Wednesday, March 22, 2017

Enigma


Michael Cretu made a big splash with Enigma's debut. You kind of either love and devour this stuff or hate it and see it as new agey, pretentious fluff. I think he's done a great job of keeping it going while also making it fresh, unlike, say, Mike Oldfield or Jean Michel Jarre.


Friday, March 17, 2017

The Jesus And Mary Chain


I actually was never too keen on JAMC's debut, Psychocandy. I kind of blame it for all the crappy indie bands who thought they, too, could be edgy if they simply threw feedback all over their records. But Darklands I think still stands up pretty well, as do Automatic, Honey's Dead and the underrated Munki.

Monday, March 13, 2017

DMode - The Albums


I never considered myself a huge Depeche Mode fan until one day I looked at my music collection and realized how much of their music I owned. They were huge here in So Cal, probably right behind U2 and REM in popularity.

Any decent record store always had import copies of their first 5 albums because the US versions were so horribly mastered they were shrill and metallic sounding. So, I've tried to assemble the best sounding versions of each that I've found.

Their Remaster campaign ticked off everyone when it turned out that in the US, the regular old versions were coupled with a DVD which contained the remasters. The UK and European versions attempted to copy protect the discs, but rendered them unplayable on most computers and many audio systems. In short, their catalog is beyond screwed and for no good reason.

One day I'll get around to posting all the singles.

Saturday, March 11, 2017

The Godfathers


Mixing a love of '60s mod and R&B with punk energy, the Godfathers' second album proved straight-up hard-nosed Brit rock was not dead in the '80s. Produced by the great Vic Maile, this was the band's high-water mark, though they continued to produced excellent music into the 1990s.