Ian Thomas - Riders on Dark Horses

I was ten years old when I first heard Ian Thomas' "Painted Ladies" on my AM radio. I still really like the song, and throughout the '70s, he was the consummate singer-songwriter. Even his 1979 single "Pilot," which was equal parts irritating and cool with its quirky recorder (yes, a recorder) runs, was one I kind of liked but never really loved. However, when Ian performed it on SCTV with Bob and Doug (his brother Dave), it took on a second life. I knew Ian Thomas from many of his own songs, but also from the various covers of his material by artists ranging from Santana to Chicago. But it was Manfred Mann's Earth Band's retooling of "The Runner" that really floated my boat (oddly, I never did pick up a copy, and it is still on my list of things to look for one day).

Fast forward to the summer of 1983, and I'm lining up to see Strange Brew, and in the opening credits, Ian Thomas delivers the title track, and it was a killer. It would herald the '80s for Mr. Thomas, and the point where I really took interest was a year later when I heard "Do You Right" on the radio. That was it. I was completely hooked. I picked up Riders on Dark Horses and pulled track after track onto my mix tapes. So I started going backward and picking up Ian's past work, and while I enjoyed it, I was more interested in looking forward than looking back.

This isn't to say that the music on Riders was hard rock or (gasp) metal (he'd save that for his awesome contributions to The Wanker's Guide to Canada - a story for another time), but there was something that felt current and fresh. After all, this was ringing my bell, and I wasn't exactly looking for nostalgia in 1984. I was looking for what was new, and despite the fact that Ian had been around since my childhood, it didn't faze me at all. Of course, for long-term fans, I suspect this was a problem, and if you read some of the reviews out there, they didn't share my enthusiasm for the album.

The album was co-produced by Mick Ronson and Max Norman. Ian enlisted Aldo Nova (yes, that Aldo Nova) to play guitar on the album (it's part of the fun trying to guess which tracks he's on), which, to me, was cool, while to others it may have just seemed like a play to stay relevant. The incomparable Peter Fredette also provided backing vocals. Haters gonna hate, I guess.

The songs were a blend of his '70s singer-songwriter sensibilities with the new sounds that were coming down the pipe. Just listen to "Progress" and you can hear the same biting lyrics (some would argue heavy-handed) and observational tendencies that were all over his previous albums. One of the near-perfect pop tunes he crafted for this album was "Your Love Heals," a song that's a little too fast to be a ballad but too slow to be a rocker. It's a mid-tempo masterpiece that still, after all these years, stops me in my tracks. The album closes with the title track, which has, over time, become one of his more haunting pieces and one of my favourite recordings from his entire catalogue. Of course, I seem to say that about a lot of songs. It's like going to a candy store and pointing at the various sweets: "I like that one...and that one...and that one too."

I'll be honest, I was often a pretty lazy listener. I was into the tunes, and if they were catchy, that was enough for me. The fact that Ian put in the effort to craft deeper pop songs wasn't something I truly appreciated until later, when my tastes matured a little more (not that I did, mind you).

He had a hell of a run through the remainder of the '80s when he followed up this album with 1985's Add Water and 1988's brilliant Levity. He was getting better as time went by, although if I'm going to call out an album as being too much of its time, it would be Add Water, which hasn't aged as well despite having some of his best songs on it.

Riders on Dark Horses, though, was the album for me that seemed to be the perfect blend of what had come before and where he'd be going in the future. Is it his best album? Probably not (Air Pirates, anyone?) but it's up there.

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...

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