Here Come the Swans

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Sunday, February 27, 2011

#77 of CFNY's Best 87 of 87, Thrashing Doves, Bedrock Vice

Sorry for the delay! Life has been crazy these past few weeks.



This, my readers, is one of those albums that shaped my musical tastes in my formative teenage years.

The Thrashing Doves are yet another band I associate with Night Flight. I was introduced to them thanks to the video posted above, and used my allowance to buy the LP at my local Cavages in Marketplace Mall. I can still hear Night Flight's incomparable Pat Prescott explain how "Beatiful Imbalance" was about unrequited love, a term I had never heard before.

I listened to the album obsessively. I once counted how many times lead singer Ken Foreman shrieked "woo hoo" in every song. I wrote the lyrics, often entire song lyrics, in the margins and the back covers of my school notebooks. ("I can that he's bad by the stains on his shirt/He's rolling in money and calling it dirt.")

Bedrock Vice is one of the few albums I own in LP, cassette, and CD versions. I probably have an MP3 copy somewhere on my computer, too. To say I'm fan is a big understatement.

Does Bedrock Vice hold up well? Eh, maybe not as well as I'd like, given my great childhood memories. I still wish the band had a better YouTube presence. Besides "Beautiful Imbalance," there are multiple versions of "Je$us on the Payroll," but mostly the instrumental mixes. "Biba's Basement," which was also part of the Night Flight introduction, has been posted. Oddly, among the slim pickings is a B-side cover of the Stones' "Sympathy for the Devil." And with the exception of "Reprobate's Hymm," songs from the second album, Trouble in the Home, are conspicuously absent. ("Angel Visit" was featured on MTV's 120 Minutes.)

The band had one last swan song with a new name, The Doves, for their last album, Affinity. (What's wrong with "thrashing?!? Hmph.) While Affinity was an obvious last stab at pop chart success, it also was on heavy rotation in my cassette player during my freshman year of college.

Oh, apparently, Margaret Thatcher dug the "Beautiful Imbalance" video, too, and some blame the Iron Lady for the then-buzzed-about band's lack of success. Read more in Alex Petridis's article on "The Curse of the Thrashing Doves."

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Wednesday, February 09, 2011

#78 of CFNY's Best 87 of 87, Run DMC, Raisin' Hell

Yes, I realize that this song is not on Raisin' Hell and it predates the list by two years, but I can never pass up an opportunity to post Artists United Against Apartheid's "Sun City." Run DMC appears at the minute mark. (Backporch Videos must have been awesome. :)) Plus, did you really expect me to post "Walk This Way"? I saw enough of that video in my childhood to last me a lifetime.

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