big o" LP 89 (Rough Trade US)
Although I've only found one of their albums, I still consider THE OPHELIAS one of my greatest musical findings of the last couple of years.

PATIFE (BRA)
- "corredor polones" LP 87 (WEA)
A real South American curiosity, the kind of album you'll only find when going through about 1000 shitty records after several hours in a seedy 2nd hand vinyl store. Even if they're seldom your best buys, finding albums like these always makes you all warm and fluffy inside. Just the notion that nobody but you would have discovered this record is enough to satify. So how does PATIFE sound like? Well, the opening title track is very cool indeed. Exciting drums & basslines, whispering vox & oozing ahhs, nice guitarlicks... a Hit for sure. I know I've overused the NOMEANSNO-reference, but fuck me, they really are close to the diversity and offbeat antics of early NMN. If they weren't from Brazil they'd definitely be Finnish ...released on Alternative Tentacles! They've got their straight pop songs and start-stop riffing and PRIMUS-quirk-funk and gentle/rocking guitars and all things nice & proper. Kinda like I want my records to sound, but nothing "out of the unordinary" so to speak. I'd love to hear more!

POPPI UK (HOL)
- "makeshift home music" LP 89 (Schemer)
Lively, diverse, original, guitary (loss for words? invent!) alterno-rock from the same planet as PIXIES, TRAGIC MULATTO, DEAD KEN'S and L'AMOURDER. At times really groovy with desperate, agonizing vocals - at times noise-folky and sensetive. They know how to put togher their songs to make them interresting, using different moods without losing themselves. Exiting, edgy, dramatic... more tense than dense. 80's alternative rock rarely got any better.

STUMP (UK)
- "mud on a colon" 12" EP 86 (Ron Johnson)
- "the peel sessions" 12" EP 87 (Strange Fruit)
- "quirk out" M-LP 87 (Chrysalis)
- "buffalo" 7" 88 (Ensign/Chrysalis) anyone know of a 12"?
- "chaos" 12" 88 (Ensign/Chrysalis)
- "a fierce pancake" 88 (Ensign/Chrysalis)
- "lights! camel! action! charlton heston meets the irresistible force" 12" (Ensign/Chrysalis)
I think that's pretty much the complete discog...
Creepy, crawly, ultra-quirky, insectoid pop which actually had a couple of radio hits ("chaos" and "charlton heston"). A pop/rock encyclopedia described them as "pop-friendly Captain Beefheart". It fits, but I'd like to add "...or if PRIMUS had been a brittish pop band". Don't get put off by the p-word, STUMP are hard core zanyness extravaganza! Oddly enough they never became one of my absolute, top-10 fave bands. Maybe coz they lacked the awsome songwriting skills of other contemporaries like CARDIACS, NOMEANSNO, KUMIKAMELI etc.

TRAGIC MULATTO (USA)
- "the suspect/no juice" 7" 83 (Alternative Tentacles)
- "judo for the blind" 12" (Alternative Tentacles)
- "locos por el sexo" LP (Alternative Tentacles)
- "hot man pussy" LP 89 (Alternative Tentacles)
- "chartreuse toulouse" LP 90 (Alternative Tentacles)
Oh what a glorious, twisted, rockin' band they were! Possibly the best AT-band ever together with NOMEANSNO, DEAD K'S and all other Jello-projects. The 7" debut is rather stripped down, bass-infested, rhytmic, "frustrated" rock much in the vein of early NOMEANSNO with some nifty trumpet bits, but the 2 last LP's included some amazeing, swinging, groovy and highly original alternative rock. The vocals of Fistula L. Roth has got this ethnic, wailing vibe which together with their highly percussive sound (coming with the two (!) drummers), make their quirky post punk sound very much alive and musky. Loads of noisy/rocking guitars too... and that ever so tasty trumpet! = :-D Like a tribal, folky version of NOMEANSNO, but with much greater diversity - they could wander between swamp-coutry on banjo and mean & heavy post-punk/pre-grunge without ever tripping into the potholes of "annoingly whacky" or contrieved "crossover". They probably shredded live, and must have been the perfect festival act. At a NOMEANSNO gig a few years back I took the opportunity to ask the guitarist if he knew what happened to the band. "Yes, I know" he said, and told me of how one of the members had stolen all the band's money, bought a phat package of heroin and gone off to Miami (or somewere). He mentioned the name of a new band formed by ex-members, and said "they sound like nothing else!" Did I make a note of the bandname? Fuck no! I'm still kicking myself for this, so If anyone have seen this "ex-members of TRAGIC MULATTO"-band, please contact me, OK.

WALKINGSEEDS (UK)
- "skullfuck" LP 87 (Probe Plus)
- "bad orb whirling ball" LP 90 (Paperhouse)
"OOOOAAAAARGHLGRHLGRRHHH!!!!!!" = DaNspeak for "golly! wot a bunch o' nifty rekkids I found yesterday!". KILLDOZER once said they were "so good they could be American" about WS, and it figures. They have alot in common with the meanest of the mean American Noisy Fuck-Rock bands like KILLDOZER, BIG BLACK, UNITED MUTATIONS and B. SURFERS. Add the japs in ZENI GEVA and you may or may not get the picture depending on you coolness. Todays "Stoner Rock" grunge-wannabees would piss their pants and run home to mama if they heard the WALKINGSEEDS' version of "iron man" - deadseriously the coolest, most desperate and brutal version I have ever heard. Sabbath's iron man would probably follow the grunchies...
Woo! Now I put on the "Bad Orb.." album and it turned out alot calmer. They even use semi-aucustic guitars here, but no need to worry. They carry themselves with excellent grime... sorry, grace, and they still rock albeit in a slightly more controlled manner. Not the same impact as "Skullfuck", but still very good.

A Darker Shade of Fun

DANIELLE DAX (UK)
- "pop eyes" LP 83 (Awesome) '85 re-release
- "jesus egg that wept" M-LP 84 (Awesome)
- "yummer yummer man" 12" EP 85 (Awesome)
- "the janice long session" 12" EP 86 (Strange Fruit/Nighttracks)
- "where the flies are" 12" EP 86 (Awesome)
- "big hollow man" 12" EP 87 (Awesome)
- "inky bloaters" LP 87 (Awesome)

DEAD CAN DANCE (AST)

SEX GANG CHILDREN (UK)
- "song and legend" LP 82 (Illuminated)
- "mauritia mayer/children's prayer" 7" 83 (Clay)
- "re-enter the abyss (the 1985 remixes)" LP 85 (Castle Communications)
- "beasts" LP 86 (Castle Communications) with all the early EPs & flipsides you'll ever need
- "nightland (performance USA 83)" LP 86 (Jungle)
ANDI SEX GANG
- "blind!" LP 84 (Illuminated)
+ more
I once made the mistake of calling SGC "the TOY DOLLS of goth" to one of my Extra-Sad (=gothster ) friends. Boy was he pissed. Later, now that I've expanded my number of references I kind of understand him. There's nothing overly mellow about SGC, but Andi's vocals are really special and at times they do sound a bit like a more sinister Olga. Musically they're the missing link between BAUHAUS and ADAM & THE ANTS. In all their skeletal, "positive punk"/goth they embedded the kind of diddies and melodies (at times surprisingly mellow) you rarely get to hear from bands of this sort. They were quite quirky too, lots of weird timechanges and stuff - all in all a most original act. The band SGC sounded pretty rough and underproduced on most their recordings, live as well as studio, but Andi's first "solo-album" (it included several SGC-members) is a little more together and actually their strongest release. The bandname was a reject of ADAM AND THE ANTS offshot BOW WOW WOW, and turned up in a line from one of their (BWW's) songs, I forgot which one. Since the sound of SGC occationally is quite reminicent of THE ANTS, there could be more connections, but I'll leave that for the factfreaks.

FOETUS (USA)
- "deaf" CD 81 (re-released by Thirsty Ear in 97)
- "ache" CD 82 (re-released by Thirsty Ear in 97)
- "hole" CD 84 (Self Immolation)
- "nail" CD 87 (Self Immolation)
- "thaw" CD 88 (Self Immolation)
- "sink" CD 89 (Self Immolation) most of the EP's collected
- "butterfly potion" 12" EP (Big Cat)
- "gash" CD 95 (Columbia)
- "null/void" CD 97 (Casablanca)
Yes I know, he called himself a trillion Foetusy things (SCRAPING FOETUS OFF THE WHEEL, YOU'VE GOT FOETUS ON YOUR BREATH, FOETUS OVER FRISCO etc, depending on what co-workers were involved) and did a zillion different EP's. Discophiles go here. Now, for those unfortunate of you who haven't yet discovered the grandfather of industrial/rock crossover, here's your chance. The diversion and development of the Foetal sound is really interresting. 1st album "deaf" is very divere and experimental and therefore I like it alot. I has got the noise, the insanity AND a couple of hits as well. Not his best but worth checking out if you're interested in early 80's cutting-edge new wave. In this context "Ache" sound rather average and more or less an intermission before the masterpiece of 1984: "Hole" - one of the greatest rock albums of the 80's. From the hard core industrial punk of "clothes hoist" to the mean & creepy epic "cold day in hell" this disc is all hits. It has all the rockabilly vibes of it's predecessor, but with a whole lot more developed musical ideas.

45 GRAVE (USA)

EXECUTIVE SLACKS (UK?)

And the soon-to-be-"good ol' 90's"?