Album of the Day 11/17/10
Every day our 1000 best albums of all time countdown continues all the way to #1. Wednesday’s album is #804:
Man or Astroman? – Intravenous Television Continuum
Don’t let their cutesy habit of introducing the songs with random snippets of dialogue from cheesy 1950s sci-fi movies turn you off. Back in the 90s, these masked men (and women – like the Ventures, there have been various editions of this band, including an all-girl version featuring Ani Cordero of Cordero on drums) put out a series of mostly first-rate instrumental rock albums, sputtering from surf to hotrod to sci-fi themes before going off on more of a dreampop/indie tangent late in the decade. This 1995 release gets the nod over the rest of their catalog because A) unlike a lot of their songs, most of the tracks here have bass in addition to guitar and B) the annoying nerdiness that occasionally surfaces on their other albums is pretty much absent. This is sort of a greatest-hits cd plus punked-out covers of surf classics. After the white noise of “Immersion Static,” they offer their big concert hits Put Your Finger In the Socket and Tomorrow Plus X as well as a 2012 version of the roaring, lo-fi Nitrous Burn Out. The best of the originals here is the eerie, jangly, Asian-tinged Tetsuwan Atomu. There are two version of their song Max Q here (including the weird and obviously titled Reverse Sync Moog Version). The covers range from obscure – an absolutely scorching version of Invasion of the Dragonmen and smartly chosen takes of Calling Hong Kong and Principles Unknown – to iconic, with punked-out versions of Out of Limits, the Munsters Theme, Deuces Wild, Cool Your Jets and a characteristically energetic, tongue-in-cheek Everyone’s Favorite Martian. If you like this, everything they did prior to 1998 is worth a listen. Here’s a random torrent – and you might also enjoy this download of a recent live show in Atlanta from earlier this year.
Album of the Day 8/13/10
Every day, we count down the 1000 best albums of all time all the way to #1. Friday’s album is #900:
Laika & the Cosmonauts – Laika Sex Machine Live
Incredibly eclectic surf and instrumental rock from Finland, 1999. These guys did it all: pounding Dick Dale chromatic stomps, spacy sci-fi themes, rapidfire chase scenes, twangy bucolic vignettes and dozens of catchy, two-and-a-half minute hits that are every bit as iconic in Europe as the Ventures are here. Laika & the Cosmonauts’ sound frequently uses keyboards as well as guitars, often in the same song, further diversifying their textures. This is a greatest-hits album of sorts recorded before ecstatic crowds in Germany and Finland: happily, we don’t have to suffer through any of their applause until the very end. As with so many of the great surf bands to come out of the Nordic regions, the band uses a lot of moody minor-key and chromatic passages, sometimes bordering on the macabre. Several others are satirical and quite funny. This collection includes the late 60s psychedelia of The Hypno-Wheel; the utterly gorgeous Turquoise; Disconnected, a surfy spoof of disco music, the bitter chromatics of Sycophant and Boris the Conductor (a bombastic sendup of Boris Yeltsin) as well as the themes from the Avengers, Get Carter and a pastiche of the Psycho and Vertigo themes. 26 songs in all, a terrific representation of one of the world’s great instrumental bands, one that literally never made a bad album. Their surprisingly traditional sounding first album, C’Mon Do the Laika and the psychedelically-tinged tour de force Absurdistan are especially worth seeking out. Be careful looking for torrents for this one: because of the title, attack sites disguised as porn have it listed, as do several dubious-looking sites located in Russia (where surf music is as huge as it is in the US).
Lucid Culture 