Baltimora - Living in the Background

You had to be living under a rock in '85 to not have heard "Tarzan Boy" on the radio, or seen the video. There was something goofy and infectious about the song, and it was certified 100% CHEESE. I'll admit it was one of those guilty pleasures I'd listen to in the car but I wouldn't have been caught dead with this in my collection.

Of course when I found the record I had to have it.

I didn't realize it was a borderline EP as the album hardly crests thirty minutes and only contains six songs. However it doesn't feel truncated or rushed. All but one song is over five minutes. "Tarzan Boy" and "Living in the Background" clock in at over six minutes and they aren't extended dance mixes, they're just longer ... but not stretched out and watered down.

The album opens with the big hit, and frankly I was expecting the album to then sink like stone after the first track, and was pleasantly surprised when the follow-up "Pull the Wires" was a pleasant '80s styled ballad. Oh it was as generic as a processed cheese slice, but it was better than I expected.

The title track closes out side one and was another solid track. This was way better than I expected. I really just bought the album to get the one kitschy cut, and the fact that everything was better than expected was a bonus.

Flipping over, "Woody Boogie" opens the festivities and it's so corny it makes me wonder how good Naimy Hackett's English was, or if he just had an old travel dictionary to translate stuff from Italian. Oh, Naimy was the lyricist and Maurizio Bassi was the composer and producer. I suspect he was an Italian version of Frank Farian, the German producer responsible for Boney M. and Milli Vanilli as well as the overlooked Far Corporation.

"Chinese Restaurant" is the musical kissing cousin to "Tarzan Boy" but it's still fun. Probably the biggest surprise was the album's closer, "Running for Your Love," a mid tempo rock song with a techno backbone. It's probably my favourite "new" song from the album. Oh it's a cookie cutter song but I really like it. It does veer a bit into extended dance track drumbeat territory but it centres itself pretty quickly.

The album may be short, but the songs aren't and while it's over before you know it, you don't necessarily feel cheated. At least I didn't. It was fun and enjoyable. Sort of what you want when you're listening to what is essentially a dance oriented album.

Reading up on Baltimora reveals a weird story. The wiki literally opens with "Jimmy McShane supposedly performed the lead vocals, although there is some controversy surrounding who the actual singer is." Cool, it was like Boney M. So for those keeping score, or trying to follow the thread, Jimmy McShane is the guy featured on the cover and is the guy who appears in the video. However on the album jacket there are no credits that specify who actually sang the songs. Which seems like a deliberate oversight as there are a lot of musician credits on the back cover. The bold print in the bottom right corner practically shouts: ARRANGED & PRODUCED BY MAURIZIO BASSI ... and yes it was in capital letters. So you get a sense of the pecking order. Poor Jimmy.

Regardless, the album was a pleasant surprise.

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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