Sandy Robison sang with FMF© faves The Peanut Butter Conspiracy. This collection of recordings featuring the PBC was released with the world's worst cover a few years back. I can't even bring myself to post it, it's so damn ugly. So I done did a new one, and changed the title an' everything. You'll groove to its sunshine pop vibe.
Peggy Lipton starred in TV's hip The Mod Squad, and made a bunch of swell recordings, too. Much later, she made a surprise appearance in Twin Peaks. The roses were gone for her as a child, but remember her this way, as a blurred Kodachrome summer.
Peggy and Sandy, th' House O' Foam© thanks you. Drop by any time.
Lewis Taylor is a genuine oddity. A massively talented musician, vocalist and arranger, his composing skills fell just slightly short of getting the hits he deserved. He started his musical career touring with a late-model Edgar Broughton Band. Why? We shall never know. Debuting his recording career as the whimsydelic© Sheriff Jack, he recorded two albums and a couple of mini-albums in '86/'87, of which I have only Let's Be Nonchalant (the internet knows Sheriff Jack Shit about this stuff).
Then he swerved inexplicably into blue-eyed soul, releasing his first album under his own name (oops, sorry, eponymous - nearly had my Rock Music Writer card taken away from me there), but even universally enthusiastic critics couldn't make it fly from the racks. There's a swell review here https://www.bbc.co.uk/music/reviews/w428/ In the likely event of your not having the energy to click and read - who has the time? - it calls it the "album that everybody talked about but few bought ... a slow-burning secret."
He followed it with more of the similar, in a confusing discography of international variations, none of which brought him the fame you - and he - might have thought due. Lesser talents (the tune-dodging clothes-horse Lenny Kravitz, for example) had greater success.
Then something dark happened in the life of Lewis Taylor, and he "retired from the music business." The Lost Album, a gorgeous homage [Fr. cheese - Ed.] to Surf's Up-era Beach Boys, was assembled for a belated release to gasps of wonder from those who loved his work and indifference from everybody else.
As a postscript, he left possibly the most baffling and left-field project in the history of recorded music - a cover version of Trout Mask Replica. A startling piece of work, neither slavishly accurate nor lazily loose, it remains unfinished, and doesn't appear on any discography I can find.
Here's what I have - not a complete œuvre [Fr. egg - Ed.], but all of it worth a listen. The Lost Album gets regular spins in the FMF© Conversation Pit O' Sound©, and makes Cody go all dreamy. Play it next time you pitch woo at your main squeeze.
Electronic music! It's so futuristic! The thing with this stuff, if it can be said to be a thing, is that it's impossible to tell if it's "good" or not, even in relation to other music of the genre. It qualifies as sound over noise because it has been created and organized through an artistic process, but is it music? This kind of argument seemed to matter a few years back. Now, nobody gives a fuck. Futuristic music is a thing of the past, as retro as ray guns and personal autogyros.
Nic/Nik Raicevik/Pascal somehow finagled himself a major-label (Buddah qualifies) release for his first album, but credited it to Head, clearing up any ambiguity by titling its three lengthy tracks Cannabis Sativa, Methedrine, and Lysergic Acid Diethylamide. Happy times! It also came with a coloring book, a nice touch as many of its listeners were only allowed crayons.
Claims for him being some kind of sonic pioneer don't stand up to scrutiny, though. Head was released in 1970, three years after the Monkees premiered the Moog in a pop context and two after their Head project. Yes, the Monkees did everything first and best! [See Tear The Top Right Off Your Million Dollar Head, March - Ed.]
When the suits at Buddah realised that avant-garde hard drug advocacy wasn't the hoped-for cash cow after their bubblegum music bubble burst, they kicked his sorry ass to the curb, and over the next five years he released a string of albums on his own Narco label (see a pattern yet?), all of them featuring his gorgeously lurid pulp S.F. paintings.
And here they are. "Do not listen to this music if you are stoned", as he cheekily warns on the sticker, the scamp.
L'Affaire Louis Trio and Les Innocents were France's answer to Britpop, which wasn't a question. France never had a strong pop group tradition, favoring solo artists, and neither group came from Paris, so their success came as a welcome surprise, seemingly out of nowhere - at least to Parisians, who tend not to look beyond the périphérique, the grim ring road that acts as a wall to keep out the rest of France, and the world. From the eighties into the nineties L'ALT and Les Inno sent hits up the charts, lighting up the radio with infectious tunes and making it seem like l'âge d'or [Fr. big door - Ed.] of pop group pop. Unfortunately, they didn't start a tradition, and French pop, with some exceptions, refocused on solo artists.
L'ALT started out making jumpy disco and dancehall pop, but quickly matured into a band capable of delivering one of the finest concept albums ever made anywhere, Mobilis In Mobile, which means, before Ed. sticks his nose in, free in a free world. Sorta. It's the Latin motto adopted by Jules Verne's Captain Nemo. Older readers may remember when Nemo wasn't a fish. As you might expect, L'ALT are a bunch of boulevard intellectuals, and this album is fathoms deeper than Yellow Submarine (thank God). But what hits you is the giddy melodic joy, the thrilling production, the sheer boggling quality of the thing, from the beautifully constructed cover to the last submarine bell. How can a single album contain so many great hooks, song after song? It is fucking brilliant.
Les Innocents were a dryer bunch, with a yearning quality to much of their work, and not as adroit with a melody, but there's a lovely element of classic pop jangle, Gallicized with a little squeezebox and tasteful strings. Fous à Lier is maybe their best album, with their best song, L'Autre Finistère, which packs a universally understandable emotional punch.
These albums are as good as pop group pop gets, which is to say, as good as music gets. Vive le pop!
