The Kings - The Kings are Here

I found this one about a year ago, and put it in the wrong pile and sort of forgot about it. I was playing The Cry, also released in 1980, and the new wave organ on a couple of their songs reminded me of The Kings, and then it was like, "Hey, I really need to sit and listen to The Kings."

Like most people I have a soft spot for their double-sided hit. "This Beat Goes On/Switchin' To Glide" is always played as a combo, and they're among a rarefied few who can command that kind of airtime. "Feeling That Way / Anytime" by Journey and "We Will Rock You / We Are the Champions" by Queen come to mind, and maybe one or two others that escape me at the moment.

To say this was career defining for the band is sort of an understatement. However, I have always been curious about what else was out there, and I know I could have just gone and streamed it, but I held off. "Why?" you ask. I dunno, why not?

The band's sound was a curious blend of high energy new wave and good old crunchy rock and roll, the kind that punk was supposed to be railing against. Somehow the band managed to engage Bob Ezrin (BOB FREAKIN' EZRIN) to produce their debut The Kings Are Here. Admittedly, it's an interesting fit as this falls sort of right after his stellar work with Pink Floyd on The Wall and KISS' Destroyer. However, this wasn't a grand statement or overblown. The band delivered a party on a platter over ten tight tracks.

One of the weird things about revisiting an album over forty years after the fact is there are forty years of accumulated baggage to unpack. Most of the weight comes from the opening one-two punch of "This Beat Goes On/Switchin' To Glide," songs so ingrained now in the fabric of classic rock they cast a shadow over everything the band has ever done.

Sequencing is everything, and it was the right call to start the album with a bang, but when I sat down to go through this, I mean really go through this, the first time through I dropped the needle on the third track, "It's Okay," and then went through both sides before going back to the beginning. I wanted to hear everything else.

I had earlier hinted at the strange sweet spot the band was aiming for. They were a quirky rock band. They employed new wave energy, complete with the cheesy organ that was part of so much early post punk music before thankfully fading away. They were also a rock band, lots of guitar and a driving beat all nestled into a tight power pop delivery system.

The guys even channelled their inner Ramones (or Blotto) by adopting what I can only assume were clever pseudonyms for themselves.

David Diamond (vocals, bass)
Sonny Keyes (keyboards)
Max Styles (drums)
Aryan Zero (guitar) - although this seems to have been changed later to Mister Zero

The songs are good. Often very good. "Partyitis" is a turbo charged celebration, and "Don't Let Me Know" is a really great power pop song that should have been a hit. It is so good. However, it was the albatross that overshadows everything else. Which is a shame, as the band really did deliver the goods, and where the double A side should have been the icing on the cake, it ended up being all anyone took from the buffet.

By all accounts the band was putting in the roadwork and building their audience, and their big hit certainly didn't hurt. Momentum was on their side. When the band went back into the studio, again with Bob Ezrin producing, their 1981 follow up Amazon Beach was met with ... nothing. So much for momentum.

Which was perplexing as Amazon Beach is really good. They were trying to change with the times and still remain themselves. I didn't expect it to be so good. Do yourself a favour and give it a listen.

The Kings are still here proving the beat does indeed go on ... and on.

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...

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