(With apologies to Ted, as there are no sob stories about failed relationships this week.)

Let it not be said that Cameron Crowe’s Elizabethtown was without its good points.

Actually, I shouldn’t say that. I never saw the movie – the trailer, lengthy running time, questionable casting of Orlando Bloom and Kirsten Dunst, and ultimately the reviews were enough to scare me away – but the impression I get is that it was not good. Whatever the qualities of his movies, though, Crowe always made sure the soundtracks could stand on their own, and sure enough, the music he slipped into Elizabethtown contains his typical blend of Boomer acts (along with the obligatory slot for wife Nancy Wilson) mixed with the occasional offbeat number or deep cut. For me, the album came down to the letter H: “Jesus Was a Crossmaker” by the Hollies, “Let It All Hang Out” by the Hombres, and last but certainly not least, “io (This Time Around)” by Los Angeles space rockers Helen Stellar. Few songs have grabbed me at first listen, and held me, like this one did.

Listen to that echo-laden piano track: it positively reeks of sadness, yet the few words that the band sprinkles into the song are not sad ones. “This time around, you can be anyone / This love of ours…” On second thought, I’m not sure exactly what that means, and I’m sure that was the point. Each listener takes a different journey with a song like this. It may not even be to a fixed point in time; just somewhere…else. For me, it made me feel like I had left something, or someone, behind, and this song was my guide to find it. Or maybe something had left me behind. Either way, it fills me with an overwhelming sense of loneliness. Sweet, beautiful loneliness. And as Kurt Cobain once put it, sometimes I miss the comfort in being sad. This song does it for me every time. (more…)

Hello, everyone. I want to play a game. But don’t worry, this isn’t one of those Jigsaw games where you have to choose between your life and, say, your eyesight.

Below are magnified fragments of 25 album covers. Most of them are well-known albums, but there are a few obscure covers (or lesser-known albums from well-known artists) mixed in to keep you honest. You must guess both the artist and album cover. In order to keep things simple, live albums, soundtracks and singles compilations will not be used, and with all apologies to our European and Japanese friends, we are going with the covers that appeared in the US record stores…back when we had record stores. Sigh.

The rules are the same as Name That Tune. Each player can make three guesses between updates (“Update” is defined as “The time when I post a comment listing all of the covers that have been guessed correctly”), so everyone will have a chance to contribute. And, just to spice things up, we have a puzzle cover this week, yay! One guess per player of the puzzle between updates, please.

1)

2) (more…)

It’s quite possible that this song is the “Sliding Doors” moment that put me on the musical path that I would ultimately follow.

This is strange, when you consider that “Your Imagination” is the fourth, overlooked single from the band’s 1981 mega-hit Private Eyes album – and the only single of the 13 singles the band released in a four-year span that didn’t crack the Top Ten – but the video for the song featured something that I had never seen or heard before: an extended version of the song. This mix itself is nothing special – it has your typical instrumental build-up and a mix-out point for the DJ – but that hardly mattered. The mix opened up a whole new world of possibilities to me. You mean there are people who take a finished song and then screw around with it? That’s awesome!

I proceeded to spend the rest of my high school years as that kid who took his records, which by then consisted mostly of 12” singles rather than albums, and made his own versions of the songs by hitting ‘pause’ on the tape deck at just the right time. It’s a miracle that I ever managed to kiss a girl before college.
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“A butterfly flies through the forest rain
And turns the wind into a hurricane…”

I was playing this song at work once, and a coworker of mine walked up and said, “Is this the Doors?” I never liked that guy.

It’s the sliding string riff in the chorus that just kills me. The drop from the first to second note is a little bump, but the third and fourth notes…? Much plummeting, as a fellow Popdoser once said in describing Luke Skywalker after he discovered Darth Vader was his father. There are few songs with such a melodic fall into despair as this one boasts.

“A schoolboy yawns, sits back, and hits Return
While ‘round the world, computers crash and burn…”

Neil Hannon takes his good sweet time getting to the point in this song, spending the first two verses talking about butterflies, hurricanes and hackers. What kind of song is this, anyway? Is he really getting this worked up over a punk kid who launches a virus? Of course not: he’s just saving the best for last.

“You must go, and I must set you free
‘Cause only that will bring you back to me…”

Ah, now it makes sense. The storm, the hacker, the girl leaving him: they’re all things he didn’t see coming, but in retrospect, feels that he should have. Inevitable moments that, once he embraces them, will lead to something better. It has to get better, right? (more…)

Sometimes, it’s not whom you know, but whom you call family.

The interwebs are not very forthcoming about the origins and chart history of Boogie Box High, the nom de guerre of one Andros Georgiou. This, of course, assumes that either origins or chart history exist in the first place, and that they consist of something other than “He’s George Michael’s cousin, and he almost had a hit once.” Imagine the sting of humiliation Georgiou must have felt when he got his record deal, released his oh-so-1987 remake of the Bee Gees’ “Jive Talkin’” as a single, positive that he was sitting on a worldwide smash…and then George Michael’s label, Epic, only allows the song to be released if the single makes no mention of Michael appearing on the track. Which is hilarious when you think about it – who the hell else could it possibly be? By the way, Andros, your single will not be released in the US. Tough break, cousin.

And that pretty much sums up the musical career of one Andros Georgiou. Boogie Box High made one album, 1987’s Outrageous (other notable guest appearance: Nick Heyward), and promptly disappeared into the ether. I cannot speak for the quality of Boogie Box High’s full-length long player (though the two people who have submitted votes on Amazon each gave it one star), but Georgiou’s cover of “Jive Talkin’” is pretty damn good. And call me crazy, but I prefer the dated production of the album version to the 12” mix, which is far too similar to the Brothers Gibb’s original. There is something in those hyper-echoed snare hits that has me reaching down to peg my pant legs. I have submitted both the awesomely overproduced LP version of the track, and the subsequent none-more-Gibb 12” mix. Which one do you prefer?

Boogie Box High - Jive Talkin’ (LP Version)

Boogie Box High - Jive Talkin’ (12″ Mix)

All right, you super-smart, wily bastards. This quiz is being assembled shortly after you disemboweled Games Four and Five. Time to step up the attack somewhat.

Below are magnified fragments of 25 album covers. Most of them are well-known albums, but there are a few obscure covers (or lesser-known albums from well-known artists) mixed in to keep you honest. You must guess both the artist and album cover. In order to keep things simple, live albums, soundtracks and singles compilations will not be used, and with all apologies to our European and Japanese friends, we are going with the covers that appeared in the US record stores…back when we had record stores. Sigh.

The rules are the same as Name That Tune. Each player can make three guesses between updates (“Update” is defined as “The time when I post a comment listing all of the covers that have been guessed correctly”), so everyone will have a chance to contribute. And, just to spice things up, we have a puzzle cover this week, yay! One guess per player of the puzzle between updates, please. Are you ready, Mr. Burns? Are you set, Mr. Burns? Go, Mr. Burns.

1)

2) (more…)

I will not rest until Simply Red covers this song.

For someone who has gotten almost as cover-friendly in his autumn years as UB40, I’m frankly surprised this hasn’t happened yet. After all, once Mick Hucknall lifted a huge chunk of Daryl Hall and John Oates’ “I Can’t Go for That (No Can Do)” for a 2003 single, you’d think that any and all apprehension about raiding the gold in them thar ‘80s hills would be an afterthought. And yet, somehow, Hucknall has to date resisted recording his own version of a UK Top 10 hit – with a Simply Red-friendly reggae beat, no less – that is fucking begging for him to sing it. Go figure.

But enough about my cover version dreams. This song hooked me from the very first moment I saw the video in the dawning hours of MTV. There was something so heartbreaking about that chorus, no matter how funny the video was. (Keyboardist Tony Hymas should have been an actor, he was so good here.) When the clip ends, with singer Jim Diamond getting carried off in an abandoned car by a junkyard magnet, I just wanted to cry. They’re sending him off to die! Won’t somebody do something?

Six years later, I distinctly remembered a moment when I thought of the clip and that haunting chorus, even though I hadn’t heard the song since its MTV heyday. It would be another seven years before I saw the song on CD, in the form of an über-expensive UK import double-disc collection of ‘80s modern rock hits. I loved the song, but not for $30.

Fast-forward another three years (1997, for those keeping score at home), and Radiohead’s OK Computer dropped. The album came out in the summer, and while I loved The Bends, I had read the reviews about the new one, and I was damned if I was going to allow my summer to be weighed down by some dark-ass album. So I bought it in the fall…right when they released “Karma Police” as a single. Perfect. Ah, this is good cold-weather music. Hey wait, what’s this? That last bit, where Thom Yorke wails, “For a minute there, I lost myself, I lost myself,” I found myself thinking, “This rings a bell.” Eventually, it hit me; I was playing guitar in my bathroom – it was a small apartment, and I didn’t want to bother anyone, because I suck – and while playing the chords to that last bit in “Karma Police,” I started slowly warbling “I won’t let you down, won’t let you down again…”

Holy shit. A perfect match.

All right, not exactly a perfect match – “Karma Police” is at least a step lower than “I Won’t Let You Down” – but hot damn, were they chord progressions of the same mind, and PhD’s melody fit Radiohead’s music like a glove. Minor, minor, minor…now end MAJOR! Has a mash-up artist stumbled upon this yet? The first one to put them together has an instant cult classic on his hands.

I finally nabbed a copy of the song in 2000 – thank you, Napster – and still play the daylights out of it. I even try to watch the video once a month. (Seriously, is there anything funnier than a guy lighting a bomb that says “BOMB” on it?) There is talk, some 27 years after the band’s first release, of putting the albums back in print via iTunes. While it’s tempting to rail against an indifferent music industry for focusing more on the short-term acts than the long-term, bank account-fattening artists that could have prevented the crisis they currently find themselves in, we will instead simply say thank you. Hopefully that 45MB of disk space will generate enough revenue for them to, oh, I don’t know, make sure no album falls out of print ever again. Just a thought.

Obscure music geek trivia: the drummer for PhD was Simon Phillips. Wow.

PhD – I Won’t Let You Down

Can you feel it? It’s like an invitation to another game of Cover Me. Can you hear it? That’s the sound of me running out of bands to use in this game. Seriously, you guys are hard, nay, impossible to stump.

Below are magnified fragments of 25 album covers. Most of them are well-known albums, but there are a few obscure covers (or lesser-known albums from well-known artists) mixed in to keep you honest. You must guess both the artist and album cover. In order to keep things simple, live albums, soundtracks and singles compilations will not be used, and with all apologies to our European and Japanese friends, we are going with the covers that appeared in the US record stores…back when we had record stores. Sigh.

The rules are the same as Name That Tune. Each player can make three guesses between updates (“Update” is defined as “The time when I post a comment listing all of the covers that have been guessed correctly”), so everyone will have a chance to contribute. And, just to spice things up, we have a puzzle cover this week, yay! One guess per player of the puzzle between updates, please. Don’t worry, I won’t hurt you. I only want to have some fun.

1)

2) (more…)

The show must go on. Scraps may be temporarily out of action, but the rest of the Popdose staff is picking up the slack and carrying on with Name That Tune in the hopes that our efforts come remotely close to the lofty standards he set for us all.

The Rules:

• MAXIMUM THREE GUESSES between updates of the list, to give everyone a chance to play. An update of the list is when I post the entire list of correct guesses with the words “OFFICIAL UPDATE.”
• While I’m not going to be a stickler for spelling and punctuation, you must guess the correct musician and song title to a close approximation.

How the game is played: I have uploaded twenty-three very brief song clips. Most of the songs are well known, though for the sake of this game (which will make sense once you’ve started playing), some of them are obscure. The clips are drawn from a variety of styles and decades. It’s likely that you’ll find a few of them instantly recognizable, while a few others you won’t know at all (but other people will, and you can’t hold it against them). There is no puzzle song this week, sorry. There is also no acrostic this time, however the clips all have something in common. I do not suspect it will take you long to figure out what this week’s theme is. Heck, you might be able to guess it without listening to a single track.

And here are the clips:

1. clip 1
2. clip 2
3. clip 3
4. clip 4
5. clip 5
6. clip 6
7. clip 7
8. clip 8
9. clip 9
10. clip 10
11. clip 11
12. clip 12
13. clip 13
14. clip 14
15. clip 15
16. clip 16
17. clip 17
18. clip 18
19. clip 19
20. clip 20
21. clip 21
22. clip 22
23. clip 23

I suggest subscribing to the comments on the post to more easily follow the progress of the game. Remember — please! — NO MORE THAN THREE GUESSES between updates of the list. Have fun!

Or, White Label Wednesday, Before They Were Stars Edition

Underworld would like you believe that they were immaculately conceived in 1994 as the spooky techno band that “debuted” with dubnobasswithmyheadman, with no past or, if pressed, a Jason Bourne case of amnesia about their former life. Ah, but we know better, don’t we? Underworld indeed has a past; they were just hoping that they could pull a Ministry and leave it all behind. The incredible thing is, it worked; almost no one remembers Underworld’s days as a synth-pop band.

But we do.

Underworld formed from the ashes of the band Freur, which scored a minor hit with the Kraftwerk-esque “Doot Doot.” When they disbanded, Freur members Karl Hyde and Rick Smith recruited three more dudes and went whole hog for the brass ring, impressing Seymour Stein enough to hire Rupert Hine – he worked with Howard Jones, man, we’re gonna be huge! – to produce 1988’s Underneath the Radar, the band’s first album for Sire. The album, well, seemed really cool at the time. Hell, even the music supervisors of “Miami Vice” liked them enough to drop the title track into a big bar fight scene. The song cracked Australia’s top ten. In the States, however, it scratched and clawed its way to #74.

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