Permanent Waves #5

We can't rewind, we've gone too far!

Welcome, or welcome back, to PERMANENT WAVES, a chronological journey through the power pop (and beyond!) of the year 1980.

This week was the kind of week I dreamt of when devising this series— A nice balanced blend of beloved smash hits, mind-blowing hidden gems, and generic landfill crap-rock. The holy trinity, if you will. Ten albums on the docket, and I’m raring to go on all counts— let’s mindset.

N’Draman Blintch - Cosmic Sounds

I’d call this the one to beat in 1980, if I had any confidence that a single other album will have the guts and grooves to play the game that Ivory Coast producer N’Draman Blintch is playing here. The rest of the albums from this week were a chore by comparison. Friendship ended with power pop, now Cosmic Sounds is my best friend. This thing might actually be the greatest album of dance music I’ve ever heard. You simply have no choice but to wiggle your booty to the absurdly dialled-in rhythmic smorgasbord served up here. “Disco” gets you in the right ballpark but this is unlike any disco I’ve ever heard: the guitars jitter and scratch like a speed-addled new-waver, and the lyricism is suffused with as much apocalyptic paranoia and spirited radicalism as any from Fela Kuti. It even earns extra points for immaculate pacing: three behemoth servings of unrelenting afro-funk intensity with a chaser of mellow soul. Seriously, I can’t recommend it highly enough. Mindset of the week: Everywhere, you carry on terror (power!) / Every day, making a faster plane (power!)

VERDICT: ZAMN

The J. Geils Band - Love Stinks

These seasoned club-circuit veterans certainly know how to keep a toe tapping, but bar bands are always good for a quick fuck— what I wanna know is, are they marriage material? On their ninth studio LP and eleventh overall, Geils and co. work a bit of new wave zing into their boozy, sleazy white-boy soul and come out the other side with two sterling pop bops, the unrequited-affection stomper “Love Stinks” and the ebullient “Just Can’t Wait”, as well as two delightfully lugubrious funk-rock numbers in “Come Back” and “Tryin’ Not to Think About It”. The rest is long on energy and short on songwriting, and “No Anchovies, Please” is one of the most misbegotten attempts at comedy I’ve ever heard from a rock band. Get three or four drinks down you, and this is a one-night stand you’ll probably look back on fondly enough. Sober, I look forward to the highlights showing up on their next live album. Unless, of course, Peter Wolf is still doing that cringeworthy jive-talk bullshit between songs.

VERDICT: FINE

Survivor - Survivor

The Babys’ willingness to go a bit softer, to admit to a bit of insecurity now and then, make them my personally preferred candidate, but the smart money is on Survivor; this Chicago fivesome’s debut is the shape of arena rock to come. Soaring, testosterone-soaked hooks, smashing bashing 4/4 beats and crunching power chords abound. By the end of side one, though, you start to get a sense of what must be sacrificed to be able to hang with Van Halen and AC/DC— namely, the wits to distinguish romantic fulfillment from athletic achievement. A couple hooks stick the landing well enough (if I had to pick a single, “Can’t Getcha Offa My Mind” wouldn’t be a totally unwelcome presence on rock radio), and more menacing, minor-key stuff like “Youngblood” at least has a detectable personality to it, but these guys are every bit as lunkheaded as every other arena rock act you’ve ever heard, and forty minutes is more of this sound than anybody needs in one sitting.

VERDICT: SKIP

Flame Dream - Elements

I must once again reiterate that, although the orthodox power poppers may frown upon me for it, I love me some prog-rock, otherwise I’d be full-tilt SKIPping these foppish fancylads and their slab of overcooked ELP worship with a sneer and a scoff. The gorgeous and delicately melodious flutterings of keyboardist Roland Ruckstuhl positively shine on “Sun Fire” and parts of “A Poem of Dancing”, but “Sea Monsters” and “Earth Song” both drag pretty badly to my ears, like an endless loop of one of those rhythmically-disorienting Gentle Giant songs where they forget to write a chorus and the singer tries to sing way too high. If you’re ravenous for this kind of thing, it’s worth a listen, but I can’t see Flame Dream converting many (if any) prog novices into true believers.

VERDICT: FINE

Professor Longhair - Crawfish Fiesta

This album shipped out to stores the very day that Henry Roeland Byrd, AKA Professor Longhair, passed on from this world, closing the book on a half-century off-and-on as a defining figure of New Orleans music, bridging rumba and boogie-blues with his bawdy, freewheeling barrelhouse-piano stylings and inspiring a legion of now-legendary disciples in the process. Don’t shed a tear, though: you would never guess that an album as bursting with joie de vivre as Crawfish Fiesta was made by a man on death’s doorstep. This is about as down-home and authentic as R&B gets; alas, power pop mindset craves the fake stuff. As intuitive and danceable as Fess’s nimble ivory-tickling may be, ultimately I hear a guy born to play onstage for a crowd, not in the booth for a producer. His rendition of “Cry to Me” inspired me to revisit, and truly fall in love with, Solomon Burke’s definitive 1961 recording of the song. Musicians like this guy keep a great tune alive like nobody’s business, and that’s enough. May he rest in peace.

VERDICT: NICE

The Buggles - The Age of Plastic

I put off writing this one till the last second, and I’m honestly not even totally sure why. The Buggles’ take on synth-pop is an agreeable one, to be sure, heavy on the raw pathos of technological alienation and full of sparkling radio hooks (er, or is that video hooks?). “Video Killed the Radio Star” deftly reconstructs the past thirty years of pop music evolution in miniature, “Living in the Plastic Age” captures enough futuristic wonderment to actually pull off that cheesy heart police/cardiac arrest lyric, “Clean, Clean” has a pounding motorik beat that’s just to die for, and “Elstree” certainly delivers hard on sentimental nostalgia (a recurring theme across the album). Some of the other tracks give me pause, though. Frontman Trevor Horn isn’t a bad singer, per se, but he’s hardly a commanding presence either, and when the melodies aren’t sticky enough to cover for that, the sci-fi kitsch of it all wears thin pretty fast. Closer “Johnny on the Monorail” makes me wonder if they’re already out of ideas after just eight songs. Maybe that’s also commentary on the plastic age! Runner-up mindset of the week: How the media builds stars / And our minds will not change / Only our cars

VERDICT: NICE

Airplay - Airplay

These guys play up their yacht-rock sophistication for all it’s worth (You may be familiar with guitarist Jay Graydon’s work with Steely Dan), but Airplay by Airplay is as airplay does: Thunderingly vacant and joylessly overproduced, with a couple moments that manage pleasantness despite it all. The highlights mostly skew light ‘n’ mellow: “Nothin’ You Can Do About It” has a nicely bouncy piano groove, very vintage Elton John, and closer “Should We Carry On” could teach Air Supply a thing or two about writing tolerable soft-rock fluff. The harder stuff stinks, though! These guys cannot rock out to save their fuckin’ lives, it all sounds like de-boned Foreigner with cloying CSNY harmonies slathered overtop, yuck.

VERDICT: SKIP

Hilly Michaels - Calling All Girls

The drummer behind the big beats of Sparks’ Big Beat clearly picked up a lesson or two in glam-damaged pop postmodernism from the Maels, and he hardly suffers for leaving behind most of their sour sardonicism in favor of sugary sardonicism. The better half of these songs really could be huge hits with the right push, even though, much like Russel Mael, Hilly’s voice is a somewhat unusual instrument. His music flatters him, though: dementedly catchy, brilliantly dumb, fueled and polished by a bevy of all-star sidemen (Elton guitarist Davey Johnstone, Cars synthesist Greg Hawkes, Queen producer Roy Thomas Baker). Liza Minelli shows up in the credits here, for god’s sakes! Instant classic hooks include DE-DE-DE-DEVOTION, shakeitnDANCE, shakeitnDANCE, and of course, I’mcallingallgirls I’mcallingallgirls. Elsewhere, “US Male” steals its title from an Elvis song, and pancakes the rank 50s patriarchalism of the original article into a harmlessly absurd chippendales number. Good stuff.

VERDICT: NICE

The Romantics - The Romantics

This is the kind of album that Permanent Waves was born to facilitate a gushing, blushing mash note for: a bright, snappy, endlessly hookful blast of retro beat-rock. “What I Like About You” doesn’t just sound like the 60s, it sounds like it’s always existed in the exact way that great 60s rock always does, and drummer Jimmy Marinos has a nice strong voice to boot. The whole album is in a similar mold, so exactly my kind of shit that I’ve spent the past week scratching my head wondering why I kinda brushed right past it on first listen, and still hesitate to call it truly great. Don’t get me wrong, it’s good, really good, front to back, but it’s just so safe! The Beat basically released the same exact album with more passion and nerve just last year! Hell, there’s a Kinks cover here and it fits in so well I didn’t even clock it; maybe picking a middling bit of self-parody like “She’s Got Everything” as your Kinks cover is part of the issue? The Romantics may be able to power pop with the best of ‘em, but only because they aren’t the best of ‘em. Are good hooks really all you can do with this much 60s nostalgia? See me after class, you wasters— you’ve clearly done the homework, there’s no excuse for mindset this unambitious.

VERDICT: NICE

Girl - Sheer Greed

The “Do You Love Me?” cover should say it all, really. This album is one hundred percent street-tuff cock-rockin’ glam metal… and not exactly the cream of that crop, either. I should clarify, I’m not even one of those people who thinks KISS and bands like them are the worst thing to ever happen to hard rock. Though their chauvinist streaks are often a deal-breaker for me, the whole genre was kind of rotten from the start on that front, and besides, I like Paul and Gene’s taste for camp, which is in short supply on Sheer Greed. I do hear potential (in the jeering gang-backing-vocal on “My Number”, in some of Phil Collen’s shredding), but potential doesn’t get a party going, does it? Dangerously close to scraping by with a FINE, since no individual song overstays its welcome too badly, but I keep a very slim collection of this stuff around, and at the end of the day I just don’t hear a damn thing here that I couldn’t get better from Slayed? or Love it to Death. Not a thing besides false advertising, that is— Whaddaya mean, “The band Girl is five men”???

VERDICT: SKIP