Pussy Galore - Exile on Main St

Partially a sneering repsonse to Sonic Youth's continual threat to cover the Beatles' White Album and partially a genuine love letter to the original from Pussy Galore guitarist Neil Hagarty, Exile on Main St is a nasty, profanity-filled screaming match recorded on a shitty boombox and released on limited cassette (and eventually vinyl), a squealing, out-of-tune hate fuck for your tender ear-holes. 

Turd on the Run

Orion - Country

Jimmy Ellis was an obscure rockabilly singer who was blessed and cursed with a singing voice eerily similar to that of Elvis Presley.  After Presley's death he assumed the identity of Orion, mysterious masked country singer, who bore an uncanny resemblance to a certain supposedly dead singer, wink wink nudge nudge.  As gimmicks go, it a weird one - for one thing, Ellis really does sound almost indistinguishable from Presley, and the production closely matches the slick proficiency of Elvis's seventies output.  But on the other side, Ellis received a slice of the wildness that was Presley's later years - not to mention legions of crazed fans' misplaced obsession.  He soon abandoned the persona altogether and took to touring and recording under his own name, unsuccessfully, before retiring to open a convenience store in Alabama, where he was tragically gunned down in a botched robbery.  It's a weird music business story for the ages, sad and ludicrous and, not surprisingly, the source of some good goddamn country music.

Crazy Arms

Max Frost and The Troopers - Shape of Things to Come

Max Frost and The Troopers were the fictional rock band from the early psychsploitation picture "Wild in the Streets."  There is some mystery regarding exactly who play on this album, as the members were credited to match characters in the movie, but it is widely believed to be the work of pioneering psych/surf band Davie Allan and the Arrows with lyrics and vocals provided by Paul Wibier (of biker movie soundtrack fame).  The title cut will be instantly recognizable to fans of the Nuggets series, and the other songs generally follow that formula: three minute snatches of psychedelia-infused garage pop with soaring harmonies and concise structure.  There's actually quite a bit of variation among the songs, though - one can feel Wibier playing around with various styles and ideas, perhaps assuming that the album was more of a novelty than a genuine artistic endeavor.  This seems to be his approach in general, now that I think about it, but it's not without merit: sometimes studio musicians and professional songwriters, liberated from the need to write actual hits, can come up with some soulful, mind-expanding stuff.  

Let your mind run free

The Vindictives - Leave Home

Sure, there's lots of knock-off Ramones bands, Ramones cover bands, and bands who cover Ramones songs, but how many people just up and cover a whole album front to back?  Chicago's legendarily neurotic Vindictives do this, and maintain a level of spontaneity and pranksterism that elevates it to the level of Dada Not Doodoo.

You should have never opened that door...

Fearless Vampire Killers - Target

Another knock-off band on the turntable tonight - this time it's the Japanese Bad Brains, Fearless Vampire Killers. Not quite up to the standard of their inspiration, especially in the vocal department, this is nonetheless a raging buzzsaw of hyperactive punk fast enough to sand the zits off your face.
All you offend to my eyes

The Ventures - Super Psychedelics

Well, here at the exhausted end of a long day I find myself with little to say. Let's wind down a bit with this killer psych-sploitation platter from the might Ventures. A few killer fuzzed-out originals mixed with a few hippie-dippie covers, this cheap cash-in is an under-appreciated gem from deep within the Ventures catalog, reviled by snobs but beloved by you humble host.
1999 A.D.

Hanson Brothers - My Game

Although I haven't explored it much on this blog as yet, one of my keenest interests is in musical fakery - the hoaxes, hucksters, rip-off artists, satirists, plagiarists, and wannabes lurking just at the fringes of the industry. There's tons of Ramones-clones clogging up the discount bins with subnormal pop punk records about girls and beer and various things they either wanna or don't wanna do. Hanson Brothers exist somewhere in this continuum, but simultaneously on a whole other Kaufmanesque level too. As the retarded flipside of Canadian spazzy jazz-punk wizards NoMeansNo, they still sing about girls and beer (and hockey) but there's also a strain of fierce technical prowess and bristling intelligence lurking beneath the three-chords-and-two-verses formula that belies their origin. They embrace the haiku-like Ramones recipe as a framework, not as a finished product.
Still, this doesn't come off as some snooty hipster slumming. Make no mistake, this is 100% sincere. This is their third album, a punchy return to form after the somewhat underwhelming Sudden Death and also a bold slapshot to the rules. The classic first LP Gross Misconduct is dissected at length here. Just because it's funny doesn't mean it's a joke.
Honey I'm Home

Los Punk Rockers

I don't know for sure, but this album seems to have the slimy fingerprints of schlock-meister El Chalpin all over it. Basically what we have is a complete re-recording of the Sex Pistols' Never Mind the Bullocks in bizarre Spanglish by a band of anonymous studio hacks. Chalpin, you may remember, was responsible for the vast ocean of posthumous Hendrix bootlegs as well as the notorious Thin Lizzy "Funky Junction" album and that psychedelic Chubby Checker record I posted a while back, among other things.

These recordings have an off-the-cuff, manic quality not present in the original album, likely due equally to the one-day recording turnover and the singer's shaky grasp of English and loose approximations of the chord progressions, which often sound like the work of some arty post-punk band. When paired with the tinny, trebly recording and hilariously misheard lyrics, we have an instant cult classic and proof that sometimes greed and cynicism can still produce great things, albeit inadvertently.
No Future in England's Greenland