With my birthday over the summer, I went loony on my Amazon wish list and loaded up on this and that - including much that has been sitting on my shopping list for many years.

I have now sat with this music long enough to pontificate, and that I shall - especially since much of it has undergone extensive road testing. Moreover, the fall is shaping up big with stuff just out or coming (some I get to here, some I don't, like the awesome new Killing Joke stuff, particularly the song In Excelsis, though the video is a lil' harsh on the eyes and NSFW for many.) I gotta get some of these discs done because the change of seasons promises to be busy on the ears.

In any event, on with the show:

Wall Of Voodoo - Call Of The West: It is a bit random for me to finally get around to buying this. I like Stan Ridgway, and always liked Mexican Radio, but there never was much reason to have this album since I also had a copy of their cover of Ring Of Fire (which remains an outstanding cover of a song easy to screw up.) Then I finally got to see the film Urgh! A Music War, which is really most excellent across the board, and was riveted by Wall Of Voodoo's contribution Back In The Flesh. That is a highlight of the studio album too as it turns out. This album sounds exactly like what music to me sounded like in the 80s. That DOES NOT MEAN IT IS DATED. In fact, it makes me remember just how fresh and frightening the post-punk stuff could sound. There was an end-of-the-world-so-wtf? vibe about the best of the post-punk/new wave stuff, and the idea of machines taking over music could seem either very liberating and democratic or alternately like humans were making themselves obsolete and it would only be a matter of time before we are all raised by robots incapable of loving us back! I won't go so far as to claim this is an important album. As scary as it can sound, it is actually kinda small and bedroom too. The songs are there. Stanard Ridgway is a fiction writer, not a lyricist, and that won't always translate for everyone, but I love him for it. In short, I like this, but I am biased and I am not sure anyone else will. Do with that what you want. (B-)

Franz Ferdinand - Tonight: I totally loved the dub version of this album - which was called Blood. Given my tastes, that was the album I bought first, and only this summer did I get the original, main album. I am aware that I suck for saying this, but I MUCH prefer the dub version to this, the "normal" version. The songs aren't so different, but the lyrics add
little for me, and the beat is where this band has always best operated, and it is closest to the hips in the dubs (not dub like Jamaican, dub like Blondie Dance Mixes.) Either you like them or you don't. If you love dub, the other version isn't a great dub album, it is a good dance/pop album. So is this, but this is more the pop than the dance, and for that, it is just sorta 'meh - ok' compared to the other version. (C+)

Fabulous Diamonds - II: Now, I shouldn't be giving dub lessons to anyone, but if you'd like to hear a more faithful cracker rendering of dub, here is a group to seek out. I love the big cavernous sound, the smoked out echo-chamber veneer, and the way that feel is the basis for their stuff. This isn't songcraft, it is sound. I really liked their first album, and this follow-up is more than a worthy successor. The cuts are a little longer than their first one, but the feel is consistent and they clearly are working from the same idea hopper. If they make another one of these, I might not be so up on it, but as it stands, it works end-to-end, and better yet, it works end-to-end after the first one - also good start to finish. (B-)

Iggy Pop - Preliminaries: I have been trying to give Iggy Pop the benefit of the doubt, which one would have to when buying his "jazz" album. It really isn't exceptionally jazzy - it really more references the sort of cliche old-timey stuff, which actually, I am quite prepared to tolerate if there are other reasons to. Lucky for me, this contains other reasons. Iggy Pop himself can be reason enough, and in a sort of left-field way, I find myself liking this album because of the songs about dogs. A Machine For Loving is just one of them, and while not pleasant in subject matter (admiration of a dog who struggled in death), there is something wise and life affirming in it. Will I be rocking out to it everyday? No. Same with the album. However, I do see much from this album making it to an Iggy Pop mix disc or playlist, which at this point, is all I can ask of any album. (C+)

Jah Wobble - Solaris: This is exactly the kind of album I buy with birthday money. I would say there are half a dozen Jah Wobble songs I go out of my way to listen to often and loudly. Those songs are spread out over 6 or 7 albums I have bought of his, none of which I find myself listening to end to end. It is one of those things, what I like from him, I love; what I don't dig, I ignore - and it is the latter bunch which is more numerous. My desire for this is the presence of Harold Budd, who I came to like because of his album with Cocteau Twins and I like the ambient stuff with Brian Eno. His stuff can be a bit ponderous on occasion, and too light for my ears. My hope was that LordGodRubberBassline would keep proceedings interesting, and by and large, he does. These cuts aren't really heavy on song craft - they are heavy on sound and feel and atmosphere, which is what I expected. Thankfully, they are also heavy on the bass. This is really gonna work more as background music than jammy-jam sorta stuff, but the bass is the key. No one can do with those four strings what Jah Wobble does. Having the keys and Harold Budd steers the sound a certain way, one I normally wouldn't go for, but with the bass underpinning, it works. Not a place to start with either of those dudes, but one you might work your way towards in time. (C+)

Blancmage - Happy Families: The #1 influence on my musical taste was my mother. The #2 influence was the student radio station of Triton College (River Grove, IL methinks - west Cook County anyway) during the first years of the 80s. They were pretty much all post-punk/new wave all the time. It was my first venture into music made by bands not trying to become super popular. That blew my mind. The music sounded weird, the musicians seemed so too. In hindsight, that music really isn't weird, and one can find where its origins lay. At the time, that was much harder for me - especially as a 12 year old. One of the things that almost always carried weirdness-significance were the early synthesizer bands. To have a band not using "real" instruments was also sort of a big deal - it was new, and instantly meant that the band involved was not clearly and definitively devoted to making REAL ROCK-n-ROLL MAN!!!!!!!! What sort of pansy doesn't want to make the classic rock of tomorrow today? Take this band - a UK synth band with a French name? Gay? Communist? Both? At the time, it would have taken much for me to spend the little money I have on such an unknown, especially when they were foreign players of synthesizers. Even so, I could not get the song Livin' On The Ceiling out of my head. I still can't. It has been almost 30 years of me singing that to myself, and on top of that, I have come to dig some of their other stuff from this album and others of theirs (Lose Your Love was enough to make me buy Believe You Me from a used bin about 10 years ago - I will end up with that CD too one day I bet.) This was a purchase I would have not appreciated in its time. With time, I have come to be able divorce the song from the sound, and to know what I like from each. I think the all-synth feel woulda confounded my ears as a 12 year old. It had to wait for my 40th to seal the deal. Overall, I suppose it is mostly standard-issue 80s Euro-pop that would come over here as "College Rock" or "New Wave". There are 3-4 excellent songs, and the remixes of 2 of them are worthy as well. That's enough for me to enjoy this disc. Would it be enough for you? It would be if you remember Fop-n-Roll radio from 1983 River Grove Illinois. (C+)

Julian Cope - Peggy Suicide: Another album that has been on my wish list for 10+ years. The 3 singles from the album were all excellent, and East Easy Rider and Beautiful Love have remained in my heavy rotation since they came out in the early 90s. Seeing that a 2 CD re-release of this was now out, I decided to grab it and see how well his stuff from that era holds up. By and large, it holds up really really well. Julian Cope is a music lover of the highest order, and while he veers into the UK prog end of the pool way more than I care about, I must say, some of the prog-leaning excesses in the extras on disc 2 work for me more than I thought they would. The original version of this album was rather long as I recall (may have been a double album), but in the expanded edition, it is almost impossible to listen to end to end. That really isn't a diss. The number of artists who can make 2.5 hours of great music in one shot can be counted on one hand. There is one very good hour of music here, which is no small feat. It doesn't sound like his early stuff, but the pop songcraft here is strong enough to balance the more ponderous stuff, and all-in-all, I think there is enough complexity here to give me much to listen to in order to get it all figured out. That is exactly the kind of album I end up becoming very attached to, which is also no small feat. (B-)

White Stripes - Under Great White Northern Lights: So I went to the Jack White/White Stripes/Third Man Records store in Nashville and couldn't just buy nothin', so I bought this. I think their first live DVD Under Blackpool Lights is one of the greatest concerts ever released, and the show I saw of theirs was also excellent. This disc is good because the songs are good and because it is them, but it is nowhere as good as Blackpool. No failing that since almost nothing is. This is more a stopgap than anything I think. I am glad I got it and all, but you'd be better off with almost any one of their other albums than this one if you are just starting out. (C+)