Tag: Retro

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Vinyl

Vinyl love: The Box “The best of The Box”

(Vinyl Love is a series of posts that quite simply lists, describes, and displays the pieces in my growing vinyl collection. You can bet that each record was given a spin during the drafting of each corresponding post.)

Artist: The Box
Album Title: The best of The Box
Year released: 2024
Details: RSD2024 release, 2 x LP, fluorescent orange & fluorescent green, foil cover, gatefold sleeve

The skinny: I’ve been participating in Record Store Day festivities for more than a decade but with the diminishing amount of exclusive releases to catch my interest, it’s been a number of years since I’ve actually ventured out early enough to get stuck in lines and get involved in the crush and the rush of the crash and grab. This year, though, there were a few on my wishlist and I ventured out before the clock even reached ten. I got coffee and queued up for hours outside and inside a couple of my local shops and in the end, found three of the four that I had my eye on*. One of these was a Canadian RSD release of a new compilation called “The best of The Box”. I wrote recently how I realized that I was a fan of The Box (without even knowing it) when I posted about their single “L’affaire Dumoutier (Say to me)” for my Eighties Best 100 Redux. Listening to this vinyl the other night only reinforced for me how underrated and how talented the Canadian new wave band was at writing an ear worm that stuck with you throughout the decades. This release is pressed to two discs in fluorescent colours (orange and green)** and comes in a foil wrapped gatefold sleeve. Definitely a successful RSD for me.

Standout track: “Ordinary people”

*I wasn’t expecting to find the fourth one here in Canada but am still on the hunt for it and closing in.

**They were an 80s band, you know.

Categories
Tunes

100 best covers: #42 Pop Will Eat Itself “Games without frontiers”

<< #43    |    #41 >>

So here’s a topsy-turvy, chicken and the egg kind of story.

I remember hearing “Games without frontiers” on AM radio as a pre-teen not really know who the artist was or what the song was about. I much later became a fan of Peter Gabriel when I picked up his “Shaking the tree” compilation on CD in the midst of my 80s retro kick in the late 1990s and there, reacquainted myself with the track. However, prior to that, in the early 1990s, I became a fan of Grebo jokesters Pop Will Eat Itself, mostly because of their relations with The Wonder Stuff and Ned’s Atomic Dustbin, bands of whom I was already a big fan. Years later, some time in the early 2000s, whilst exploring some of PWEI’s back catalogue that I had yet to consume, I came across this cover they did of “Games without frontiers” and with a bit more digging, found that it was their contribution to a fundraiser compilation supporting the peace efforts in Northern Ireland, called “Peace together”.

Peter Gabriel’s original version of the song was recorded for his self-titled third album, released in 1980. It features Kate Bush on backing vocals, plodding percussive and bass synths, a drum machine mimicking congos, whistling, and sinister guitar lines dancing along the minor key. It is oft-considered an anti-war song with a title referencing a well-known European game show and lyrics that equate politics with children games, rhyming off names of children from different cultures, all playing together.

So a good choice then for a band to cover for an album promoting peace. Pop Will Eat Itself’s cover is longer, predictably rage-filled, and rife with samples. Though its rhythm and its use of rhythm as melody is the same, the tone is indeed very different. It feels like they packaged it all up, Gabriel included, and shot it off into an apocalyptic future world similar to that found in “Tank girl”. Yeah, it’s fun in its angst.

Indeed, both versions are a gas and make you feel urbane as your happily singalong, but I think I may be siding with original in terms of preference, even as I replay the cover with the volume cranked.

Cover:

Original:

For the rest of the 100 best covers list, click here.

Categories
Tunes

Best tunes of 1993: #3 Cracker “Euro-trash girl”

<< #4   |    #2 >>

Digital music has certainly changed the way we consume our favourite songs and albums*. First, with the mp3 and illegal downloading in the late 90s and early 2000s and then, with music streaming services in the late 2000s to present. I know a great many people who have stopped buying physical music altogether and some who have been offloading their collections in order to make room for other… stuff. Indeed, I am thinking that there may be some in the younger generations who have never owned a record, a cassette tape, or a compact disc. It’s these folks that I worry may never know the joys of physical music: album artwork, liner notes, gatefold and other foldout sleeves, and of course, the hidden track.

Yes… the hidden track.

For those who may not know of what I speak, hidden tracks are songs that were typically tacked on at the end of the official track listing on records, tapes, and CDs, the song titles weren’t listed on the sleeves and sometimes on CDs, would be “hidden” on tracks far later on in the disc. I personally have enjoyed a great many of these over the years** but I do believe my all-time favourite example would be Cracker’s “Euro-trash girl”. It appeared at track 69 of 99 on the CD version of the band’s sophomore album, “Kerosene hat”, and was apparently put on there by the band unbeknownst to the record company, who wanted them to keep it for a future release.

I had gotten into Cracker with their self-titled debut album and the hilarious debut single, “Teen angst (What the world needs now)” and when I started hearing new singles “Low” and “Get off this” on alternative radio, I recognized their country-twanged alt rock right away. But when I started hearing “Euro-trash girl” on the radio, I knew had to get the new album. Of course, when I first picked up the CD in the stores and didn’t see the song listed, I was quite disappointed but I picked it up anyway. And yet the story had a happy ending, unlike our protagonist in the song.

“Yeah, I’ll search the world over
For my angel in black
Yeah, I’ll search the world over
For a Euro-trash girl”

“Euro-trash girl” is a fan favourite at live shows that was as such before it was ever put to tape, which is reportedly why it ended up as a hidden track. It starts with a gentle strum and a forlorn electric guitar and it doesn’t really kick in to a higher gear than that, even when the drums join the fray and things get louder. It’s a lackadaisical eight minutes of meandering and reminiscing, David Lowery weaving a tale, true or no, of a backpacking trip through Europe, a search for European love and the misadventures that are found instead. It plays on all of our collective schadenfreude, amusing us to the point that we don’t want it to end, singing along with our narrator as he gets robbed, arrested, shaken down by border cops, is forced to sell his ‘plasma’ after his parents refuse to wire him money. And at the end, he is still searching for his “angel in black”.

*In fact, I’ve seen more than few writers posit whether the ‘album’ has seen its day.

**“Train in vain” by The Clash, “Blue flashing light” by Travis, and “All by myself” by Green Day are just a few fine examples.

For the rest of the Best tunes of 1993 list, click here.