Music Babble

Spectrum was Sonic Boom's band in the '90s, after Spacemen 3 broke up. They put out three albums and span his shift from guitar to synths, which he's stuck with ever since (the majority of his career, weird because I associate him with inventive guitar and his teardrop Vox Starstream, which you can see in the first YT link.)



(pretty. If I were a girl I'd be all over anyone who played this song)



(crazy, all synths plus theremin)



(beautiful, like whalesong. Middle ground between guitar and synthesizers)

I posted some Jazz Butcher tracks below in my response to Norville. This is one of their better early songs:





Inspiral Carpets were a Madchester band who had one great album and an essential singles collection. Everything else is kind of lame and washed-out (kind of like Hoodoo Gurus, actually), and the maddeningest thing is that they wrote great verses but fell apart in the choruses so you think it's going to be a great melody, and when the chorus comes it's underwhelming. A lot of their singles are pretty good ("Uniform" is their best song of their later stuff. Very pretty, but check out "This Is How It Feels", "Joe", "Commercial Rain" too.



(their biggest hit? The lame choruses haven't shown up yet)



(should have been a huge hit)



("Uniform". In case you can't tell, organ was their big thing)

Chas Jankel (Chaz in his later albums) was the "music director", whatever that means, for the Blockheads, Ian Dury's group. TBH his solo career was basically a failure but I like his first two. "Ai no corrida" was on his debut and later covered, to greater commercial success, by Quincy Jones.



(original)



(cover)

Black Grape were Shaun Ryder's post-Happy-Mondays project in the '90s, and again with an album in 2017 that was instantly dated because the intro track is about the 2016 election (like the Black Eyed Peas' "I'm so 2008, you're so two-thousand-and-late", released in 2009, and it just gets more dated from there). He teamed up with a rapper named Kermit and on the whole it's like the Mondays with a heavy hip-hop element. Bez was in the band.



(first track from first album)



(most rapping)



(2016-election intro)

The Soft Cell record is really, really good. I got it at a thrift shop for "Tainted Love" but the whole album is so ####ing good. One of my major finds. Their other albums aren't at all bad, either. I need to hear Marc Almond's solo stuff (he's the singer). "Say Hello Wave Goodbye" is probably second-best-known on the album.



(side one closer on *Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret*. The video was banned in Britain -- not this; this is a live performance)



(from 2022 album)



(second-best-known on *Cabaret*, after "Tainted Love" which you've heard. The closer on that album)