Nick Gilder - City Nights

City Nights was Nick's second solo album, and for most of us it's "Hot Child in the City" that he's best known for ... as a solo artist. He's still somewhat infamous as the guy who left Sweeney Todd just as they were taking off ... but for many years now he's been touring as Sweeney Todd so I guess he ended up having the last laugh anyway.

Regardless, there's no denying how good "Hot Child in the City" was ... it was huge on both sides of the border, and Nick's balancing of the glam elements with rock and emerging new wave was pretty impressive. A big part of this was the songwriting team of James McCulloch and Nick Gilder. When Nick left Sweeney Todd, it was with guitarist and songwriter James, and if Nick had a secret sauce it was James' both as a writer and, more impressively, a really tasty and economical player.

The album was produced by Peter Coleman, and Mike Chapman. Both had deep roots with power pop and glam. Mike Chapman is the name I'm more familiar with, but looking through Peter's credits is equally impressive. It was Mike who produced "Hot Child in the City" and a couple of others with Peter handling the chores on the rest of the album. It's a remarkably cohesive album. The rhythm section was Craig Krampf on drums and Eric Nelson on bass and they really anchor the album.

Now, I have to admit this was an album I'd not heard before. I did have the follow-up to this one, Frequency, a mostly forgettable album that had one spectacular song on it ... but in fairness, it was years after it was released when I got it, so I never really spent time with it.

Listening to City Nights now is sort of bittersweet in that this is the kind of music I really liked. It's not like I had a huge budget to buy records back then as my collection was pretty thin, but I sure did like listening to the radio, and for whatever reason I was actively ambivalent to "Hot Child in the City" mainly because some of the mean girls liked it ... and they were, well, mean and therefore anything they liked was tainted.

Ick.

So here we are, decades after the fact rocking out in the basement and having a grand old time. I can't say this is timeless, but it sure does hold up. The riffs are huge, and the production is so clean while maintaining an edge. Then there's Nick's voice. It's kind of a love it or really, really, really hate it kind of thing. I don't think there's much of a middle ground.

My favourite review is featured prominently on Nick's wiki page for the album and comes from the Globe and Mail in 1978:

"'Hot Child in the City', which appears on this album, sums up most of what he has to offer - titillating lyrics, simple, formula melodies, derivative zooming guitars and percussive rhythms so basic they verge on the moronic."

Ouch, show me on the doll where the bad man touched you while making you listen to this one.

The other way of looking at this is that while "Hot Child in the City" was the big song on the album, it's indicative of what you can expect from the rest of the songs on the record. Zooming guitars and percussive rhythms that pay homage to the golden era of glam while looking forward at the same time. There's nothing overly complicated here, just good old rock and roll.

This is really an enjoyable album all the way through, and while not necessarily moronic, the songs are honestly largely forgettable aside from the one song where it all came together. Which may also be due to familiarity and a few decades of nostalgia ... so hearing the "new" songs a few times will hardly have the same impact as a song that I've known since I was a teenager.

So I can forgive a bit of object permanence with respect to how well the songs stick with me after hearing them. While this is playing all I can think about is how much fun these songs are. Isn't that enough?

Yes, yes it is.

When I think of City Nights my impression is, "What a great album."

What more do you want?

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 , ...

David Baerwald - Bedtime Stories

The little sticker on the shrinkwrap says, "You may remember David Baerwald from David & David's Boomtown ..." You bet, I remembered David Baerwald. Back in 1986 Boomtown was an album with moments of sheer brilliance. The whole album may not have been as top shelf as the first few tracks, but that didn't matter - it is an excellent album. I waited for a follow-up ... and waited, and then in 1990 it was a solo David, David Baerwald, who dropped Bedtime Stories . I snapped it up. "All For You," the opening cut, is still my favourite song on the album. It was mesmerizing. I'm not sure if the song got any airplay, it may have, but that may have been wishful thinking on my part as it was on a lot of mix tapes at the time and I heard it a lot in the car. The CD had a great booklet with all of the musician credits and lyrics. Oddly, when I found a sealed copy of the record (a great score), it just had a plain paper insert - the picture of David walking wit...

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 continued 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 b...

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