Skip to main content

Body Electric - Two Worlds

Body Electric

Two Worlds came out in 1985 and the '80s had a sound, and by gum this was it. The flat splat of the drums, crisp guitars and gang vocals and sparkly keyboard parts. Body Electric was one of those bands who never really got out of the starting blocks. I remember seeing a poster for the band's debut on the wall at Little Mountain Sound. It was a cool cover, but all I knew was it was Frank Ludwig's new band, and as talented as Frank was, I never really got into his stuff.

When "Do You Think They Can Tell" got some minor airplay in Vancouver, I thought it was pretty cool, but it was the ballad "Don't Look Back" that clicked with me. That was an awesome song. So I picked up the E.P. and with only 5 songs, it was really all killer no filler. The album was produced by Bill Henderson and it sounded like a continuation of his '84 release Look In, Look Out. The album felt like a taster of things to come, except there wasn't anything else. This was a standalone and it would be a couple of years before the band would release a follow-up that I never knew existed until recently.

Too bad.

The band was comprised of Ross Friesen on drums (who I'd met when he was doing some video work for a non profit project I was part of many years ago), Frank Ludwig and Bob Buckley on keyboards, with Bob also providing sax, and David Sinclair on vocals and guitar. David and Bob (who had both been members of the band Straight Lines) wrote the songs, and the band enlisted Brian Newcombe to play bass ... his fretless work on "Don't Look Back" is so good.

This was top shelf in terms of production and was mixed by Bob Rock and assisted by Mike Fraser, and it was mastered at Sterling Sound by the man with the golden ears George Marino.

back cover

I really did like this back in the day, and it should have been the start of something wonderful that never materialized. I know the goal is to leave the audience wanting more but this just felt like being ghosted.

At least they left this behind.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

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...