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 , ...

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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