Am I a bad person for liking the Mentors?  That may very well be a fair, debatable question.

Just so we're up to speed, the Mentors are an extremely vulgar and sexist metal band.  Yes, I say "are", because they still exist.  They first came to moderate prominence in the mid-80s, when speed metal lived in the underground and hair metal dominated radio and video airwaves.  They attracted the attention of some rather influential people when one of their songs was quoted during the PMRC hearings.  Man, the band members must have seriously loved that.  If you're roughly my age or older, you know all about the PMRC.  That was Tipper Gore's outfit.  They are at least somewhat responsible for the "Parental Advisory" stickers you see on CD cases even today.  She became a whipping girl for musicians for years after that.  Of course, many of them would go on to practically jump out of their shoes to try to make her our First Lady, but that's beside the point...

Anyway, what it boils down to is this - when you take away the controversy and the vile subject matter, you still have a band that rocks pretty hard.  Sure they didn't have Van Halen's talent or the production budgets of the Ratt Poisons or the Motleyrellas of the world.  They're just a lot of fun to listen to.  So, here is "Four F Club" (I'll let you discover what the F's mean) from 1985's You Axed For It.  This was when the late El Duce (who was hit by a train and killed in 1997) was still their drummer and lead singer.  I just get a huge kick out of hearing him "sing."  He amuses me greatly.

Hear "Four F Club" on YouTube.

Wikipedia article on the Mentors.  If you go from there to El Duce's Wiki, check out the YouTube segment of one of the band's appearances on the Wally George show Hot Seat.  It's a howl.  Wally George was an overly moralistic version of Jerry Springer (and the father of Rebecca De Mornay), so you can imagine what went down when the Mentors appeared there.

Days of the New has been largely written off as a Creed clone.  They may very well be one.  Certainly their most well known song, "Touch, Peel and Stand", positively reeks of Creed.  Bands that parlayed this whole style, with the wall of heavy guitars and psycho-tenor singing voices, were hardly rare in the 90s.

And their name is just so incredibly lame.  "Days of the New."  Blecch.  I don't like typing it or even thinking it.

However, "The Down Town" is still a huge fave.  Here's a tune I've wanted to post for a looooong time.  But the studio recording just wasn't to be found.  YouTube has several live renditions, not to mention a whole bunch of anonymous wankers trying to play it on their guitars.  Hey, geniuses, it's not like this song is all that hard.  You know that E-based barre chord?  Which was probably the first thing you ever learned?  Yeah, leave the top two strings open while you're playing those.  Voila.  You are now playing the bulk of "The Down Town."  Color me unimpressed.

(You know, at some point one of these YouTube wanna-bes is going to find my site, hear my recorded cover tunes and tell me I suck and that I'm fulla crap.  Hey, at least I'll get some actual traffic that day...)

In any case, where was I?  Oh yeah, couldn't find this song anywhere online.  Enter a little website called thesixtyone.  The band has a page there, and "The Down Town" is on it.  Search over!  Here it is!  It may be somewhat derivative, but it just has such a great sound and I appreciate the understated arrangement.  This just wouldn't work as well if it was another Creed-y barrage of massively overdubbed electric guitars.

Screw it.  I'm gonna record myself playing this on a ukulele and upload it to YouTube.

Hear "The Down Town" on thesixtyone.  What a douchey band pic.  Eh, whaddya gonna do?

I love this track.  And on a lazy Sunday afternoon in January of '08, I gave it a really half-assed entry.  Hell, it was barely a quarter-assed entry.

Here's a prime example of how repetition can work in a song, although I'll admit I'm not sure how to really explain why it works.  You could just say "well, if you LIKE what's being repeated, then it's OK", but it's a little more complicated than that.  I guess you just have to make sure your repetitive patterns serve as the foundation for a song and be careful not to have them become the song.  Or, you simply have to have other crap going on during the repeated parts.  You can boogie down to the same rAwKinZezZes 4- to 8-bar groove for short while, but the song had better evolve past that at some point or it will cease to be interesting quite quickly.

You see that often amongst amateur musicians, and particularly at websites like Songfight.  There have been numerous instances of song submissions there that drew criticism for being overly redundant, usually with lines like "it doesn't go anywhere."  Sometimes that comes from "songwriter" types who are merely bitching about the song not fitting some pre-conceived format.  But usually, they're right on the money.  They truly don't go anywhere.

Here, that whole 8-bar keyboard/guitar line is almost totally consistent throughout.  But things come and go. Sounds samples appear out of nowhere.  The canned drums cut out, then come back in again.  The chorus itself is relatively short, and not repeated incessantly (ugh, excessive chorus repetitions are brutal).  There's enough going on here to not make you hit that little "next" arrow after about a minute and a half.

Actually, I think I just like what's being repeated, so it's OK.  Forget I said anything.

The original YouTube vid got yanked (shock!), but here's another.

Watch a live performance.

Wikipedia entry

This is part of a week-long series on songs I am revisiting.

This song, more than any other, began my fascination with Cake.  When I posted it during my lunch hour (as usual) in April of last year, well, who the hell knows.  Maybe I had a really good catered lunch.  Maybe I was busy playing some intense Scrabble games.  (Scrabble? Intense? Oh, you bet)  Maybe I was - gasp! - doing job-related things.  In any event, that post was pretty much worthless. I like this song way too much for that.

This group has always been a bit of an enigma for me because way more often than not I reject these types of indie-darling bands.  I usually find them incredibly dull, mostly because there is so little going on musically.  They're so concerned with the "songwriting" (ugh, you know, I'm looking upon that word in a negative context more and more as time passes) aspect, concentrating so heavily on the "catchy tunes" and "hummable melodies" and locking themselves into such formulaic templates that band arrangements suffer almost to the point of non-existence.

Famous "indie" band:  "Be-ver-ly Hills (plod plod plod plod) Thaaat's where I wa-nna be (plod plod plod plod)"
Me: (zzzzzzzzzz)

Look, I don't mean to come down on people who like that stuff.  I can only speak for myself.  I just don't deal in "catchy."  I don't think that's necessarily a good thing.  Sure, making a song that burrows into people's brains like the Ceti Eels in Star Trek is an enviable skill to have.  It can make you wealthy.  But ultimately I still have to actually like what's being "caught."  And getting a song you hate stuck in your head just sucks.  "Life is a Highway" is incredibly "catchy."  And I can't stand that piece of crap.

Cake is infectious as all get out.  There's a tangible, visceral quality to what they do.  They can move.  They can groove.  They can breathe.  There's no "hey look at me I'm so INDIE" thing going on.

And I would never call them "catchy."

Whaddya know, the fanvid for "Sheep Go to Heaven" is still on YouTube.  God be praised!

This is part of a week-long series on songs I am revisiting.

On 11/11/07, I posted the XTC track "Dear God."  It was the day Andy Partridge turned 54.  Even though the Skylarking album was a letdown, I've always liked this track.  It should have received more than yet another half-assed Sunday entry.  See, this is one reason I cut back on Sunday entries.

With it's religious context, posting it on a Sunday may have been appropriate.  Or perhaps not, due to its religion-critical stance.  It spawned a bit of controversy when it was released, as some music stores refused to stock it for fear of backlash from religious groups.  Actually, after some albeit brief research, I have yet to come across any examples of pro-theistic rebuttals to this song.  There may well have been, but I can't help but wonder if a lot of the "controversy" was simply manufactured.

Personally, my biggest beef with the song isn't theological, but simply grammatical - namely, the line "us crazy humans wrote it, you should take a look."  Apparently, even literate songwriter types seem to have trouble understanding that INTERJECTING THE NOUN DOES NOT CHANGE THE PRONOUN!!!  How would you say that line if you left out "crazy humans"?  Exactly.  You would simply say "we wrote it."  When you add the noun, the pronoun does not change.  You say "we crazy humans wrote it."  Geez, why not go the full nine and say "for all intensive purposes" while you're at it?

Although, I will also say that "believe in that chunky stew" is a pretty funny mondegreen.

Through some miracle, the music video is still on YouTube.  This is the exact same link I posted before.  If this hasn't been pulled, there must truly be a God.  I guess these things can happen when you're not signed to Warner.

Wiki linky

This is part of a week-long series on songs I am revisiting.

Possibly my most beloved stereotypical "classic rock" song from the 70s got a pretty haphazard entry from me in October of '07.  Man, that was some weak sheet.  I think I love this song more even than any Zeppelin track.

That may have been the entry that got the whole recurring "classic rock radio" topic going.  As I've said over and over again, I don't listen to classic rock radio.  When I first heard "Carry On Wayward Son" (note:  the word "my" DOES NOT EXIST IN THE TITLE), there was no such thing as classic rock radio.  Hell, the term itself didn't exist.  Back then when you played tunes on the radio that were 30+ years old, they called them "oldies."  Now I guess the term "oldies" is for 40-50 year old stuff, "classic rock" is roughly 20-35, less than 20 gets you a "classic alternative"... wait, they call stuff from the 80s "classic alternative."  What DO they call 15-20 year old stuff they used to call "alternative"?  Like it was ever "alternative".  Tens of millions of copies of that stuff was sold and they called it "alternative."  Alternative to what?  Buying things that DON'T sell?  I mean, come on... wait, where was I going?  Where the hell am I now?  My head hurts.  I need a cookie.

Ah hell, all that buzzword nonsense means nothing to me anyway.  The gist of it is - "Carry On Wayward Son" is an amazing song, no matter what decade it was written in.

Hear "Carry On Wayward Son" on YouTube.  It's probably best to avoid the laughable fire-breathing religious discussion on the comment thread, because as we all know, YouTube commentators are masters of thoughtful, rational socio-political discourse.

Oh, yesterday I got a hit from a Google search on "youtube nurses giving enemas giving getting."  I LOVE my audience!

This is part of a week-long series on songs I am revisiting.

Man, I didn't say squat about this one when it went up before.  Thomas Dolby does a funkalicious rendition of a George Clinton composition and I give it two measly little sentences?  I should be whipped with the proverbial wet noodle.

Aliens Ate My Buick (1988) is just so terrific.  I adore it.  It didn't sell that well, and reviews were mixed.  Which, of course, has SO COMPLETELY AND UTTERLY PREVENTED ME FROM ENJOYING GREAT ALBUMS IN THE PAST, as you all know full well.  I had originally intended to post "Hot Sauce" during one of my cover weeks, thinking that this was a send-up of a previously released George Clinton track.  Now, my details on this are spotty at best, but I guess Clinton and Dolby had worked together before this album in some context and George had written this song for Thomas, who then recorded it for this release later on.  So, I guess it wasn't an actual cover after all.  But when I did get around to posting it, it was a throwaway entry.  That oversight is being corrected today.

Of course, when this song did go up before, I had not yet constructed my LATFAP Seal of Approval.  Voy-lah!



Hear "Hot Sauce" on Last.fm.

The video is still on YouTube, but somehow I reckon I may not be so lucky later on.

This is part of a week-long series on songs I am revisiting.

I had only been doing this thing for a month, but I guess I had already established my pattern of brief Sunday submissions when I first posted the After the Fire hit "Der Kommissar."  That was lame.  This is one of my absolute favorite tracks from the 80s.  It deserved better.

This tune was, of course, originally performed and co-written by Austrian singer Falco.  Yep, the guy who also did "Rock Me Amadeus."  I f**king HATE "Rock Me Amadeus."  If I ever do another week of songs I can't stand, that'll be a prime candidate.  Seriously, that's one of those songs I can't hear for more than about three seconds.  His 1981 version of "Kommissar", well, I don't harbor quite the vitriol for that one.  Still, I find it to be plodding, sterile and dull.

Enter Britain's After the Fire, who wrote new English lyrics, fattened it up with some rockingly organic backing tracks and released a kickass cover version in 1982.  I loved it then and still do.  It's just one of those songs that doesn't seem to get old.  It's generally considered some worn-out 80s staple, but it's more than that.

Get this - my Dad even liked it.  He was playing a radio somewhere, then came up to me and said "Have you ever heard 'Don't Turn Around'?"  Huh?  Oh, I get it.  I told him what it was really called and he said "That's a neat song."  He was right.

Watch the video for "Der Kommissar" on YouTube.

Hear an extended version.

Wikipedia article

This is part of a week-long series on songs I am revisiting.

Going back through this blog's storied (ha!) history, I noticed that some of my favorite tunes ever were given short shrift.  Shafted.  Glossed over.  Hosed.  Many of them were quickly prepared Sunday entries and some were made on other days when I just didn't feel like writing much.  So, this week we are revisiting much of the awesome tunage that didn't get its proper due the first go-around.