Angel City (The Angels)

Angel City (The Angels) - Face to Face

Today the album I was looking forward to cranking up was Nazareth's Greatest Hits. I found a copy in the dollar bin yesterday, along with a few other records I was pretty excited about. I had quite a few records queued up in the "clean me" pile, and I decided today was a good day to sit in the cave and get caught up. I got to the Nazareth album, pulled out the vinyl, and lo and behold, I was looking at a rather beat-up copy of Nathaniel the Grublet from 1979. It was on Birdwing Records, a label that catered to the Christian bookstore market. Part of me was thinking "What the fuh?" But I have quite a collection of CCM (Contemporary Christian Music, for those who care), so a small part of me was hoping this 1979 release was a goofy progressive rock concept album.

I'm normally very careful when bin diving. I always check the vinyl, and while I'm more forgiving about the jacket and liner (if it's even there at all), yesterday I was in a hurry because the store was closing.

The vinyl looked like someone had used it to polish concrete. Undeterred, I cleaned it anyway, hoping for the best. I made it through "Diddle-Daddle Day." This was not prog rock. It was a kids' record, but the narrator's voice kept nagging at me until it finally clicked.

Dean Jones.

Dang, Dean Jones.

Still, the record was pretty much unplayable, and I just couldn't do it with the constant barrage of clicks and pops. I hate throwing things away. I spent a dollar on this, dagnabbit. I may keep the jacket just in case I need it in the future.

At this point you're either looking at your watch or wondering what the heck is going on. Well, let me tell you. Hang on just a little longer.

The album underneath the aforementioned Nazareth album was Angel City's 1980 release Face to Face. This was an album I'd seen before but frankly had no idea what to expect. It had a cool cover, and a hard-to-forget one at that. The band, known as The Angels in their native Australia, had initially released Face to Face in 1978. When it was released by Epic internationally, it was re-sequenced and included tracks from the band's earlier releases.

There must be something in the water down under. Face to Face is crunchy three (sometimes four) chord rock that at times bears more than a passing resemblance to their fellow countrymen AC/DC. From what I've read, they landed their first record deal on the recommendation of Bon Scott and Malcolm Young. Heck, they even had Vanda & Young credited on the album jacket as production consultants. Those two were behind a lot of the early AC/DC releases.

However, this isn't like listening to Rhino Bucket or Airbourne. Sure, they have crunchy, in-your-face hooks, but they're more diverse than that, moving comfortably between hard rock and new wave—yeah, new wave. There's organ on some of them there songs (I wrote that on purpose, channelling my inner Richard Meltzer - he didn't make sense a lot of the time either). I'm actually rather surprised I hadn't been exposed to this before now. This stuff is making the little hairs on the back of my neck stand up.

Doc Neeson, as a singer, has a great snarly swagger, propelled by the Brewster brothers (John and Rick) on guitar. It's a great combination. Graham "Buzz" Bidstrup on drums and Chris Bailey on bass keep everything in the pocket. The whole album is a great listen.

I'm going to keep an eye out for more of their stuff. I'll be careful to check and make sure the record on the inside matches the jacket. Fool me once, shame on me. Fool me twice, and it just proves I'm an idiot.

In case you're curious - no, I didn't throw out poor Nathaniel. I put it back in the Nazareth jacket and filed it beside Loud 'n' Proud.

Billy Rankin - Growin' Up Too Fast

Growin' Up Too Fast was never widely released on CD (if at all), and it was one of the albums I really wanted to get back after a basement flood wiped out my vinyl collection in the '90s (when no one really gave a shit about records, and my insurance gave me a couple hundred bucks for an appraised $10,000 collection). Way back in 1984, my (dearly departed and greatly missed) buddy Dave let me borrow his cassette copy, which included a bonus track of "Get It On (Bang A Gong)." When I eventually bought the album, I didn't know it was a bonus track, or even what a bonus track was. If that sentence was hard to read, just go back and skim it. I'm sure you'll get the gist. I'd find out later Billy was an off-and-on-again member of Nazareth and wrote some absolutely killer songs for them. At the time, though, all I knew was this guy laid it out cold with the opening cut, "Baby Come Back," then proceeded to lay down one killer tune after another bef...

Styx - Paradise Theater

Styx was hands down one of my favourite bands as a kid. They were a strange band, even back then. They were a hard rock, almost progressive at times who had a penchant for sucky ballads. I know there's a tendency for people to zero in on "Babe" as the song that killed the band's credibility. The roots go way back to almost the beginning when Styx released "Lady" on their second album. It showed a side to the band that needed to be kept in check, and for the most part the band kept things on a pretty tight leash. The band had been setting a gruelling pace, releasing an album a year (two in 1972) and by the time they released Paradise Theater (if I end up writing theatre later it's because that's how we spell it here) in 1981 they'd dropped ten albums in less than a decade. I snapped this up as soon as I saw it, and it became a fixture on my turntable. Like the band had announced on "Borrowed Time" from 1979's Cornerstone , "Don...

Gary Numan - The Pleasure Principle

"Cars" was really the only song I knew by Gary Numan. I knew the name of the album the song came from. Over the years bits and pieces of trivia are accumulated, but in terms of his music it was still distilled down to one song ... It would be too easy to write Mr. Numan off as a one hit wonder, and I suppose in terms of actual chart hits this was his defining moment as a solo artist. Of course this really means nothing, as Gary Numan would drop an album a year pretty much through to the end of the '80s. He'd then slow down a little but continues to make music. While The Pleasure Principle was Gary Numan's debut solo release in '79, he actually cut his teeth on a couple of albums in a band called Tubeway Army, first with the band's self titled release in 1978, and then on Replicas that came out in April of '79. By the end of Tubeway Army's run most of the band would follow Gary into his solo career. Paul Gardiner who had been with Gary from the beg...

Old Enough to Forget

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