Albert Hammond - Albert Hammond

Albert Hammond is a name I knew as a kid because I loved "I'm a Train" a song that appeared on one of the K-tel collections I had. When I recently found a copy of Dynamite I got reacquainted with Mister Hammond and it got me thinking, "Surely he did more than just the train song."

Surely (and don't call me Shirley) he did. I was actually quite surprised at how many songs of his I did know. As a solo artist he had recorded and released "It Never Rains in Southern California" in 1972, and when he found the hamster wheel life of a recording artist to be too much he turned to writing for and with others.

A few of the songs he had a hand in:

"99 Miles from L.A."
"I Don't Wanna Live Without Your Love"
"The Air That I Breathe"
"When I Need You"
"To All the Girls I've Loved Before"

It was his solo work I was interested in, and it just so happened I found a copy of his 1974 self-titled release. Apparently the version I have was the one released in South Africa, but the track listing is mostly the same with a couple of omissions depending on where you were in the world. It was all new to me so it didn't really matter, besides I thought it was kind of cool to think of the journey this record took to come to my little corner of the world.

There were no credits aside from some small print that listed A. Hammond, M. Hazelwood as the composers, and Roy Halee as the producer. I've been listening to the album for a couple of days now, and I'm a bit torn. In some ways this was a profoundly disappointing album. It was more than incredibly derivative it was downright perplexing. This was the musical equivalent of a mockbuster from The Asylum, except in this case the producer who had worked with the original artist was involved in the creation of the off kilter copy.

The album starts off very strong with "Half a Million Miles from Home" and I'm thinking, "This is good." It's very much in the same vein as "It Never Rains in Southern California" but that's okay. However the album's next track, "I Don't Wanna Die in an Air Disaster" lyrically, was pretty fun but the music was lifted from Simon & Garfunkel's Bridge Over Troubled Water. Part of the fun was trying to pick out which songs were being interpolated. As much fun as that was, even more brazen on "Dime Queen of Nevada" when Albert under the watchful eye of Roy Halee reworked Paul Simon's "Mother and Child Reunion."

At this point it started to be less enjoyable. Which was a shame as there are some wonderful moments here, and it's not like Albert couldn't write a song in his own voice. So why work so hard to channel early '70s Paul Simon? Why would Roy Halee work so hard to realize such a vision? The songs in and of themselves are quite enjoyable. As you'd expect they sound great too with Roy likely engineering as well. If you put aside the source material this borders on really good at times, except it's so blatant and in your face it sucks the life out of the songs.

I still love "I'm a Train" and there are a few other really nice songs I really enjoyed, but I suspect the album won't spend a lot of time on the turntable when I put it away.

Having said that, I'm still curious about his earlier work and am looking for the two albums that preceded this one. I am if nothing else, a sucker.

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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