Phantastic Phantasms, Pholks!

Call me a phan, pholk. I love the Phantasm series with all my heart, but I had a weird roundabout way to see Don Coscarelli's beloved cult horror series. The original Phantasm was in a media rights package picked up by one of the big national chains who didn't put that many films into their programming, and when they did, putting a curious, ultra low budget film from the late 70s on probably wasn't on their agenda. So that film never ran on TV. Phantasm II, the only Hollywood-backed major release, was in a rights package that went to a private channel, and since they had to fill hours of programming without having their own programming they stuffed their schedule with American TV series and films. So Phantasm II was on at least once a year, if not more. Instead of falling in love with the original, that's the one I fell in love with. It's not a bad entry. It is weird as hell, but not as inscrutably weird as the original film, which is often a literal 'what the fuck just happened' experience. Phantasm barely has a plotline and almost no inner logic. Rather than a coherent film, it's more a collection of little horror vignettes involving the same people, with Scenes pretty much coming and going in seemingly arbitrary order.  

Part of this was of course it's production history, with Coscarelli basically rounding up a bunch of friends and filming the movie on weekends over an entire year, then spending months trying to put this footage into shape in editing. And the other part is that it's just a profoundly strange picture, with Coscarelli giving in to any whims and the oddest of inspirations (putting his finger through a styrofoam cup inspired him for the scene with the Tall Man's severed but moving finger), and scrapping a linear narrative for surreal dream imagery and just plain oddness. Compared to that, Phantasm II is a model of narrative clarity, though that was the price of doing business with a major studio. 'No dream sequences' was the edict which was (almost) followed, so the story is more streamlined, while still keeping enough odd moments so as not to confuse it with cookie-cutter studio ware. It does what sequels usually do, going bigger and (depending on your point of view) better: more evil dwarfs that still look like the Jawas from Star Wars, more evil henchmen, more elaborate evil spheres that drill their way through people. 

Whoah, now that's a mouthful...

I had the (mis-) fortune of also seeing Phantasm III on TV, but it's easily the weakest of Coscarelli's films, with him seemingly taking inspiration from Sam Raimi's increasingly comical Evil Dead series and Bruce Campbell's cult hero Ash, modeling series stalwart Reggie - the ever-horny, thus always trouble-finding ice cream vendor turned Tall Man-hunter - after Ash's overly confident but slightly incompetent anti-hero. That alone would've been fine, but Coscarelli want way too far in the frenetic horror-comedy direction, allowing a trio of cackling zombies that are Deadites in all but name to take over parts of the film. Add to that a black lesbian ex-marine and a precocious kid with killer traps (a perverted or possibly more honest Home Alone?!) as Reggie's sidekicks, and Phantasm III is a miscalculation. 

Phantasm OblIVion came out in 1997 after a number of attempts to make a bigger, more ambitious (and thus more ambitiously budgeted) movie fell through, Coscarelli called up the gang and decided 'fuck it, let's make a movie'. It's a truly slimmed-down low-budget affair, with a grand total of five speaking roles! Then again, the idea that the Tall Man is emptying the earth, one small town after another, kind of invites this reduction, doen't it? Coscarelli also reduces the budget by reusing a couple of scenes that didn't make the cut of the first Phantasm. And while some of these do feel shoehorned in, others are marvelous fits. Phantasm OblIVion is a definite slow burn, more of an abstract meditation on the themes of the serie sequential sequel. And in that way, very true to the spirit of the original as a bunch of distinct vignettes that hang together relatively well. It has probably my favorite shot of the entire series, shot guerilla-style on Wilkshire boulevard one Thanksgiving morning. And it ends on a marvelous scene, another outtake from 1977/1978 that mixes dialogue from 1997 in. "It's the wind...just the wind". No third sequel to a cheapo horror series has ever ended in such a poetic and wonderful way. (You can see the movie right here and the scene in question starting from the 1.23.30 mark. It's a spoiler, and it isn't. Nothing ever ends in the world of Phantasm, and evrything does.)

All right, no more ice cream for you...and you...and you...and you

Seeing the lights of Reggie's ice cream van slowly disappear in the darkness is the absolute best way to leave the series, as the belated follow-up Phantasm RaVager - not coincidentally the only film not directed by Coscarelli - is a bit of a disaster. A fan project that grew into a feature film, but can never disguise its origins as a bunch of short films, making RaVager the most incoherent film in the entire series, which really is quite the feat! Most sequences feel barely connected, and while accepting the limits of low budget constraints had alwas been part and parcel of being a phan, the awful CGI is an eye soar, it's like watching video game cut scenes from a decade earlier. Truly hideous stuff. While there is a certain pathos and satisfaction in seeing the gang go out there one more time for the hell of it, including Angus Scrimm who was a cool 86 when they filmed it, the film is just not good, or good enough. Yes, it is heartfelt, but I'd still stick to those red tail lights fading. And yet, I can't hate on it, checking in with these same actors, and these films, over a span of almost 45 years is like seeing old friends again, and you love them, even the obnoxious ones...

I don't know if you came for a retrospective on Phantasm, but hey, once you get me to talkin', I ain't stoppin' 'til I had my say. As usual, there is of course a musical reason for this as well. As Halloween is upon us, it feels just right to bring out my love for horror films, togethetr with another horro-film related treat for your ears. The music score for Phantasm was a collaboration between veteran Fred Myrow (who had scored "Soylent Green" before) and Edward Seagrave, and was inspired by Dario Argento favorites Goblin and Mike Oldfield's "Tubular Bells" extracts as made famous by The Exorcist. The latter will be obviou to anyone listening to the Phantasm theme, which is a pretty bald-faced rip-off of "Tubular Bells", but hey, I dig it more than Oldfield's tune.  

Yo Fred, we won't get sued over this, huh?! 

Today's offering are two suites, one for the original film, and one for its sequel. The score by Myrow and Seagrave has its moments - notably any time the main theme is involved, but also a lot of incidental music that isn't much without pictures (and, sign of the times, a horrid disco tune), so I basically edited the best moments together for about a vinyl side's worth of atmospheric music from Phantasm. The suite for Phantasm II was actually a bonus program for the score for Phantasm when that album was reissued by Silva Screeens in 1991. It is a rerecording, slightly synthetic-sounding, that I just tightened up a bit and relieved of its stupid, ultracheap and cheasy explostion sound effects. That score, co-written and performed by Christopher L. Stone (who would take over scoring of OlIVion and RaVager), gives a good feel of the more action-oriented nature of Phantasm II. 

An additional bonus is my improved extra edition version of Best Of Horror, a now somewhat classic compilation around here, that someone asked for and I'm happy to re-up in its proper thread. Hell, I'll also throw in 2024's offering, a sampler of music from Italian horror films and giallos, 'cause these guys know their creepy music. Features classic tracks by Goblin, Ennio Morricone and Claudio Simonetti, as well as a rare track, an outtake medley by Keith Emerson, lovingly assembled by yours truly, same as it ever was. 

Now, all that should cover your needs in atmospheric, spooky and creepy music from the movies, for Halloween or any other time of the year, really...

So, Happy Halloween if you're celebrating that, and happy listeing either way if you don't...

Move To The (Algo)Rhythm Of Some Fine Folk Music...

Algorhythms, baby, sometimes they work against you, and sometimes they actually help you. No, I am not talking about joining the A.I. revolution - if you've been here a while you'd know better, though the wife has embraced Claude who thankfully is not another man, as one could assume by its stupid French-ass name. Oh, sorry, I digress. What was I talking about again? Oh, yeah, digressions. How about digressions by algorhythm? Still not a streamer, but even trusty old Youtube, my music service of choice, is obviously trying to lure me with tempting 'oh, you might like this' suggestions on the sidebar. And wouldn't you know it, today's offering comes straight from the Youtube pipeline. I don't know which modern folk-related artist I was looking up in winter/spring 2023, but all of a sudden Youtube proposed me at every visit two or three new related suggestions for vaguely folk an Americana-inspired artists, and dutifully I clicked my way through their suggestions. Also dutifully, I took note and load of those I liked, and one of the results is the One Buck Record of the day. 

When I published Americana 2 about two weeks ago, I mentioned in the write-up that a good number of those tracks, most by little-known or unknown artists were outtakes from another project, and this is said project. When finally finishing compiling these, I finally decided to throw off the truly country-tinged songs, knowing that I had a perfect album to put those on, while everything that was decidedly more folk was kept here, for the first of three volumes in this little series. I slapped the name New Folk(s) on it, because...well...these folks were new to me and...I guess you can figure out the rest. Now, that they've been lying around in a folder for two and a half years, these folks and their music aren't as new as they once were, and in truth some of these songs might now almost be a decade old. But hey, I'm slow with modern music, and it's a title I like, so New Folk(s) stays, even if the fresh paint might be peeling off one or two tracks. A reader also mentioned "some nice melancholia" on Americana 2. Well, if some nice melancholia is your thing, you're definitely going to find that here. 

It wasn't necessarily the main criteria - that'd be song quality, natch! - but I realized that pretty much every artist here is one I hadn't heard of before, and most are in double or triple digits as far as subscribers go. Now, there's some fantastic artists on the Tube who have a ridiculously low number of subscribers (like, say, The Fly Birds straight out of my Bluegrass Chartbusters series, who surely deserve more than 355 followers), but I liked that this was, in more ways than one, a voyage into the unknown. Which it will stay, for me as for you, prospective listeners. I could look up all these artists and give you one-line descriptions and what have you, but I'm not gonna. Instead, it's the One Buck Records algorhythm that will surprise you, in much the same way I was surprised when these songs first showed up. I just added a nicely flowing running order, and some cover art, and that's it. The exploration is still on, and if you find someone or their song that you like, well, investigate. or, you know, tell us about 'em. Folks like Andrew Tasker, Justin Prins, Sounds Like April, William Troia, Missing Teeth, Catseye Parrish, Fixer, So Impartial and Sambassadeur are awaiting you. 

So, I'll just leave this here, enjoy these New Folk(s), folks...

Let The Crow Take Musical Flight Again...

The Crow the movie was a sizable hit when it came out in 1994, but the accompanying soundtrack was bigger. It was freakin' huge, becoming a megaseller (we're talking triple platinum in the U.S. alone, baby), soundtracking the teenage years of many a youngling worldwide - yours truly included - and subsequently also became a staple of second hand record stores, besides about twelve copies of R.E.M.'s Monster and the inevitable half dozen copies of Hootie And The Blowfish's Cracked Rear View. The 90s were obviously still the heyday of the soundtrack compilation as secret-or-aspiring-hits-collection, with tracks you couldn't necessarily get elsewhere - the producers of the The Crow album made sure all tracks were exclusives - but the immense success was still somewhat surprising considering how hard-edged the record and how niche the film as a goth/film noir/comic book adaptation was. Suffice to say that at the time it was probably the hardest record I had in my collection.

Sure, having a couple of big names on the album didn't hurt, with Nine Inch Nails being the key addition to the soundtrack that started to drop all other dominos. Once Tent Reznor in, record company signed off on the concept of the album, and the research for similarly themed or similar-sounding bands and artists began. James O'Barr had gone so far as to quote an entire song by The Cure in the comic book source (and cheekily written 'used with permission' despite asking nothing of nobody), but when Robert Smith was approached, he loved the comic and the script and for the first time produced a song specific for a film. (A year later, he'd write "Dredd Song" for the Sly Stallone-starring Judge Dredd, a much less well-regarded film and soundtrack). And while the Crow soundtrack was rife with big names, there could have been even more Radiohead's then-underappreciated-but-now-a-modern classic "Creep" could have been on the album, but executive producer Jeff Most kicked it off after Brandon Lee's death, not wanting his character to be called a creep or a weirdo. Smashing Pumpkin's "Silverfuck" was written with the film in mind, but the record company asked for the song back to put on Siamese Dream. 

As an older teen I loved the movie. I didn't listen to the music that was just developing and woud later be known as emo, but you can think of teen OBG as a sort-of-emo kid, with younger me lapping up the the film's themes of love that trancends death, revenge and quests for higher purpose. And looking back on the movie, it still holds up today, even if its characters and script are relatively light and barely scratch more than the surface. That said, the actors do an excellent job to bring these thinly drawn characters to life, none moreso than Brandon Lee in the title role, whose on set death always overshadowed the film and its themes, making it even more 'goth' and darkly romantic than it was. But really, in most ways, The Crow is all about the look and feel. The sets and design work is absolutely incredible, as is the lighting and the camerawork. This film looks like no other, and today's flat, green-screened 'we'll fix it in post' practices will assure that we will never have a film like it again. The miniature work is also something that for obvious reasons we won't see again, and what a loss that is as well, with the Gothic cityscapes reminding you of Tim Burton's Gotham City. Proyas' Detroit in this film of course looks nothing like the real city, but a godforsaken urban wasteland of shadows, broken down neighbourhoods and rain. So. Much. Rain. But hey, it can't rain all the time. 

Loving the movie meant at least respecting the soundtrack, even though I was very picky, which will come into play in how I approached the One Buck Record of the day. I loved the film's signature songs, while some of the more noisy industrial tracks weren't my bag and some I didn't remember at all, for reasons we'll get into in a bit. Let's just say that listening to the album always involved free and freqent use of the 'skip' button, something that was at least partly responsible for the creation of this specific album. The other reason was that, when I finally picked up the CD with Graeme Revell's score music, I realized how little the soundtrack alone represented the feeling of the movie it accompanies. 

I already mentioned this in the first reworked soundtrack that mixed soundtrack songs and score tracks, but it is even more true here: To simulate how a movie sounded and felt, you have to have the two together (unless there is little to no score or it's entirely unobtrusive and thus, uh, unmemorable). The Crow is mainly known for its soundtrack album - one of the biggest-selling soundtracks of its, or any era - but what most people remember from the movie, not the album, is something different: How Graeme Revell's score with its World Music vocalizing and heavy rock guitars supported and supplemented the rock tracks by some of the biggest name in the game in the 90s. 

Starting this project, I was wondering again about something that always felt curious, and a bit 'off'' about a film I know well and have watched numerous times. How come that I remembered some songs extremely well, while I had literally no memory of ever hearing a couple of them in the film at all? The first part of that equation is simple: The most memorable songs are memorable, because the film makes them so: You always remember The Cure's "Burn" - the inofficial theme song from the film - and Nine Inch Nails' cover of Joy Division's "Dead Souls" because the movie constructed whole sequences  that almost function as music videos around them. As such, these songs, much like Jane Siberry's end title ballad "It Can't Rain All The Time, co-written with Revell around one of his themes, are inextricable from the pictures and the moments shown. In the case of The Crow it's all about the score and some handpicked 'feature' songs.

But what about those other songs that even as a fan of the film you'd have difficulties to place? Rewatching the film to find why I had no memory of how the film used, say, Rage Against The Machine's "Darkness" or Helmet's "Milktoast". And that is because the film didn't use them, not really. These tracks, like the ones by The Rollins Band and Pantera are used as incidental music coming from the night club while Top Dollar and his minions are scheming evil plans upstairs, meaning they are almost completely inaudible other than as low backgrpund noise. So, yeah, the soundtrack album cheats to put some big names on the album, even if director Alex Proyas couldn't find a showcase spot, or any real spot, for them in the film. Thus follows my brutal logic for this album: These four tracks that are all but inaudible in the film are gone, big names attached or not. 

The usual idea applies for The Crow [OBG Edit]: Mix and match score moments and songs in chronological order to imitate the movie's movement and capture it's biggest moments. I slightly cheated, for personal reasons. See, "Big Empty" is by far my favorite track from Stone Temple Pilots - a grunge second coming track that perfects the quiet-loud-quiet dynamic so many of its predecessors were built around - and I didn't want to wait all the way to the end of the album to hear it, as you would have to, as that song ran over the second half of the movie's end credits. And it's a small cheat: You see, during the films opening, when T-Bird's jolly bunch of criminals and murderer's drive by the hot dog stand, where friendly beat cop Albrecht and young Sarah hang out, "Big Empty" is playing in their car as they speed by. You can only hear a couple of bars of the song, but it's there. Enough for ol' OBG to showcase it, albeit shortened a bit, in the lead-off track. It is also, in its unedited form, the last track of the album, so if two "Big Empty"'s is too much for you, you can easily drop the 'reprise' version at the very end. A ton of tracks have gotten new names, with the featured songs added in parantheses.

Generally I shortened down the songs rather unmercifully, to keep momentum up, and the album moving along. Having one of the lesser songs run unabridged for four or five minutes could and would really be a momentum killer, so most tracks are edited, some down to their main gist. Machines Of Loving Grace's punchy "Golgotha Tenement Blues" is cut in half, but plays pretty much exactly as in the movie: At the time I end it, it gets mixed into the background as the characters start to speak. The big moments of this track are here, and I didn't need anything else. My Life With The Thrill Kill Cult maybe knew someone in high places, because like Medicine they got a plum gig as one of the house bands in Top Dollar's night club. So "After The Flesh", which I personally find to be an awful industrial noise rock number, gets played almost in its entirety - I kept only the 30-second intro before the song really gets garish. On the other hand, Violent Femmes' "Color Me Once" plays for about thirty seconds as background music in the film, but gets a longer - if not complete - spot in the set list. 

The secret to why Graeme Revell's score is so remarkable is that it really is a couple of different scores in one. The city scapes get a lot of World Music influences, ethnic vocalizing and industrial percussion, elements that Revell noted got copied for a lot of gothic, religious or horror/thriller scores. The romantic and 'beyond the grave' scenes get the usual angelic voice choir and the action-based scenes and scenes featuring the main character, a rock musician, get heavy guitar-featuring tracks. It also helps that Revell has a background in industrial and rock music, coming from Aussie industrial electronic rocker SPK. There is even a bit of one of my favorite film scores of all time in this score: The canned blues horns in "Nothing Is Trivial" recall Vangelis' "Blade Runner Blues", which I don't think is purely coincidental, from one nocturnal tale in a city in which it always rains to another. 

Wow, that write-up got a little out of hand here. Time to, uh, let the music do the talking. Music From The Crow (A One Buck Records Mix) is exactly what it says it is, and if you have seen that film a long while ago will hopefully succeed in bringing back fond memories. Or, if you haven't, maybe gets you in the mood to check this out. Excellent movie, excellent music. One's already easily at hand, check for the other. Or not, but enjoy the aural odyssey of Eric Draven on his quest for revenge and redemption. 

Sweet Sixteen! With The Usual Mandolins, Fiddles And Banjos Of Course!

So we got another killer line up assembled here, both in artists and songs, starting with the real groovy double opening punch of "Rock'n'Roll All Night" by Cornbread Red and "I Love Rock'n'Roll" by Iron Horse. Series vets really coming through here, and from there we hit highlight after highlight. 

There's a row of new artists makinf their first appearances here, but coming back with more cool songs in the future. For example genre vet Frank Solivan, who together with backing group The Dirty Kitchen bring us our first Steely Dan cover with "Rikki Don't Lose That Number". We also heartily greet The Barefoot Movement, a band that exists for almost two decades now, but one I just recently discovered. They make their debut with a wonderful version of "Penny Lane". There is also Caltucky, a band playing hard-edged rock'n'roll bluegrass, but for their debut here I've voted for a rare all-acoustic rendition of Alice In Chains' classic "Rooster". 

And no one can claim I didn't search high and low for cool covers of Bluegrass tunes. One unexpected place where I found just that? Brazil. Meet Mr. Maze (up left) who is a balding, bespectacled middle-aged dude looking a bit like your slighly over-enthusiastic music teacher from back in the days (and his accent easily gives away that English isn't his first language), but when he hooks up with backing group RockGrass - from two to four guys, depending on song and availability, I imagine - he produces some very fun Bluegrass Chartbuster candidates, leading of here with "You're The One That I Want" featuring an Carol penhavel as his Olivia Newton-John. 

As for the one-and-done's? Double one-and-done for the price of, uh, one. There will be only a single Billy Joel cover appearing in this series, and the band doing it will also only show up this once, but they make it count. First of all, how cool is their band name? The Bluegrass Regulators. 10/10, no notes. And they cover Joel's "The Downeaster 'Alexa'", my personal favorite of Joel together with "Miami 2031 (Seen The Lights Go Down On Broadway)". So, a win and a win. The other band showing up just once is The Lil' Smokies who normally don't do covers in favor of their original material, but got invited by The A.V. Club to do a 90s cover and chose Counting Crows' "A Long December". Lovely stuff.

But the returning roster ain't no slouches, either. I really dig The Fly Bird's take on Radiohead's "Creep", can always groove along with the Infamous Stringduster's take on "Sharp Dressed Man", bop to Honeywagon's cover of "The Rock Show" or admire the picking in Bourbon Revival's cover of "Dead Flowers". Also kudos to Dave Dick and his assembled band for adapting the Eagles' "The Last Resort", a sneakily tricky proposition, and doing it really well. Volume 16 of the Bluegrass Chartbusters flows beautifully and is one of my personal favorites from the series. So, celebrate the Bluegrass Chartbusters' Sweet Sixteen with another twenty top notch quality Bluegrass covers lovingly assemnled by the One Buck Guy for your listening pleasure...

The (Almost) French Connection: Bonjour, C'est Monsieur Pop Qui Vous Propose De La Musique Populaire Aujourd'hui...

Iggy's recent cameo on this site - to duet with recently departed Catherine Ringer of Les Rita Mitsouko - and especially his chatming attempts at speaking French reminded me of this little bijou. If the Iggy of the 70's is known as a devil-may-care spit-and-blood berzerker on stage (and off of it), the James Osterberg of the 2000's is a decidedly different fellow. If he occasionally indulges in loud and noisy rock it almost always seems to be with some invisible quotation marks around it. See, guys, I can 'still rock', in a sort of half-nostalgic, half-ironic way. But I suspect his heart isn't that much in it anymore. From time to time, he plays the noisy Iggy of old, but it's almost like your friendly but decidedly weird uncle at a family reunion getting out a football and arthritis be damned wants to show off his moves from when he was a football star in high school. That said, on 2023's Every Loser Pop he lets it rip with an all-star band for support.

You wouldn't be able to tell from the first twenty years or so of his career, that really, James Osterberg was a crooner at heart, who just tried to get out under the maniac and increasingly scarred skin suit the Popster donned for those first twenty years of his career. I'd argue that when he teamed up with future dad rock great Don Was in 1990, this was really the beginning of crooner Pop, some swerves into noise - with and without the reformed Stooges - notwithstanding. But the number of collaborations outside of the noisy rock spectrum, his penchant for unexpected covers and rather unexpected sonic explorations in the last three decades and change really made you think that Iggy Pop as elder statesman of rock is a very different beast from the classic Iggy. And why wouldn't he be? Once he hit middle age, and now senior citizenship status, is there still a point in doing the wild man on stage? Not for your hips and back, for sure, but probably also not for your musical spirit. So he spent basically the entire 2010's as a crooner before the aforementioned rock'n'roll comeback at a sprightly 75 years of age. 

Pop explains the why pretty succinctly in his liner notes: "All popular music forms of today get their strength from the beat. Rap, hip-hop, metal, pop and rock producers will tell you that the beats they use imitate the human heartbeat and that is where the power lies. The feeling of listening to any of these forms is always some variation on excitement, but before the birth of the blues there was another form of popular song, in which the timing comes from the human breath and the feelings are much more about emotion." He also adresses the elephant in the room, as far as song choices: "Many of these songs are in French, probably because it is French culture which has most stubbornly resisted the mortal attacks of the Anglo-American music machine."

So, Iggy Pop the francophile elder statesman crooner. Pop had both started a real effort at a rock'n'roll-less album and his first attempts at French on 2009's Préliminaires (note the title, will ya?), which itself was a second attempt at an art-rock album after 1999's Avenue B, with a cover of "Les Feuilles Morts", but he really plunges into the Seine of memory  on Après, while also repurposing 60's chestnuts like "Everybody's Talkin'" or "Only The Lonely". You want Pop do Gainsbourg? Check. Joe Dassin? Check. Brassens? Check. Piaf? Of course. And then, for an Anglo-Gallic marriage, The Beatles' "Michelle", naturally, probably the first song that gave Anglophile audiences un goût de la France, so to speak. 

So, is ol' man Pop the best crooner of all time? No sir, Frank Sinatra he decidedly is not. But is Après a very fun diversion, du bon divertissement, comme on dirait chez nous? Ah, ça oui, absolument. Pop is trying, and his croon warble has a real charme to it, much like the so-so at best French pronounciation. Pop might be somewhat of an enthusiastic dilletant when he's trying to evoke a French-English mix pop record, with more than a few jazz influences, from the 1960's with Après. As it would have been in the 60's, Après is an exceedingly short record, not even hitting the 30 minute mark, although with two extra tracks not on the original edition, they creep over the 35 minute mark. The first of these, a lovely cover of Sacha Distel's "La Belle Vie" was a digital bonus track I believe, then added to the tenth anniversary edition, while his duet of "I'll Be Seeing You" with the late, great Françoise Hardy was a one-off from 2000, but - unlike "Les Feuilles Mortes", which I didn't include for that reason - fits the tone and sound of the album perfectly. 

So, here's Après (with a little something ajouté après), for a hopefully lovely autumn stroll this weekend, for real, or in your mind and musical memories. See yourself walking down along the Seine in the late 60s or early 70s, while Monsieur Osterberg softly croons in your ears. Elle n'est pas belle, la vie? 

All Pearls, New Wave, Lush Pop, No Swine

 

Don't fear the Reaper Neon! It might look like it, but this isn't a pure synth pop affair like Vol. 33 was. No, instead All Pearls, No Swine Vol. 44 is smuggling in a whole bunch of New Wave of all kinds and a whole lot of pop. It's all in the title, folks. Lovers of uptempo fare will be served here by a couple of bands that walk the thin line between punk rock and power pop - say hello to Australia's Mad Turks From Istanbul, Slaughter & The Dogs, the Bleeding Hearts and the Fascinators. The power pop hero for insiders is back - yup, its Jonathan Kupersmith. And if you think, that "Pauline" sounds vaguely familiar to the trained ear of the APNS veteran, you're also right! The issued version was featured way back on volume 13, the series' fourth trip to the 80s. This, however, is the demo version of the song, which is almost as worthwhile. And in absence of more Kupersmith material that i could unearth, it'll have to do. And it does. 

Another big part of this comp is some lush, sopphisticated pop by the likes of Aztec Camera, Crowded House, John Howard, Goanna or China Crisis. So, yeah, some of these names will be familiar, and maybe even their songs, so I tried to keep the 'hidden gem' part of the bargain, by including some songs in different mixes from the classic versions. And there is, as usual, a ton of little known artists to discover on here. Or, you know, a big name, but with a way less big song. Daryl Hall, with comrade Oates in tow, was of course a constant guest in the Top 40 throughout the 80s, but "Survive", the album closer here, is from the outlier in Hall's discography, the Robert Fripp produced artpop album Sacred Songs. 

One thing I've always found fascinating in music - and the sheer number of alternate albums on One Buck Records will attest to that - is the 'what if's'. One of these 'what if's' is present here on All Pearls, No Swine Vol. 44. When Giorgio Moroder was tasked with creating a love song for Top Gun, he and his former car mechanic Tom Whitlock came up with "Take My Breath Away", which they first gave to New Wave/power pop band The Motels. But Moroder wasn't happy with their versionn, and then approached Berlin, or rather lead singer Terri Nunn, as no other Berlin members play on the hit version, which unfortunately and infamously caused the band to immediately break up after their biggest hit. Here's the original Motels version of the song, quite close to the Berlin/Nunn version, so I'm not sure what Moroder was bothered by. 

A compilation that has place for both 60's icon Ronnie Spector and Irish pych punk misfits The Golden Horde? Yup, here it is. So I hope you enjoy the pop songs from a wide range of styles that make up All Pearls, No Swine Vol. 44. 

Americana 2

And another one that's been a long time comin'. Americana Vol. 1, as seen in the title, was always supposed to have a sequel, but in between the Bluegrass Chartbusters series and a couple of alt albums or One Album Wonders it always got pushed back, as I don't want this place to only become OBG's Americana corner. But after a year and a half, it seems about time to actually get to Volume No. 2. The idea is still the same: There is no specific idea, other than compiling 20 tracks from the Americana spectrum. Some refugees from the Bluegrass Chartbusters, who were either not Bluegrass or Chartbuster enough, have found a home here, plus the usual stray tracks I stumbled upon one way or the other. Some are relatively newcomers, other are vets. No real structuring principle either, other than flow and variety.  

Having said all that, the newcomers are clearly having the upper hand here, and there's a reason for that. A bunch of these, by such unheralded artists as Gene Gainey, Bryan Yurcan, Jung Bergo, Sean Whalshe or Madmans Moustache, are escapees from yet another project that will debut soon on One Buck Records, but were quote-unquote too country for that one, so they found the perfect new home right here. Also relatively newcomer-ish: Swedish Americana artist Magnus Hansson alias Maybe Canada, Melanoid, and Song Preservation Society. Lots of people to discover here that I'm sure most of you haven't heard of yet, but if these selections are any indication, deserve a closer look in the future. 

The vets brought in range from pioneers like cow-punk legend Jason Ringenberg to cult artists like Will Oldham a.k.a. Bonnie 'Prince' Billy, to artists creeping into the vets camp with each passing year like Maren Morris, here still a teenager. There's also a young Kacey Musgraves with a wonderful take on Uncle Neil's "Heart Of Gold". Throw in the Counting Crows with a really neat live in studio performance of the Grateful Dead's "Friend Of The Devil" and Chris Stapleton's "Outlaw State Of Mind". And a word for Bill Miller, the rare Native American Americana/country rock artist, whoese 1982 debut Native Sons, from which "Two Places At Once" is taken, is an underappreciated early example of what we'd call Americana later on. 

And finally, a word (or three) on the special bonus track, which I designed as such, so if you have a strict 'No A.I. in my music' policy, you can just delete it without consequence: You might remember Jared Hutcherson as the AI-generated country singer with the changing voices, who was highly productive, until he got deep-sixed. R.I.P. Jared, we hardly knew ya! But we got one thing to remember you by. Of the half-dozen songs I sampled from 'Jared', one stood out. "Burning Horses" is done in the growly vet voice, for a dark Americana song with apocalyptic undertones. Maybe fitting that it's the A.I. that goes so dark: "This is a call for the burning horses, racing out through hell / they can find you anywhere, anywhere you dwell / flame and fury, teeth and bone / ain't no place to hide alone / burning horses know your name, and they're coming just the same." Whoa, A.I. on a dark death trip. It's a weird song, and I like that, and I really like the song, which is, well, weird. And, you know, "Burning Horses" sentiment of unstoppable, impending doomis  truly fitting considering the rapid-fire development - and not in a good way - in the A.I. department in the last months. Always remember, folks: A.I. knows your name, and it's coming just the same.