[It's] your basic rock and roll but with a certain Kafka-esque, grass roots, Pavlovian, existential, Calvanistic, Zen, New York liberal Jewish intellectual kind of slant to it.
Doug Bennett
Cowabunga L.P.
A perfect song.
Mutant Surf Sounds may like something from within the borders of the Twilight Zone blog but this 1985 compilation has way more faux Beach Boys surf music (a la the Barracudas) then faux Dick Dale faux surf (a la Beach Coma). A wave of fun to be ridden here faux surfers!
Despite the seeming narrowness of it's premise, this mish-mash rips. There's no duff tracks and each band brings a different angle on what we call surf music. As possible highlights, I've included the long-lived Surfin' Lungs rockin' "Who Stole the Summer", the B-girls more Go-Go's-ish "Fun at the Beach", the Ramones-meets-Beach Boys "Surfin C.I.A." by Buzz and the B-Days and, just to mess with chronology, there's Episode Six (who later became Deep fuckin' Purple!!) and their 1966 hot rod anthem "Mighty Morris Ten".
Mutant Surf Punks L.P.
Critically, Graham Parker's early 80s albums are usually dismissed as lightweight. To be fair both the excellent Another Grey Area and the less-then-excellent The Real Macaw do suffer from glossy production and perfunctory sessionmen back-up. Parker is Parker of course and while there was a let-up in the vitriol (lest he sneer himself into a corner) his lyrics remained knife-like.
By 1979, Graham Parker had ditched the Rumour horns and a lot of his beloved R&B tricks. Instead, the vicious rocker part of his personae dominated what may be Parker's defining work, Squeezing Out Sparks and the under-appreciated 1980 follow-up, The Up Escalator. The problem was that anger had begun to lose its currency against the flighty values of the ascendant New Romantic bands like Spandau Ballet. Like every other great artist in the early 80's, Parker would be forced to grapple with the epidemic of synthetic mediocrity that had infected the musical culture.Graham Parker
"Our attitude to punk was, we were kind of jolted." We were in a field of one, doing things like : "You Can't Hurry Love" really aggrressively, doing reggae with this angry attitude; we had it all together and suddenly we were not the only ballgame. There was this thing called [Punk Rock]....and it was a bit scary for us. So we thought we'd better crank it up another level and came back really nasty."And Parker's records did grow more vitriolic throughout the seventies. So to follow up the live show from '76, here's the ever-more belligerent Parker's Live on the Test. This set is made up of BBC TV performances on The Old Grey Whistle Test from 17 March 1977 and 20 March 1978. It's further proof of Parker and The Rumour's live fire-power. If, like Parker himself, you believe Mutt Lange's production of his second album, Heat Treatment, is sterile, then you'll find these versions raw and bloody enough to be a bio-hazard.
(Definitely NOT the store I work at.)
(Click the picture to read GP's fabulous liner notes)
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