Men at Work - Business as Usual

Several months ago I wrote about the band's 1983 album Cargo, and I mentioned that I loved the big hits on the debut album and was really disappointed with the album overall. I think my exact words were, "I remember being profoundly disappointed in the record. Two killers, and filler. It's not an album I've heard in decades." Okay, those were my exact words, that's the nice thing about cut and pasting. I began to wonder if I had been carrying around a lot of unnecessary baggage with respect to the album. After all, this is an album that's sold in excess of 10 million copies worldwide, and half a million of them right here in Canada. If it was shit, people would have noticed. Wouldn't they?

As fate would have it, a little while ago I found a copy in the dollar bin (sadly the store has since closed as their landlord decided they wanted to jack up the rent. Bad for them, bad for me ... but I was starting to run out of space) that was in decent shape. It was the white cover, which still throws me off, as I remember really agonizing over whether or not to get the yellow or the white — I liked the yellow cover. The album cleaned up really well, and the first side was pristine. The second sadly had a small scratch that looked worse than it was, and the pop it generated was between songs ... bonus.

I still find it interesting that my prevailing opinion before dropping the needle was still two killers, and filler ... simply based on reading the song titles. The album opens right off with "Who Can It Be Now" and it's still awesome. I will admit there was a time when the song felt overplayed, but with the passage of so much time it felt like an old friend. Then "I Can See It in Your Eyes" came on, and I'd forgotten how good this song was. I'm already being forced to revisit my long-held assessment of the album. The first side was pretty good, and of course it didn't hurt that the two classics were on Side One.

Flipping it over, the second side kicked off with "People Just Love to Play with Words," which was another one of those "how did I not remember this song?" moments. It's a quirky song that got better with a couple spins. "Be Good Johnny" I did remember, and back in the day it was a song that didn't work for me, but it was catchy, and now it felt like a postcard from an old friend. All of the songs were enjoyable, and admittedly the wow factor generated by the two big songs wasn't present on all of the songs, but it didn't mean they were throwaways either. The closing track, "Down by the Sea," The closing track, "Down by the Sea," I remembered as soon as I heard it. It was an ambitious song, and honestly, in terms of texture and mood, it is one of the best songs on the album. It's not a catchy single, it's a piece of music. It's so good. I suppose this is the definition of a deep cut, and being the last song didn't get any deeper.

I enjoyed this far more than I expected, which was a surprise. No doubt in a little while, given my impaired sense of object permanence, I'll go back to thinking of Men at Work as a great singles band, which is sort of business as usual for me (I'm sorry, but I really wanted to work that in somewhere).

I'll just make a note to myself that this was actually a really good album.

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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