Space Project - Conquest of the Stars

This was a total surprise. I bought it thinking it was likely a trippy prog rock album, maybe something like Starcastle, although the art wasn't as good. It was a little better than a high school mural, but then again it was kind of cool in a way too. I don't know why I thought of GNIDROLOG and their Lady Lake album but I was thinking, "long songs, spacey cover, gotta be prog."

You know what they say when you assume.

This ... was ... disco.

I suppose the thought was, "If Meco can have a disco hit with a Star Wars song, just think what we could achieve with a whole album of space disco!" So Dominic Sciscente, Michel Daigle and J. Lafleche sat around brainstorming, and after a few beers, it was decided they'd need to have a spectacular cover. There needed to be space boobs, and oh, and an astronaut, but he needed to have a video camera and be holding a space shovel, and then some other goofy shit. It didn't have to make sense, but it needed to look like something you could spray paint on the side of a van. Oh, yeah, it needs to come out on translucent yellow vinyl. The songs needed to be long, long enough to work up a sweat on the dance floor. This was going to be awesome.

The album was recorded in Quebec, and I'm guessing the songwriting team was also French Canadian, and rather than sing with an accent they opted to go the instrumental route. I've got to hand it to disco, people weren't above just dancing to the music. Honestly, this is like four little mini soundtracks that run like an overly long credit sequence. I wish I knew why my brain starts making up voice over parts to go with the music when I hear this kind of stuff. It's entertaining to me, but also a little distracting, that and the voice in my head sounds like Bill Swisher, the guy who did the speaking part in Boney M.'s "Rasputin," which was also from 1978, but that's just a coincidence ... or is it?

Considering that in 1978 shows like Buck Rogers (Erin Gray in a spandex one-piece, good lord) and even the beloved (to me) Battlestar Galactica weren't exactly ratings juggernauts (did I mention Erin Gray?) it's kind of weird that they figured there was an audience for this. Although it did remind me more of Quark and the bikini twins with the twins ... yeah, I was 14, that's the stuff you remember.

If you can park the "WTF is this?" reaction and just listen to it for the sake of kitsch, this really is a lot of fun. I'm not suggesting you play this at a house party unless you want to clear the floor. I actually got more enjoyment out of this than I expected. Which surprised me as after the first song I kept thinking, "Did I need more of this?" Apparently the answer was yes, yes I did, and the little Swisher voice concurred and made up a story about the advances in technology that would one day make space-mail a reality. Oh, of course there was Erin Gray and her space twins but let's be honest my eyes weren't up there.

There's not a lot out there on these guys, and apparently outside of Canada the album was fittingly titled, Disco From Another Galaxy, with a different cover which nicely sidestepped anyone thinking this was a prog rock album. If you're curious, and you should be, you can stream it.

Go on, do it.

Better yet, look for the record, it's worth it, and it's on yellow vinyl, which makes it totally more betterer. There's gold in them there grooves, baby!

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 , ...

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...

Garfield - Strange Streets

I'd seen this before in the bin, but kept flipping through the stacks. I'd see it a few more times, each time stopping to look at it a little more. There was something kind of cool about the cover where the stylized Celtic knot had the dotted yellow line - it was a strange street for sure. I pulled the record out of the jacket and I was struck by the centre image. There was the familiar Mercury label, the same one I'd seen a thousand times on BTO's Head On album. Well, I'd bought things based on odd associations before - like when I had to buy anything that Solid Rock Records released (this was generally a good thing) - so who knows, maybe this was a hidden gem. There weren't any real scratches or rash, just a lot of dirt and dust. It seemed to clean up okay, but we'll see how it goes. The album opens with the title track, and this wasn't straight-ahead pop or rock. It was leaning toward the progressive, but with a pop bent. Oddly enough, the vocals rem...

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