When Ian McCulloch left Echo & the Bunnymen in 1988 for a solo career, no one really expected the rest of the band to carry on without him, much less attempt to replace him. McCulloch was such a singular rock presence, mixing Jim Morrison brooding with goth attitude (before there was such a thing), that any attempt to slot a new singer in his spot was nearly unthinkable. But the Bunnymen did, in fact, soldier on, and the results were surprisingly good — maybe even better than McCulloch’s glossier solo debut.

While Ian chose to continue the mainstream sound of the Bunnymen’s self-titled 1987 album, the new Echo & the Bunnymen, with St. Vitus Dance vocalist Noel Burke, touring keyboardist Jake Brockman, and drummer Damon Reece (piling on the bad news, original Echo drummer Pete de Freitas was killed in a motorcycle accident in 1989) moved back to the earlier psychedelia of Crocodiles and Heaven Up Here with 1990’s Reverberation. Luckily, the band was poised to catch the zeitgeist of the Manchester baggy sound of the time with tracks like the first single, “Enlighten Me” (download), a trippy mix of sitars, baggy beats and guitarist Will Sergeant’s distinctive guitar riffs. New singer Burke wisely chose not to try to imitate McCulloch’s singing style and the results were catchy and appealing. (more…)

Former New Order bassist Peter Hook has a pretty big set of brass balls. When the band decided to take a break after 1993’s Republic, various members did their own thing — singer Bernard Sumner continued his Electronic project with Johnny Marr, drummer Stephen Morris and keyboardist Gillian Gilbert experimented with more synthpop as the Other Two, and Hook … well, Hook just decided to keep New Order going with Monaco. If he couldn’t use the New Order name, he certainly could use the sound.

Hook’s distinctive high-note bass technique was joined by vocalist David Potts, who seemed to be selected purely for his ability to ape Bernard Sumner’s vocals with Rich Little precision (but accurately, unlike Rich Little — sorry, I couldn’t name another famous impressionist). Just take a listen to Monaco’s modern rock hit, “What Do You Want From Me?” (download) — if there wasn’t an MP3 tag on there identifying it otherwise, you’d swear it was New Order.

The cloning process continued on Music for Pleasure’s second single, “Shine” (download), which improbably manages to be even more New Order-ish than New Order. It’s like Hook took every New Order cliche and combined it in an evil laboratory experiment to create the perfect New Order song. It’s all here — the high-plucked bass, the oblique love-song lyrics, and that distinctive New Order-yet-not voice. Shameless, yes, but perhaps Hook had a lot more to do with New Order’s sound and success than we think? (more…)

Washington D.C.-based art-punk quartet Jawbox earned the ire of indie purists in 1993 when they left Dischord Records for major-label Atlantic in the Great Post-Nirvana Alternative Rock Swoop-Up. It proved to be not that big of a deal in the end when the resulting album, For Your Own Special Sweetheart, while sounding a little cleaner, ended up sounding pretty much like their Dischord stuff. Lead single “Savory” (download) summed up the band quite well, as the tension and release that was the band’s calling card was paired with metallic riffs and a melody almost bordering on crooning.

Atlantic’s marketing muscle got the band on MTV, and “Savory” got some airplay on 120 Minutes and even Beavis & Butthead commented on the video featuring a little girl’s twisted birthday party (love the Barbie cake!):

While Sweetheart didn’t exactly make Jawbox a household name, Atlantic was happy enough with the buzz to place the band on their ill-fated Alternative-focused TAG Records imprint in 1996 (an imprint that was recently revived, in name only, to promote Tag Body Spray — seriously). (more…)

By all rights, L.A.-based Possum Dixon’s second full-length album, 1996’s Star Maps, should have been an unfocused disaster. Band members were beset by serious drug problems and lead singer/songwriter Rob Zabrecky’s wife committed suicide during its recording. The band was following up its first major label LP, which garnered them a pretty big modern rock hit with the single, “Watch That Girl Destroy Me,” a song that seemed tailor-made for one-hit wonder-dom. Amazingly, the band was able to overcome all these barriers and deliver a consistently great, if overlooked, second album.

Lead single “Emergency’s About To End” (download) is as insanely catchy as a single gets, with its Peter Gunn-isms and hook-filled chorus. While the song got some scant alternative radio airplay, it also appeared on the soundtrack for the infamous Showgirls, aka The Greatest Movie Ever Made. Now, I’ve seen Showgirls about 87 kajilion times, but I couldn’t tell you where in the movie “Emergency’s” shows up, if at all. Anyone?

I really wanted to link to the band’s superb video for the single that references Devo’s performance of “Worried Man” in a toxic waste dump from Neil Young’s movie “Human Highway,” but the band’s label, Universal Music, for some reason doesn’t allow it to be embedded from YouTube, so two things:

1. Sorry.

2. Fuck you, Universal Music. God forbid you allow someone to promote your artists. (more…)

On Tuesday the B-52’s will release their first album of new material in 16 years: Funplex. While that’s a long stretch between releases, the band wasn’t exactly quiet during that period — they toured every few years or so, and in 1996 vocalist/yelper/cheerleader Fred Schneider released his second solo album, the surprisingly gritty and punkish Just Fred.

Working with “recorder” Steve “Don’t Call Me a ‘Producer’” Albini and members of Six Finger Satellite, Shadowy Men on a Shadowy Planet, the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, and the Supersuckers, Just Fred is a raw take on the party rock the B-52’s are known for, recalling their earlier CBGB’s days. Trouble is, coming after the huge pop success of Cosmic Thing and, to a lesser extent, Good Stuff, B-52’s fans didn’t quite know how to take it.

Dishing out equal portions of camp and indie rock, lead single “Whip” (download) has Fred posturing and growling until he becomes positively Lydon-esque. All together now — FORTY LASH-SHESSS! FORTY LASHES FROM YOUR EYYYYYYYEEESSS!

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Led by the progenies of two ’60s rockers, hippy-dippy Donovan and blue-hatted Monkee Mike Nesmith, pomo new wavers Nancy Boy definitely rebelled against their musical pedigree, emphasizing fashion and style over traditional substance. Model Donovan Leitch and Jason Nesmith threw Bowie, Suede, Duran Duran, and Blur in a blender and served up their self-titled full-length debut in 1996, competing with the post-grunge, Creed-infested landscape of alternative music. With their skinny ties and eyeliner, they didn’t stand a chance.

Nicking a guitar lick and chorus from early Blur, lead single “Deep Sleep Motel” (download) was an instantly catchy if lightweight song that would have fit quite nicely on that band’s Modern Life Is Rubbish a couple years earlier. Considering I was in the throes of a serious Blur phase at the time, I didn’t mind at all, enjoying Nancy Boy much as I did Camouflage in the ’80s when Depeche Mode were between albums — they were far from the real thing, but nice in a pinch.

A track the band carried over from an earlier EP, “Johnny Chrome & Silver” (download), sounds like a lost Duran outtake circa 1981, and that’s a good thing. It’s completely out of step with what was happening musically at the time, but that doesn’t stop it and the album as a whole from being entertaining. The group’s proclivity for posing, quite literally (they did a few fashion-magazine spreads), didn’t endear them to the press or public, but Leitch’s Paris Hilton-like celebutante image garnered the band a small but fervent following in New York clubs.

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Sometimes a huge single with a overly familiar sample can be both a blessing and a curse. Look at P.M. Dawn or this week’s example, U.K. trio Soho, fronted by twin sisters, Jacqui and Pauline Cuff. After a couple of unsuccessful attempts on an indie label, they finally hit paydirt with their second major-label single, “Hippychick” (download), a fun track about an activist and her cop boyfriend who arrests her during a protest demonstration. Built around a sample from the Smiths’ “How Soon is Now,” the song caught on immediately in dance clubs and on modern rock stations before crossing over to the pop charts. I can personally attest to how huge this song was — I was DJing at the time, in Tongduchon, Korea, of all places, and I got requests for “Hippychick” nightly. In fact, in one of the most obvious DJ moves, I often mixed “Hippychick” into the instrumental break of “How Soon Is Now” then back again, creating a 12-minute or so megamix that kept the floor packed. (more…)

Orchestra JB was the nom de plume of Jimmy Brown, a multi-instrumentalist and DJ who, after releasing a few underground dance hits for indie labels, signed to major EastWest Records and in 1991 released Tambourine Fever, an album of trippy, Ecstasy-fueled “comedown” tracks with nothing too groundbreaking or noteworthy, save the album’s single, “Come Alive.”

“Come Alive” (download) is an earworm, an insistent, hallucinatory yet catchy track with a spoken word/sung female vocal not too different from the music Dot Allison and One Dove would create a couple years later. “Come Alive’s” laconic beat, stream of consciousness vocal and harmonica showed up in another club hit that year, the Orb’s “Little Fluffy Clouds.” (more…)

Since we visited Boston for Tuesday’s LIT80s, let’s stick around there for the ’90s and take a look at one of the more unique bands from the Boston scene during that decade, the Dambuilders. I mean, any alternative rock band that puts a violin in the mix on par with the lead guitar is worth a second look — right, Camper Van Beethoven?

Led by bassist and vocalist Dave Derby, the Dambuilders specialized in edgy power pop, honing their songwriting skills with four indie albums before signing to EastWest Records with their Encendedor album in 1994. The band was a nice counterpoint to all the grunge happening in that period, the songs driven more by the melodic bass lines, with the guitar and violin shredding out riffs in tandem, eschewing the typical verse/chorus/verse song structure. Strangely, in spite of this, the songs were also insanely catchy and memorable. Nice trick to do without a chorus. The band was also notable for their attempt to compose 50 different songs, each named after one of the 50 United States.

Encendedor’s lead single “Shrine,” a tight little tale about new romance with a girl who “doesn’t speak much English,” had some chart action on alternative radio and the video was a staple on MTV’s 120 Minutes for a time. The band followed this up with “Smell,” a track I’m not too fond of — I much prefer “Colin’s Heroes,” an excellent song for driving, complete with lyrics about, well, driving.

The Dambuilders built upon their sound with two more albums, 1995’s Ruby Red and 1997’s stab for more commercial appeal, Against the Stars, a personal favorite which saw the band venturing into more danceable realms, complete with an honest-to-goodness disco song. We’ll definitely have to talk about that one in a future LIT90s post.

However, the band called it a day after Against the Stars failed to generate any heat. Derby continues to record solo, and violinist Joan Wassar has released a couple of projects under the intriguing name Joan as Police Woman. They have yet to reunite and finish that 50 states project.

“Shrine” peaked at #13 on the Billboard Modern Rock Chart in 1994.

Get Dambuilders music (for pennies!) at Amazon or on

Swedish trio Whale burst onto the alternative music scene in 1994, instantly making a splash on MTV with their video for “Hobo Humpin’ Slobo Babe,” a song about…what, exactly?

Seeking candy, out of line
Broken kneecap, severed spine
Left for dead, left for good (seeking candy)
Left for dead, misunderstood. (back for more)

But you… (back for more)
Always came back for more…

You hobo humpin’ slobo babe
Get it off, get off, get off of me!

In any case, the video got plenty of MTV love, thanks to Whale’s sexy-in-a-crazy-way lead singer Cia Berg’s armpit-licking, brace-face displaying charm. So much charm that when the video was featured on Beavis & Butthead, Butthead immediately fell in love, identifying with her braces. Beavis, on the other hand was grossed out, yelling at one point, “EWWW! SHE’S LICKING HIS ARMPIT, BUTTHEAD!” (more…)