Skip to main content

Opus - Up and Down

Opus - Up and Down
I snatched this up when I found it. Up and Down was released in '84 the same year "Live is Life" was a worldwide hit. Polydor repackaged the album, dropped a couple of songs from the European release and tacked on "Live is Life" which for those of us over here was a pretty good idea. I also suspect they subbed out the studio version of "Flyin' High" as well. Despite their success much of the band's catalogue was never released in North America, and even now the band has a surprisingly small digital footprint on the streaming platforms.

The album is really good, and the title track "Up and Down" that opens the album is really strong with Herwig's soaring vocals and Ewald's tasty fretwork. The whole album is full of pleasant soft rock with hints of AOR and some progressive overtones. Knowing there are songs out there that were left off it makes me wonder what they were like. The nine songs here, seven studio tracks and two live songs from their '84 live album are so good. "Live is Life" is still infectious, but it's also out of place here, as is the closing track "Flyin' High" which is something I didn't expect.

insert
The studio tracks were cohesive and needed to flow together. When the live tracks hit at end of each side it's like a postscript. Whoever worked out the new song order was smart enough to not interrupt the flow of the album by inserting the live songs in the middle somewhere. I'm glad they're on the album and this is where they needed to be.

The band:

  • Herwig Rudisser - lead vocals, piano, guitar
  • Ewald Pfleger - guitar, vocals
  • Niki Gruber - bass vocals
  • Kurt Rene Plisnier - keyboards, computers, vocals
  • Gunter Grasmuck - drums, percussion, beat-programming

Admittedly this may not be everyone's cup of tea. It may be a tad generic sounding (at least now with all that came after, one can forget who came first) and Herwig's voice can evoke a bit too much of '70s era Jon Anderson (not really, but I can hear it sometimes) and if you find Jon's voice annoying this will just drive you nuts. 

back cover
I love this kind of stuff, cheese and all. It's actually a little surprising how much I like this. It's really polished but has a little quirkiness to some of the arrangements that keeps things fresh. Opus had their one big moment, and then seemed to disappear but for those who wondered if the band had more to offer the answer is a resounding yes.

You can't stream this one, but you can look for it and it'll be worth the effort.

 

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Billy Rankin - Growin' Up Too Fast

Growin' Up Too Fast was never widely released on CD (if at all), and 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 that had a bonus track of " Get It On (Bang A Gong)" that when I bought the album 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. However, at the time all I knew was this guy laid it out cold with the first cut "Baby Come Back" and proceeded to lay down one killer tune after another and closed out the album (sans any...
Post a Comment
Read more

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, 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 , "Don...
Post a Comment
Read more

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 continues 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 beg...
Post a Comment
Read more