Thomas Dolby - The Flat Earth (1984)

 Capitol Records ■ ST-12309

Released February, 1984

Produced by Thomas Dolby

Engineered by Dan Lacksman
Mixed by Mike Shipley ("Hyperactive!" mixed by Alan Douglas)

Side One:	Side Two:
Dissidents The Flat Earth Screen Kiss	White City Mulu the Rain Forest I Scare Myself Hyperactive!

Oddly, I'd never really heard "She Blinded Me with Science", nor have I (really) even now, though it was a big hit in the decade I've spent my life unabashedly enjoying the resulting pop music from. I bought this LP as well as the Blinded by Science 12" EP/mini-album simply because I saw them for a low enough price. I'm honestly not sure at this point if they pre-dated or followed my father stuffing a copy of 1992's Astronauts and Heretics on CD into my hand while visiting a used music store. It's entirely possible they followed it--"I Love You Goodbye" is a stupendous song, on a really great album. I'd still only heard the clips of that biggest of singles though, on the commercials for 80s compilations, or on any show that was referencing it as indicative of the decade.

When I had the poll up (due to the absence of votes, I simply removed it), a single vote appeared and then disappeared, for the Blinded by Science mini-album, which I decided to sit down and listen to first. While I naturally couldn't recognize the original, I strongly suspected the version of "She Blinded Me with Science" was a 12" extended mix, and I later confirmed it was just that. Those things are difficult to pull off and it rarely happened with much success. The hooks are either beaten into the ground or so severely cropped or inverted as to become thoroughly un-catchy. This wasn't much an exception, so I didn't feel much like trying to write about not only a mini-album that was an attempt to capitalize on the now rather confused release history Dolby had built up (in his native U.K., The Golden Age of Wireless did not contain that enormous single, though the original U.S. did not either--it was initially released, instead, with tracks omitted and replaced with b-sides, in typical U.S. fashion for U.K. releases--though I still don't much understand a lot of the reasons this was and is done) but one that contained one of those mixes.

Day Forty-Five: Elvis Costello & the Attractions - Armed Forces

Columbia Records ■ JC 35709

Released January 5, 1979

Produced by Nick Lowe

Engineered by Roger Bechirian

Side One:	Side Two:
Accidents Will Happen Senior Service Oliver's Army Big Boys Green Shirt Party Girl	Goon Squad Busy Bodies Moods for Moderns Chemistry Class Two Little Hitlers (What's So Funny 'Bout) Peace, Love and Understanding

While I've managed to cover bands from Italy, Cornwall, Sweden, Ireland, Australia, and, of course various other parts of the UK ("other parts" references back to Cornwall, not Australia), I'm most definitely a U.S. citizen. I have always lived here, and indeed have never left here. As a result, many of my used records reflect the peculiarities of the U.S. market, and the alterations¹ thereof. While Mondo Bongo managed to squeak into my Boomtown Rats poll without warning, I decided, in the future, to notate these issues as they arise, in case anyone is voting on standing preference or favourites. Armed Forces is more distinctly transformed from its original U.K. counterpart, going so far as to be effectively unrecognizable even on sight. The tracklist is altered only slightly, though: "Sunday's Best" is dropped from the middle of the early half of side two in favour of the closing inclusion of "(What's So Funny 'Bout) Peace, Love and Understanding," E.C.'s cover of Nick Lowe's song, which was originally released as the B-side to Lowe's "American Squirm", and credited to "Nick Lowe and His Sound", though the cover does manage to hint at the artist's true identity if you look (just a bit) carefully.

Day Thirty-Five: The Cars - Shake It Up

Elektra Records ■ 5E-567

Released November 6, 1981

Produced by Roy Thomas Baker

Engineered by Ian Taylor (with Walter Turbitt and Thom Moore)

Side One:	Side Two:
Since You're Gone Shake It Up I'm Not the One Victim of Love Cruiser	A Dream Away This Could Be Love Think It Over Maybe Baby

The reasons for this particular purchase might be, in their way, kind of stupid. There was a period of time in high school where I began to raid my father's rather extensive poster collection, which was largely made up of the theatrical ones from his time managing a theater in the early 80s (I've got some real doozies, actually, like the ones for Blade Runner, Life of Brian, Poltergeist, Escape from New York and Wrath of Khan), but had a tiny smattering of music-oriented ones. One somewhat wrinkled, partly ripped but extraordinarily large one was the cover art for Shake It Up. While I originally began to put whatever posters I liked up (in some cases the link being semi-tenuous, as I'm not huge on Halloween II, but the poster is good, and I do like Halloween), I started to decide I should own the works in question before advertising them, as if it were disingenuous to say, "Look at my Shake It Up poster, what a good album!" and then not even own it.

Day Twenty-Six: The Boomtown Rats - Mondo Bongo

Columbia Records ■ PC 37062

Released January 24, 1981¹

Produced by Tony Visconti and the Boomtown Rats

Engineered by Chris Porter and Tom Winter

¹Original tracklisting; UK release

Side One:	Side Two:
Mood Mambo Straight Up This Is My Room Another Piece of Red Go Man Go Under Their Thumb...Is Under My Thumb	Please Don't Go The Elephant's Graveyard Banana Republic Don't Talk to Me Hurt Hurts Up All Night

Anyone who knows this album (and let's be honest, that's probably zero people I know, and thus zero people reading this) might see something a bit peculiar above. And there is something peculiar. Anyone who has done much research into British music in the 1960s--and it doesn't take much--will start to see a large volume peculiarities. There was no Yesterday and Today, no Beatles VI, no Who album titled Happy Jack--and the list goes on, and on, and on, and on. Even AC/DC (who were only British by birth, and even then only 3/5 of them) suffered this with the weird melding of the albums T.N.T. and High Voltage, with some tracks from these scattered around, and others lost until the release of the '74 Jailbreak EP in 1984, four years after the death of Bon Scott in 1980--to say nothing of the more minor fiddlings with the other albums cannibalized to encompass that release. Bewildering re-arrangements and tossed-in-a-blender releases are a hallmark of U.S. releases of artists from other countries, and often done in fashions more like High Voltage, where the title stays the same and nothing else does--the tracklisting, the cover art, even the placement in the chronology of release. This is actually another tiny part of my frustration with blogs setting out to cover 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die: if you are unaware, you may not actually be listening to the recordings you are being directed toward. If you are told to listen to Raw Power in the modern age, chances are you aren't going to hear David Bowie's mix, unless you know to seek it out. If you are told to listen to a number of Frank Zappa's albums with the Mothers of Invention, censoring, strange mixes and other alterations will occur (though you can be forgiven, in that case, for thinking perhaps they are intended in some cases).

Day Eight Point Bonus Track(s): Barry Andrews - "Rossmore Road" b/w "Win a Night Out with a Well-Known Paranoiac"

Virgin Records ■ VS 378

Released: September, 1980

Produced by Barry Andews and John Strudwick

A-Side: Rossmore Road	B-Side: Win a Night Out with a Well-Known Paranoiac

NOTE: I don't normally review singles (or most EPs, live albums, etc) but I'm going to use smaller releases to take up time when I feel like it.

I found this single when I was out hunting around on Record Store Day last year, and grabbed it only because Barry Andrews was originally keyboard player for XTC.

I've found that 7"s in general have their own kind of community (45cat is a database exclusively of 45rpm 7" releases, primarily going only through the 1980s or 1990s in terms of what it contains) and tend to have cult followings--especially for artists who lack full album releases, and Mr. Andrews didn't release an album with exclusively his name on it for another 23 years after this single came out. There are some cool songs out there that never got released in any other fashion (I do have one of my dad's copies of Chris Hodge's "We're on Our Way" b/w "Supersoul" that was released on the Beatles' Apple Records), so it always makes this kind of thing a bit fun.

Anyway, Barry left XTC after the release of Go 2, their second full length, and possessor of one of my favourite album covers ever, unsurprisingly designed by Hipgnosis, who designed many a classic album cover. The album was a bit peculiar in that it marks the only occasion that the band ever released an album with songs explicitly written by someone other than frontman Andy Partridge or co-conspirator, bassist Colin Moulding. Those songs--"Super Tuff" and "My Weapon" were written by Barry Andrews, who was trying to find his voice as a songwriter, but was somewhat wrestled out of the band by the paranoid Partridge (who feared he might lose control). They were odd songs, not sounding like most of the band's output even to that point, and not the greatest by any stretch. I grabbed this single because I thought Barry might turn out differently without the strictures or expectations of an XTC record to constrain his songwriting.

It turns out I was right. "Rossmore Road" and "Win a Night Out with a Well-Known Paranoiac" are both interesting songs, with a sound a bit like a slightly over-"hip" band in a club, with a walking bassline in the A-side behind woodwinds--but also strange electronic noises. Barry describes Rossmore Road (apparently in Marylebone, London) in a sing-song fashion, joined in chorus by others when he sings the name of the road, until the song builds and explodes into a heavily punctuated and more full sounding chorus, which repeats "All humming now" to describe the amenities located in and around the road itself. 

"Win a Night Out" apparently got actual radio play, and is a much stranger song, though it sounds much like another band in a small club in the way I envision (perhaps inaccurately, but based primarily on television and movies in the 1980s and 1990s, usually in semi-period settings from earlier decades, like 1990's Dick Tracy), but is dominated by Barry Andrews speaking out his notion of nights out with the theoretical winner, each of which goes off in strange and dark, awful directions. They're all punctuated by a group of voices singing "Win a night out!" which Barry finishes for them, adding a bit more singing for those moments, but continuing primarily to operate his voice by rhythm.

This isn't a release you're going to stumble into, so give it a listen here: