Then Jerico - First (The Sound of Music)

Another one of those, "I wonder what this sounds like" albums I found in a bin. It was still shrink-wrapped, which is always fun. The cover didn't yield a release date, but this looked mid-'80s and the guys looked like they were going to sound like ABC or Depeche Mode ... or worst case Duran Duran, or worster case, they'd be a boy band.

You know what they say about judging a book by its cover.

Well, in this case I got more or less what I was hoping for. From the opening notes of "Let Her Fall" this was that dreamy blend of rock and synth-pop. It had a lot of guitars, and there were times I got hints of INXS and Simple Minds ... of course I could have easily said it sounded like a-ha and Pseudo Echo and I'd still be right. First (The Sound of Music) was the band's debut, and it came out in '87. By this time the '80s had developed a sound and Then Jerico knew what they were doing.

Now, as much as I'd like to write a love letter to the band about how I missed out and all that, I have to be honest and say that while I enjoyed this ... I mean, seriously, I really enjoyed this, it was just yet another album full of solid songs that came and went without making a lasting impact.

This is generally what happens when I'm a few decades late to the party, and although this was a genuinely pleasant surprise, I just won't have the luxury of being able to spend enough time to have this sink in, truly sink in. So I'm left sitting here listening to an album that I like, that I'll know I'll forget, but if I think about the band I'll think good things but won't remember any of the tunes.

I'll likely pull it out and put it on and it'll feel like a new experience, and most likely I'll think to myself, "Man this is really good, I wonder why they never took off over here." I'll play it a couple of times and then put it away.

Now, after all that you'd think this was a generic turd ... but it's not. This period of the '80s was chock full of good bands all vying for a little slice of the pie. The problem with good is that it isn't great. There were moments throughout First (The Sound of Music) that flirted with being great, but for me just couldn't quite get there, but man they got close more often than not.

Still, to be fair, in England, where the band was from, this album would yield three singles that crack the top 100, and one, "The Motive," that broke into the top 20 (is a really good song). So while it may not have done much here in Canada, the band made some inroads at home.

It would be their follow-up, The Big Area, that did even better, but like their debut, it didn't make a blip on the radar over here ... that said, it is on mine. I may have been damning the band throughout this entry with faint praise, but like I said, I got what I was hoping for, and I really do like this era of pop.

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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