Cutting Crew - Broadcast

Cutting Crew were one of those bands whose career trajectory followed Newton's third law - one that has been corrupted and oversimplified to: what goes up, must come down. It's not like I'm singling Cutting Crew out for a sophomoric drubbing with cheap innuendo.

The band was in good company for all that. Heck a couple of years earlier Mr. Mister's Welcome to the Real World (1985) had a couple of absolutely huge radio singles. After all that "success" that band just disappeared. Now the difference between Mr. Mister and Cutting Crew for me is that I had the Mr. Mister album. All I knew of Cutting Crew was the big single, and it was big: "(I Just) Died in Your Arms" and to a lesser extent (because I'd forgotten about it until I listened to the record) the obligatory power ballad (not a lot of power, but a lot of ballad) "I've Been in Love Before" which was pretty good. Who knows why I didn't get the album back in the day, I mean I really liked the single (the one I knew) and this was the kind of slick polished rock with impeccable guitar playing I really enjoyed.

Well I have it now, and the album is really solid. Yeah, it's a tad generic and somewhat faceless at times, but there really aren't any duds (okay there is one, but on balance it's all good). Most of the songs were written by vocalist Nick Van Eede and guitarist Kevin Scott MacMichael. While Kevin is a particularly good player, Nick's range was fairly limited. There were some songs where he killed it, and there were others where I found myself looking at the credits to see if someone else had taken a turn in the vocal booth. Again, this probably reads a little harsher than intended.

I really did like Broadcast and the first side in particular was one solid song after another. The second side was anchored by the big hit to start things off, but I found some of the songs less memorable - they seemed to lack oomph. I don't know why I found the saxophone fills and accents on a couple of the songs so irritating. Gary Barnacle is a fantastic player ... his contributions just seemed out of place. Particularly on the atmospheric "Sahara" - one of the more artsy fartsy songs. The fretless work by Colin Farley was so tasty but the song just never seemed to coalesce into anything enjoyable (if there was a dud this was it, but I said there weren't any duds so I can't call it a dud). It's also one of the songs where Nick's voice just seemed to be a bit strained. It's probably the only song here I don't enjoy (again not a dud) and frankly I'll give it a pass because the guys were swinging for the fences.

Broadcast would be the band's big album, and while they'd release two more records on Siren / Virgin that by all accounts were pretty decent (I've heard some of the songs, and they were pretty good) the band wasn't commercially viable and they'd find themselves without a major label.

What goes up, must come down ... at least they managed to get up there, even if only for a little while.

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...

Old Enough to Forget

Search This Blog