Idle Cure - Idle Cure

This was new to me. I had heard about them from my buddy Dave back in the day, but never actually heard them. Dave was pretty dialed into what was happening in Christian music and generally had decent taste. By '86 my interest in a lot (not all) of CCM (for the unwashed in the secular world that stands for Contemporary Christian Music) because most of what I was hearing was inferior. I know Larry Norman asked, "Why should the devil have all the good music." He wasn't entirely right, but he was close enough to bury a good chunk of what passed for music being sold in Christian Bookstores.

One of the hallmarks of being a Christian artist was trying to copy what was popular in "secular" music. The problem was there was a lag of about five or more years. Of course I'm generalizing, there were a handful of bands that were just plain good, but for me most of what I heard was borderline awful.

Around this time some smaller rock oriented labels started to pop up. Frontline was one of them and the acts they were signing were actually contemporary. The problem was for them to be marketed to the bookstores and youth pastors the music had to fit on one of those "sounds like" grids so the kids could listen to Christian bands who sounded sort of like what regular kids were listening to and not feel left out.

So where did Idle Cure get slotted? I have no idea, I'd never heard them until now. I have to admit were a really solid contemporary rock band. They were sort in the hair metal lane, but were more Journey than Def Leppard. Well, actually more Mr. Mister than Journey but they can be easily slotted in with the "arena" rock bands of the day. Actually they weren't hair metal or glam at all ... they were a rock and roll band ... which I already said so I'm just repeating myself now.

Despite me making fun of the soundalike grid mentality, I have to admit the first time listened to this I was playing the "match the song to a band" and quickly realized I was doing Idle Cure a disservice. There were countless bands out there who were mining the same musical vein and frankly music falls into one of two categories.

Good
Bad

Pretty simple, and who doesn't like simple?

Idle Cure was good. In fact I'd go so far as to say they were right in the mix with their contemporaries in the real world. I'm guessing the album was recorded on a modest budget, Lord knows they didn't put any money into the cover art, but man producer and engineer Bill Baumgart made the guys sound like a million bucks without having to spend a million bucks.

It's hardly fair to think of Idle Cure as a poor facsimile of those "real" bands who were trudging away in the secular world. Bands who sounded like a a lot of other who were mining the same genre. Some of those bands were awesome, and some weren't. Again it's pretty simple: good / bad. To that end I'll take Idle Cure at face value - these guys were good.

Billy Rankin - Growin' Up Too Fast

Growin' Up Too Fast was never widely released on CD (if at all), and 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 that had a bonus track of " Get It On (Bang A Gong)" that when I bought the album 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. However, at the time all I knew was this guy laid it out cold with the first cut "Baby Come Back" and proceeded to lay down one killer tune after another and closed out the album (sans any...

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, 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 , "Don...

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...

Old Enough to Forget

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