Permanent Waves #16

Spread out your head, and educate your parts!

Welcome, or welcome back, to Permanent Waves, a weekly-ish expedition into the power pop (and beyond!) of the year 1980.

Pretty hefty docket this week! Nine albums, some of them are by big-league names anyone reading will surely recognize, most of them are pretty damn good! Let’s mindset.

Billy Squier - The Tale of the Tape

This solo debut by the former Piper frontman stays firmly in the extended KISSiverse of bubblegummy, shout-along glam-metal from which he originated, and he’s a dab enough hand at stadium-size choruses for it to be kind of a shame that everything surrounding those choruses is so down-the-line. It’s a tough album to hate: Squier seems like a decent enough fella (more than I can say for Gene and Paul), he’s clearly done his power pop homework (Piper covered “The Last Time” respectably well on their ‘77 debut LP), and his singing voice is only improving with age. Still, there’s an inescapable plainness to this whole album that makes it an awfully tough sell to anyone the least bit skeptical of this style. Throw me a new chord on a middle 8, man, a bit of keyboard, something! “Calley Oh” does exactly that with its warm, nostalgic touches of organ, and it’s the best thing here by a mile. This would have scraped by with a FINE if it wasn’t the weakest album of the week, and if Squier wasn’t so obviously capable of better.

VERDICT: SKIP

Iron Maiden - Iron Maiden

The hottest new band on the British metal scene is helmed by a virtuosic bass player (yay!) with a penchant for cartoonishly depraved lyrics about flashing women in the park and murdering prostitutes (uh, less yay?). Some tout these lads as metal’s answer to punk, but as a bona-fide punk scholar I can’t say I really hear it— “Running Free” is more “Ballroom Blitz” than “Blitzkrieg Bop”, and since when did punks have a monopoly on fast guitar music, anyhow? The ornate, almost baroque rhythms of “Phantom of the Opera” suggests that if anything, Steve Harris and co. are probably a lot more interested in prog than hardcore. But are they actually any good? Well, their macabre streak strikes me as a little bit immature, but on balance I’d say YES! Harris and primary guitarist Dave Murray can really shred, and the band’s power ballad game is nothing to sneeze at either. I’m especially fond of the instrumental “Transylvania” and of “Remember Tomorrow”, inspired by the death of singer Paul DiAnno’s grandfather. See? Beneath all the edginess, they’re really sensitive artistes; that’s the kind of contradiction great careers are built on.

VERDICT: NICE

Judas Priest - British Steel

With Iron Maiden now kicking ass up and down the UK, Judas Priest aren’t quite the hot new band on the block that they were when Sad Wings of Destiny shook up the game four years ago with its intricate song structures, vicious riffing, and disturbing lyrics. The band has clearly been trying to streamline that unmistakable sound into something a bit more radio-friendly since 1978’s Stained Class, and as much as I’ve been a fan of their 70s work (I’ll even stick up for last year’s uneven Hell Bent for Leather), British Steel is comfortably their most dialled-in and popwise album to date. Frontman Rob Halford certainly takes to stomping, Queen-style arena-rock enthusiastically enough on tracks like the rousing “United” and the hedonistic “Living After Midnight”, but I’ve always found that guitarists K.K. Downing and Glenn Tipton are at their best on a charging uptempo headbanger such as “Exciter”, and new drummer Dave Holland proves a natural fit for two of their most satisfying shred-fests to date, namely opener “Rapid Fire” and closer “Steeler”. And of course, there’s “Breaking the Law”, a tough, chugging biker jam that frames criminality as the rational response of unlucky people to an unjust, uncaring society; Halford’s impassioned cry of YOU DON’T KNOW WHAT IT’S LIIIIIIIIKE!!! near-singlehandedly earns this album a cherished place in my admittedly slim collection of metal LPs. Sure, it’s a tad cheesy in spots, but the band believes it all so much that I end up cheesin’ right along with ‘em. Take notes, Saxon.

VERDICT: ZAMN

John Cooper Clarke - Snap, Crackle and Bop

This “punk poet” is handily a more accomplished wordsmith than either Lydia Lunch or Jim Carroll, and his commanding Manchester drawl makes for a strong emotional core to a set of lyrics about urban squalor and human degeneracy. I’m a bit mixed on Clarke’s backing band, though: they match his energy but rarely enhance it. Luckily, the motormouthed side one opener “Evidently Chickentown” and the grimy, grandiose side one closer “Beasley Street” hardly need any enhancement at all, and the band whips up a nifty little new wave jingle to suitably sweeten up the grody “Conditional Discharge”. The abject poverty and desperation Clarke speaks of is not something I can speak about with much authority (it’s certainly not very mindset— leave such unsavory matters to the journalists!), but I still enjoyed my time with it well enough. I can’t quite tell if that’s a sign he’s doing something right, or something wrong; my afflictions may be comforted, but my comfort may need to be more afflicted next time around.

VERDICT: FINE

Dirty Looks - Dirty Looks

Staten Island’s own Dirty Looks are a fair sight more neighborly and normal-sounding than the majority of their Stiff Records labelmates across the pond, but you can still clearly hear the influence of blokes like Ian Dury and Wreckless Eric on their self-titled debut. You can tell they cut their teeth at CBGB’s, too, especially from the nervy energy and driving, thick-toned bassline on opener “They Got Me Covered”, which seems to be about the predations of the music industry, and on “Let Go”, which in a truly mindset stroke of inspiration proclaims rock and roll as “still the best drug / if you wanna find out what you’re really made of”. Their sound is total catnip to me personally, in particular the heavenly jangly riff that kicks off “12 O’Clock High”, but a bunch of songs are sort of undistinguished, even when they’re obviously shooting for a pastiche (reggae on “Disappearing”, rockabilly on “Drop That Tan”, blue-eyed soul on “Lie to Me”). I like it, really I do, just not quite enough to put any actual faith in the band; time has already made fools of too many sharper power poppers than these.

VERDICT: NICE

New Musik - From A to B

The only thing I don’t adore about this band is their name— you seriously expect me to go and tell someone how great New Musik is? ‘Who’s on First’-ass name, seriously. Hate, hate, hate it. With that out of the way, holy moly is this album ever amazing! The genre is synthesizer-driven pop of the Gary Numan variety, but bolstered by wonderfully spirited guitar strumming guaranteed to melt the heart of any power pop aficionado such as myself. Instantly addicting hookcraft abounds on “Sanctuary” (they pronounce it like “Century”!), “This World of Water” (they add this mind-blowing robot voice synth thing on the chorus that makes it sound like the singer is a malfunctioning computer!), “Dead Fish (Don’t Swim Home)” (that two-note melisma on HO-O-O-O-O-O-O-OME is everything) and “Living by Numbers” (those lyrics, god, right in the feels). Mindset of the week: You count the days, but does it all add up to you?

VERDICT: ZAMN

The Monochrome Set - Strange Boutique

The Monochrome Set is not power pop, but they waltz right up to almost every line they can on their debut album. Their guitar often jangles, but never cathartically so. They clearly love their Kinks, but they also clearly prefer sophisticated music hall Kinks to guitar-driven Mod Kinks. Their lyrics evince both cleverness and upper-middle-classness, but without any of power pop’s naivete about those qualities. “The Lighter Side of Dating” is even about a vain woman the narrator is seeing, but it’s so detached and non-angsty! The point is just how comically ridiculous all the trappings of modern courtship are at the end of the day! To anyone mystified why this is getting lumped in with the post-punk crowd, it’s surely that arch sardonicism. Well, that and frontman Ganesh Seshadri’s steadfast refusal to raise his voice one decibel beyond an unimpressed mutter, even when he’s doing an impression of a lounge singer. I admire their wit and their dedication to writing songs that haven’t been written before, I just hope they find something to give a shit about by the time album #2 rolls around.

VERDICT: FINE

The Passions - Michael and Miranda

Hey, wait a minute, this is just The Monochrome Set again, but with a woman singing this time! The Passions ply the same exact mix of jangly retro pop and tart irony as their fellow Londoners, tuned about 10% more towards my personal tastes (check out that pretty chorus-y guitar tone on “Snow”!) They play a little tighter, sing a little harder, don’t flex their higher education quite as ostentatiously. Sorry to say, it all amounts to a slightly diluted version of a sound that wasn’t quite to my liking anyway. In other words, I have not been successfully pandered to, with the stridently feminist album closer “Why Me” standing as a significant exception. Frontwoman Barbara Gogan puts enough fire in her delivery to make that song a satisfyingly righteous telling-off of some stand-in for the patriarchy, I just wish that same energy came across on the rest of the songs. For a band literally called “The Passions”, they’re a mite short on ‘em. Or is that just that famous post-punk sarcasm at it again?

VERDICT: FINE

The Undertones - Hypnotised

These Irish power pop punkers came out the gate swinging last year with their self-titled debut, the perfect dumb-fun counterpart to the heavy political angst of their countrymen in Stiff Little Fingers. The buzz is already wearing off, though: the nicest thing I can say about Hypnotised is that it’s more of the same. I mean shit, right off the bat the opener promises “More Songs About Chocolate and Girls”, and at no point for the next 38 minutes is that mission statement subverted or complicated. “The Way Girls Talk” slows things down enough for its adolescent insecurity to at least stand apart from the pack, but otherwise this album really blurs together. The only other notable moments are a Drifters cover that bleating frontman Feargal Sharkey doesn’t really have the pipes for, a solid lyric about a “Perfect Cousin” who all the adults like more, and an oi-style chorus that the band shouts insistently enough to permanently lodge in your grey matter (THERE GOES NORMAN!) If you really love the first album it’s still at least worth one listen; I love the first album just enough that it took me a good half-dozen to realize how much of a sophomore slump it really is.

VERDICT: FINE