Always Tomorrow is another of my beloved Marco Polo Platters. The first thing that caught my eye was the cover. Okay, that was the second thing. The first thing was the clearance sticker, but dang the cover gave me a good chuckle. The cover for Always Tomorrow is a weirdly wonderful juxtaposition of perspective on a familiar image. It's a picture taken from inside the Hotel California looking out into the world. Some will get it, some won't ... most won't care. It's the font in the bottom right that pulls it all together. Dagnabbit that album was twenty years when Bethany Cosentino was born, so I'm guessing her parents had a decent record collection. Of course I could just be seeing things, and this is all a giant load of horseshit. I don't think so. Best Coast is a dreamy pop band who likes to incorporate jingle jangle guitars into their music. The music is weirdly nostalgic for me. It may be new but structurally this is what I grew up with. Ah, the more thi...
Prism was a band I loved - right up until I didn’t. But it was complicated, because I still loved the band, but it was conditional. Those first two albums on GRT were foundational for me. Heck, Armageddon was as cool as it got, but if push came to shove, I’d throw the band under the bus without a second thought. Then came Young and Restless , an album with some (one for sure) killer songs, though honestly, I didn’t consider it essential. When Small Change dropped in 1981, I remember really liking the cover - Norman Rockwell, how can you not? My old friend Robert Baldwin (rest in peace, Robert, you were one of a kind) was the only person I knew who had it (apparently there were 49,999 others who had it too). I remember seeing the record in his room and teasing him for owning it. We sat and listened to the record; the first track sounded like classic Prism, but the rest didn’t. That’s how I remember it. Looking at the back cover there were major changes in the band: Ron Tabak, the vocal...