workoutwednesday

It’s hurrah for the life of a country boy, and me ramblin’ in the new-mown hay! This week’s a good one for the elliptical cross-trainer; the missus likes it for an easy run.

148 bpm 3: Town and Country

Hokkai-Bayashi (Hokkaido Rhythm) – Nihon Daiko Medicine Bow (version) – The Waterboys Nightjoy – Kubichek! Ohio – Devo Cattle & Cane – The Go-Betweens Lovers In A Dangerous Time – Bruce Cockburn Lost In The Supermarket – The Clash Pilots Of Beka – Cactus World News Where Were You Hiding When The Storm Broke? – The Alarm So. Central Rain (I’m Sorry) – R.E.M. Home – Iggy Pop (cooldown) Love’s Lost Guarantee – Rogue Wave

Notes:

Without getting too New Age-y about it, there’s something really intense about ritual drumming. It’s exciting—it gets your blood going—but it’s grounded, too; every musical gesture is enjoined by centuries of repetition and tradition. As explosive as it is, there’s nothing spontaneous happening here. This has all happened many times before, and it will happen many times again. And there’s a certain comfort in listening to the taiko while you’re at the gym; as hard as you’re working at exercise, you know the guys playing the big drums are working even harder.

I vacillate on the question of a favorite Waterboys record, with This Is The Sea and Fisherman’s Blues regularly flip-flopping the #1 spot. This is an alternate version of “Medicine Bow,” with a different verse and an extended break featuring the sound of a piano being dropped down a mineshaft.

I’m generally not keen on bands with punctuation marks in the name, but this Kubichek! track leaped out of the speakers when I heard it at Who Needs Radio? (I quite liked that Dega Breaks track, too, and like it still: Paul was in fine form that day. Damn, I miss Paul the Anglophile.)

I missed out on the Go-Betweens first time around—I knew Grant McLennan primarily from his work with Steve Kilbey in Jack Frost—and the last year of discovering their work has made me richer. There’s something about the tone in this—that melancholy, the way that childhood and nature and colonialism all get tied together, an invocation of the landscape, so dear to a child but not the land of his fathers; the sense of making something new, as recollected years later. It’s a quality of voice: it’s hard to pin down, but I hear it in many songs by Not Drowning, Waving (especially the lovely and heartbreaking “Willow Tree”), and in the writing of Nadine Gordimer and the young Doris Lessing, and it moves me.

For some reason, I will always associate “Lovers In A Dangerous Time” with autumn in New England, blazing skies and livid trees, every shadow sharp and clear, the air pleasantly crisp and winter more than a rumor.

I can’t really defend my lingering affection for the Alarm, I suppose (although I’ll note that my ten-year old likes ‘em, too, so it’s either genetic or universal); I will say, though, that of all their songs this one probably has the greatest profusion of quotable lines.

And Iggy… well, what with recent events, Iggy’s been a bit of an earworm round our place.

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A huge, unashamed retro-bash, this one, reeking of hair mousse and shoulder pads. Good for the intervals trainer or a gentle run. Or, you know, dancing.

148 bpm 2: Turn It Up High, Captain Vertigo – U2 Mickey – Toni Basil 88 Lines About 44 Women – The Nails China – Red Rockers UnAlone – Translator Space Age Love Song – A Flock Of Seagulls She Sells Sanctuary – The Cult Hazy Shade Of Winter – The Bangles That Demon Jive – An Emotional Fish Mr. Jones – The Psychedelic Furs Sultans Of Swing – Dire Straits (cooldown) Dream Brother – Jeff Buckley

Lots of video links this time around. It wouldn’t feel like the Eighties if we couldn’t look at the haircuts, now would it?

“Mickey” was out at about the same time as Josie Cotton’s “Johnny, Are You Queer?” and it took me forever to realize that they’re basically the exact same song, except “Mickey” is miles dirtier.

God, I love “China”—all the interlocking guitar and bass riffs, and that huge chorus. Years ago, I worked out a solo acoustic arrangement that I still bust out from time to time. Red Rockers never really got their shot. Maybe their politics made people uncomfortable; they wanted to be the American Clash, and the leap-and-bounds musical progress they made from their first rote-hardcore record to the spaghetti-western pop glory of Good As Gold makes me think they had it in them. Jim Riley, the drummer, made his bones in Stiff Little Fingers; he and Rockers bassist Darren Hill eventually went East and ended up the rhythm section for Boston also-rans the Raindogs—another band that didn’t get a fair hearing.

When people remember Translator—if they remember them at all—it’s for “Everywhere That I’m Not,” rather than for this power-pop gem, though “UnAlone” is, to my ear, a far better song, and the one that I remember getting radio play back in the day. Eh. Whaddayagonnado?.

I’m inordinately pleased with the transitions in the first half of this mix, by the way.

Flock of Seagulls: GAH! THE HAIRCUT! The Cult: Captain Jack Sparrow sings! Both: Man, that’s a lot of smoke.

Not very coherent today. Shut up and dance, I guess.

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