Puffy - Bring it!

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My abiding love of Puffy is one of those things that people don't seem to understand. Why do I like these 2 silly women singing silly pop songs, who got a silly show on Cartoon Network? I dunno, they're a hoot? Can't that be good enough? Yeah, they can be incredibly derivative, (Their second album rips off The Who and Black Sabbath so hard it's crazy) but so what? They aren't trying to be anything they aren't, just goofy and fun. So 13 years of silliness into their careers they've put out this album, and like the rest of their albums it's full of great songs and horrible ones. A couple of the great songs were written by Shiina Ringo, who is incredibly prolific and talented and plays in any genre she wants to with aplomb. She's a great source of material. Unfortunately though, 2 of the songs were given to them by Avril Lavigne. Enough said about that. A fair amount of the album skirts pop-punk territory, unfortunately, but there's enough good stuff on here to make it worthwhile. "Anata to Watashi", for instance, could easily fit in on Todd Rundgren's "Something/anything?". It's a perfect catchy pop song full of great devices. Through the whole album, their voices, as always, blend together perfectly. And the last track, "Wedding Bell", a cover of an old song by the Japanese pop band Sugar, is just fantastic. It's a snark filled story of a woman going to an old friend's wedding, alone, feeling totally inadequate, and hating it. So she wants to just say "Fuck you, amen" to the bride. It's a very catchy tune, and Puffy really padded out the arrangement with flutes and chimes and strings, which makes the contrast to the lyrics that much better. Still, the overall album is flawed, so its rating must reflect that. And here's a video they made for "Wedding Bell". Hope you understand Japanese.

Ass burners - Blasting poo armageddon

Anyone who knows me would know that as soon as I saw this I was bound to give it a listen and a review. Obviously, shit-themed metal is going to tickle my fancy. It should come as no surprise that this is "novelty" music. But since it's pretty much all in french, I could pretend it isn't... except for when it goes from some seriously righteous riffage into a fucking polka. I mean, on the one hand I don't think there's much room to be disappointed by that, and they actually do it pretty well, but on the other hand, I was just rocking out and digging it and only understanding every 4th word and it was fine until it changed. So I dunno. With such fecal gems as "scheiße wurst", "Proctologue", "Tout dans l'anus", and "Anal speed dating", you pretty much get what you expect. The riffage is great, these dudes are a surprisingly good metal act. They throw in their "other genre" bits with a fair amount of sophistication, though I still don't care for that. Hearing shit metal in french is pretty cool. Check 'em out if you're feeling sophomoric and not too picky about things. It's kind of worth it. Kind of.

The police/Sting - Ghost in the studio

Weeeiirrd. A couple of days ago, I acquired an album attributed to the Police and titled simply "Ghost in the studio". A web search for information didn't turn up much, just that it was apparently Sting's demo tapes that he brought to the band in 1980 or 81 to flesh out into the fourth Police album. Let's look at the track listing:

1. Secret Journey
2. Sprits in the material world
3. Invisible Sun
4. Too much information
5. One world (not three)
6. Hungry for you
7. Invisible Sun
8. Secret Journey
9. Don't believe in me baby
10. Don't think we could ever be friends
11. Don't look at me
12. It's never too late
13. Daytime Job

So we have a good chunk of the finished album here in rough form, and a few others that have never seen the light of day. Let's take a listen. The sound quality is pretty rough in general, and some tracks sound better engineered than others. There's a definite lack of Stew, and all the drum tracks are done with a drum machine and are quite minimal. "Too much information", in fact, features handclaps instead of drums, and "One world" has no rhythm track at all. The tracks that ended up on the actual album sound remarkably unchanged from their prototypes here, which makes me wonder if Andy Summers had a hand in the guitar parts on this demo, or if he mostly just played on the album what he heard here. The multiple versions of "Secret Journey" and "Invisible Sun" really only differ in that the atmospheric synth sounds were a bit different to each other. None of the tracks here offer any polish at all, and it's kind of interesting to hear how Sting layers his vocals. But let's check out the stuff that really had me interested: The tracks that never made the cut.
None of them could have made it as Police songs. "Don't believe in me baby" is actually pretty good as a moody british new wave song, but "Don't think we could ever be friends" and "Don't look at me" sound like Sting teamed up with Michael McDonald. Yech. "It's never too late" could have easily popped back up on one of Sting's solo records. It has that slick, butt-jazz lite feel to it. Finally, there's "Daytime Job", which is surprisingly uncharacteristic for Sting and I like it in spite of its cheesiness. It would have been a great Billy Joel song. This collection of tracks offers some interesting insight for those of us geeky enough to want to peek behind the process of making a police record. It's kind of like the "deleted scenes" on the DVD. Kinda cool, not that great, and it takes a nerd to appreciate it. I'll ignore the muddiness of the sound, and give it a C. It's an inferior version of the finished product, but it's interesting enough to be worth a listen, and has one new song that's pretty good.

Just say yes...

1987 was quite the interesting year for me. I was 10, and started realizing and noticing things that have made their indelible marks upon me. When this CD was released at the end of that year, it made quite an impression in my young and impressionable mind. Why is this? Here's the track listing:

1. Never Let Me Down Again (Remix) - Depeche Mode
2. Lips Like Sugar (12" Mix) - Echo & The Bunnymen
3. Out of Hand (Extended Version) - The Mighty Lemon Drops
4. Ya Ho - James
5. Work Is a 4 Letter Word - The Smiths
6. No Stars - Figures On A Beach
7. Young Manhood - The Wild Swans
8. Somebody Gotta Do It (Remix) - Ice-T
9. I Wanna Live - The Ramones
10. Can't Hardly Wait - The Replacements
11. Feeling, A - Throwing Muses
12. How Men Are - Aztec Camera
13. Cherokee Chief - Casual Gods (Jerry Harrison)
14. Hideaway (Remix) - Erasure

As a kid who colored his hair red and blue that summer and wore a ripped up jean vest, I'd already heard the Depeche Mode track and seen the video. But Echo and the Bunnymen? The Smiths? Ice-T? The Ramones? Aztec Camera? Throwing Muses? THE REPLACEMENTS? Fully half of these tracks turned me on to something I found amazing at one time or another in the interceding 20 years. Throwing Muses took me some warming up to, as did the white-boy soul of Aztec Camera's Roddy Frame, but for a 10 year old mind that was full of Bon Jovi, This was some revolutionary stuff, man. Revisiting it now, It's a crappy Ramones song, The Smiths track is somehow uncharacteristic, and the Depeche Mode track is like 8 minutes long, just right for a leather daddy with some poppers to put on a mix tape for his lair. But the Replacements track... Probbly the best 'Mats song to use if you're going to hook someone into fandom. The Throwing Muses track would make a fine soundtrack to a girl on LSD staring into space while languidly pulling out her hair. Not quite what you might expect if all you've heard of them is "Not too soon", A college radio staple of the early 90s as well as a fine song. I'd love to give this an A. I can't. Jerry Harrison could never hack it outside of Talking heads and Tom-tom club. I don't like Erasure. The Wild Swans and Figures on a Beach and James are all no good. But the music on this CD led me to other sources, such as Thrasher Magazine's Notes from the underground column, which turned me on to so much more... This was, for me, a seminal, if half-assed album. I love it.