Harlequin - Love Crimes

One of the first albums I bought was Harlequin's 1979 debut, mainly because my friend Andrew, who was a great guitar player (at least that's how I remember him), wanted me to learn "You Are the Light" so we could play it together. Victim of a Song would become one of my favourite albums, and I did learn how to play "You Are the Light." The combination of George Belanger's distinct vocals and Glen Willows' searing guitar work was a one-two punch that seemed to deliver over and over on that album.

When the band dropped their new album in 1980, I was primed and eager to hear what they had to offer. They didn't disappoint. The legendary Jack Douglas produced the album, and the opening track, "Innocence," perfectly encapsulated everything Harlequin brought to the table: killer vocals, a killer guitar solo, and a killer hook. It was - and remains - probably one of the best songs the band ever recorded.

The bar was immediately set pretty freakin' high, and frankly it was too high for most of the songs to clear. This isn't to say the rest of the album is filler - far from it - but I will admit that when I pull this album out, the first thing that crosses my mind is "Innocence." The second thing is the driving riff from "Thinking of You," a song that really shouldn't be as cool as it is, but dang, it is a great song.

I was in my senior year, and we were on a basketball road trip. When we were warming up, this was one of the songs our opposition was playing to get their team hyped. Now I love the song, but it's an odd choice, especially when you get to the chorus where the song chunks along: "I'll be thinking of you"... kick, kick, snare... "thinking of you"... kick, kick, snare. Oh well, it did stick with me. That was also the trip I figured out how to dunk a ball... during warm-up - but it still counted.

Anyway, where was I?

Right. It wasn't unusual for my teenage self to listen for the best tracks, pull out what I thought were the mix-worthy songs, and then more or less bury the rest of the album. Honestly, the two "best" songs were on the first side, and as a result I seldom flipped the record over. (This wasn't the only album to suffer such a fate.) When I found this replacement copy, I honestly couldn't remember any of the other songs from the album.

I did pay more than a dollar for this, so I was going to sit and intentionally listen to the songs until I had either changed my mind, or at least was familiar enough with the album to stand by my initial assessment back in 1980. The first side was still smoking, and while there were no duds, nothing really eclipsed the two songs I liked back then, and still really liked now.

Turning the album over was like walking through a field of tall grass. There were no tracks from my old memories to follow, and despite having played the album many times, the songs all felt new to me. The songs were a good listen, but nothing was really sticking. A less charitable person would call it filler, but that's unfair, and not accurate - the songs, while good, just weren't memorable. They're okay to have playing in the background, and when they're cranked (and they are now) they have a certain presence - but once done, they're done.

The exception comes near the end of the second side. "Can't Hold Back" has a spark, and it certainly got my attention. Now that the energy level was up, the album's closer, "Midnight Magic," was definitely the beneficiary of the momentum. I likely wouldn't single this one out for a mix tape, but it does end the album on a high note.

Love Crimes featured two of the band's best songs, but the album, despite being a solid AOR effort, didn't resonate with me the same way their debut did.

Why then write about this one instead of Victim of a Song? Because just like back then, this album held the promise of things to come - even if it didn't deliver. The two songs that did are indelibly stamped into my musical DNA, and that was enough to make this worthwhile and a purchase I was glad to make - again.

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 band, 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 , ...

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

Search This Blog