Music Review - The Terminals - "Last Days of the Sun"
One of the great missed opportunities of popular music is that the Vacuum never got around to releasing any records. Because, just going by the quality of the output of all the groups which can trace their musical family tree back to the Vacuum, if that group had ever put out a record it could well have been something fairly bloody good
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I'm sure I'm not the only one with Yazoo and Roy Montgomery in my collection! My old friend Eve probably has both of those, too.
The Terminals were among a number of Kiwi groups that I've been aware of but never had the opportunity to listen to until recently. I don't think anything else of theirs has ever been in print in the States. In fact, most records from Flying Nun/Xpressway/Propeller have probably never received distribution here, which has made it difficult for me to track down physical copies of something like Blam Blam Blam, Bird Nest Roys, or Look Blue Go Purple (and forget about even trying to find something like The Victor Dimisich Band!). Only The Clean, The Chills, The Verlaines, the aforementioned Roy Montgomery (and everything he's been involved with from The Pin Group onward), The Dead C., The 3-D's, The Renderers and Pumice have had any sort of distribution here.
As for "Vertigo", it can't be played on American radio because the lyrics contain the expletive "shit." That definitely won't fly with the Federal Communications Commission and their often-hypocritical policies.
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Most people I know don't have Roy Montgomery in their collection (they probably wouldn't even know who he is!) and Yazoo are a largely forgotten group over here - they never had a major hit in New Zealand (I think "Nobody's Diary" might have scraped the bottom reaches of the top 20 for a couple of weeks, but that's about it).
The only Victor Dimisich Band anything I've ever managed to find was the Mekong Delta Blues cassette tape on Xpressway something like 15 or so years ago now. Other than that, "Native Waiter" has shown up on a couple of compilations (Xpressway Pile-Up and the otherwise rather disappointing Flying Nun 25th anniversary boxed set).
The Blam Blam Blam Story is still in print in CD over here last I heard, and the Look Blue Go Purple compilation CD isn't too hard to find. But some `eighties stuff I have on vinyl is practically impossible to find and I don't think it's ever had a CD release... generally slightly warped and highly original almost-pop sort of stuff like Car Crash Set's No Accident and a couple of singles; The Body Electric's Presentation and Reality and the Pulsing EP, and Low Profile's Elephünkin' (interestingly enough, I just picked up the 12" single of Elephunk In My Soup second hand a few weeks back). This is despite the fact that a much more obscure ancestor of Car Crash Set has appeared on CD (Danse Macabre) and that they later teamed up with Greg Johnson, and as the Greg Johnson Set are still in print; and that Alan Jansson of The Body Electric was one of the team behind the Otara Millionaires' Club worldwide novelty hit "How Bizarre".
I suppose I've never figured out how censorship works in America... over here, I was quite amused when our (traditionally solid and conservative) national public radio station played the whole of the Scavengers' "Mysterex" as a "taster" for a programme about punk rock later that night. The song in question has a couple of cases where the singer drops what some friends of mine call "the F-bomb"; and these went out on air completely un-bleeped. I've never heard of any sort of complaint about it either...
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I heard Roy Montgomery by accident while listening to WFMU, this freeform radio station out of Jersey City, New Jersey that's quite possibly the greatest station to exist. They've been around for about 40 years and seem to have everything in their position -- the college radio station I DJ for seems really disappointing in comparison. We do have The Pin Group and three Roy Montgomery CDs down here, and the wall of our station features posters for And Now the Rain Sounds Like Life is Falling Down Through It and True.
Yazoo were huge in Britain for about two years in the Eighties and had a nice slightly-larger-than-cult following in America through achieving Number One Dance hits, and they've achieved longevity through influencing trance and being sampled and referenced a lot. (For example, Los Del Rio's "Macarena" samples Alison Moyet's echoed laughter, DJs like Diplo will mash-up songs like "Don't Go" and "Situation", New York dance-punkers LCD Soundsystem mentions them in one of their two best known songs.)
Look Blue Go Purple's still in print? That makes me happy. I have recurring dreams where I've flown to New Zealand and I keep wanting to look for their compilation but I'm always taken to the wrong stores!
I can't explain how censorship works here in the States, either. Part of it comes from Puritanical traditions, part of it comes from the spread of conservatives over rural areas and their leadership of major corporations (and now in the past decade the government), and it's further enhanced by this silly belief about corrupting the minds of children when life experience itself will do that on its own. The Federal Communications Commisssion does not actually list words that are offensive to radio and leaves it up "community standards". There is a watershed period between 10 PM and 6 AM where you can supposedly air/show almost anything, but even at my college radio station we still won't dare to play songs with expletives in them because we're worried that someone (most likely the FCC themselves) will shut us down. For all the complaints about, say, Janet Jackson's breast (with her nipple mostly covered by a star) being bared during the Super Bowl or Bono saying "fuck" during an award ceremony, the controversy is largely stirred by conservative ethics groups like the Parents Television Council, who are responsible for 99% of the complaints to the FCC. The number of those complaints has risen dramatically since Bush went into office (because they know an administration as reactionary as this one will react) from about 400 to over 1,000,000 if I'm not mistaken.
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I lived up in Dunedin for a couple of years and heard a lot of interesting music on the local student radio station, although, ironically, the most interesting musical discovery I made listening to Radio One was Bob Mould! I've got fairly wide and mildly weird musical tastes anyway, although lately I've been mostly getting into some of the less "ordinary" "classic rock" thanks to a co-worker who for a couple of years couldn't live without Radio Hauraki and a steady diet of Led Zeppelin, AC/DC, etc. etc. He soon learned not to try turning off the radio when it was playing something like Cream, Jethro Tull or Iron Maiden...
I don't think I've ever actually heard anything with a Yazoo sample, but I've been fairly much "out of the loop" as far as new release music goes for a decade or so... everything seems to be so depressingly mainstream these days and there isn't anything nearly as interesting as "Radio With Pictures" on the TV any more... I bought a lot of music after first seeing the video on RWP (most memorably the Verlaines, back when "Bird-Dog" first came out). I did, once, hear a weird hip-hop / rap sort of thing which pinched lines out of a whole lot of left-field music... got the biggest surprise when, completely out of the blue, they quoted a few lines from the Pixies. Quite odd indeed.
"The Federal Communications Commisssion does not actually list words that are offensive to radio and leaves it up "community standards"." Honestly, this sounds like the problem. Any code which leaves it up to lawyers (because, let's face it, when it gets to the court it's not broadcaster vs. community, it's lawyer vs. lawyer) to set precedent serves nobody but the lawyers themselves.
Otherwise... I could never decide which side to laugh at with regard to that Janet Jackson falling-out-of-her-top incident: the corner of American society which made such a big deal about it, or Janet Jackson for being so desperate for publicity in the first place...
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Ahh, Bob Mould -- funnily enough, I downloaded a bootleg of a 1984 Husker Du concert yesterday. Lately I haven't been able to stop listening to the first Hunters & Collectors album or Gal Costa's 1969 self-titled LP.
There's so much more music out now (I think I read a statistic that 30,000 CDs were released in 2003 -- compare that to 3,000 LPs in 1979!) that it's more difficult to find good music, and even so, with most of the music I get to review these days it usually seems that someone else has done it better. There's a handful of releases that I've gotten into this year, like the new records from Parts & Labor, Kristin Hersh (of Throwing Muses), Mary Timony (of Helium), The Rosebuds, The Spiritualaires of Hurtsboro, Alabama, The Twilight Sad, and a few others. I barely listen to anything that I liked from last year -- The Big Sleep put out my favorite record of 2006 but I've hardly listened to it since the new year started. I pull out Marisa Monte or the Orlando hip-hop group X:144 and SPS from time to time and listen to Daylight's for the Birds and a couple of songs from the last Scott Walker record occasionally, and the other day I was moved to pull out American Watercolor Movement, but that's about it.
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Have got another couple of music reviews I'm planning on typing up some time in the near future... Bill Direen (as "Bilderine")'s "Split Seconds" and Human Instinct's "Peg Leg". Just waiting for me to actually think of enough to say about them.
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