Bourgeois Tagg - Bourgeois Tagg

I heard "Mutual Surrender (What a Wonderful World)" on the radio - once. It was a nifty track that appealed to me enough to look for the album. I bought the CD, and the other song I liked that made it onto a few mixes was "Dying to Be Free," an oddly haunting track that really appealed to me. A year later the band was seemingly everywhere with their infectious "I Don't Mind at All," a song barely three minutes long that sounded like nothing else the band had recorded. To many, it was the biggest bait and switch since Coke had tried to rebrand back in 1985. Okay, maybe not that big, but I had a friend who bought the album thinking he was getting the new Beatles and declared it was a huge steamy pile of poop, aside from one great song.

I don't have Yoyo on vinyl (I have it on CD), but I did recently find a sealed copy of their debut, and I know I already have it on CD and I'm not supposed to be doubling up, but come on, a sealed copy? It was cheap too, which made it impossible to pass up.

This isn't something I'd listened to for a long time. I was scanning the back cover and trying to remember more than the two songs I'd mentioned, and it was a blank. Now, to be upfront, there was a time when I was buying a lot of albums and I didn't really spend a lot of time with much of what I was accumulating. Everything got a chance, but if I didn't hear anything that I thought was awesome, I'd generally shelve it and leave it to gather dust. The fact that I remember more than one song here is a plus.

So, in essence, I'm finally giving this a proper, intentional listen. History has already passed judgment on the band, and a gushing blog post about a band no one really heard in the first place isn't going to change that. The same is true if I decided to be as dismissive as my old friend Scott and label this a steaming pile of crap.

Let's set the record straight and give props where props are due. This is a really good record. It's very '80s, and it's very cool. Structurally, the guys are colouring a little outside the lines, the result being a surprisingly organic-feeling album that still uses a lot of technology. It's a rock record with an alternative feel. This was probably better received on college radio, but that seldom translated into wider success. Then again, success is a relative thing. Many of the bands who've impacted me had little impact on the charts or radio - but they still had an audience and a fan base.

The band was anchored by Brent Bourgeois and Larry Tagg and were augmented by Lyle Workman on guitar, whose style was wonderfully suited to this style of music, Scott Moon on keyboards and Mike Urbano on drums. The guys were all solid players, and almost all of them went on to other endeavours after the second album failed to gain a wider audience.

This was a pleasant surprise, and I found myself really enjoying the album. From the opening track "Changed" to the oddly progressive "Let the War Begin," all of the songs are solid, and there aren't any misfires to distract from the experience. As to the two songs I did remember, they were even better in the context of the rest of the album.

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

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