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Soapbox: Someone please tell me they saw or heard or read someone, anyone, anywhere, mentioning that the liquid-bomb-airplane plot, interrupted with arrests in Britain, was probably timed to occur just before American congressional elections that, without an attack, were/are/hopefully will replace our current government with one that will not engage terrorists in the way they'd like to be engaged. We get rid of our current batch of bullheaded, culturally ignorant jingoists and we just might put the fear of DVDs, infrastructure aid, and prosperity into the heads of religious fascists. They fear options, real health care, sex both healthy and un-, women's rights, real wages for the working class, modernization, evironmental conservatism, and all that other stuff that can't be implemented with bombs but usually defeats the power-gaining industry of some/most organized religions. Birds of a feather with the prez, no?
But I will give W a point, at least, for finally and correctly using the word "fascists" to describe the peeps perpetrating stuff like this. Just took him seven years. Maybe someone bought him a new mirror.
Music: Lost eighties/nineties/oughts will be today instead of last Friday, which I spent in the park eating ribs.
Sometime around the early to mid-nineties, I was transferred from Star City to a secret lab in the Martial Islands, where plans to detonate a neutron bomb were unfortunately soon scrapped due to the lack of people to kill in the area. I island hopped my way to New Zealand, Australia, and Tasmania, simply to begin buying records by the boatload, especially those on the Flying Nun label, and in Tasmania I discovered the Able Tasmans, a keyboard lead outfit crafting frighteningly melodic pop, but mostly sounding like nothing and no one else. I can think of 20 young, current outfits, especially those with 10+ members, who would do themselves a favor to listen to the Able Tasmans' first two full lengths (a debut EP, "The Tired Sun," is interesting, but not of a kind with the others) and discover ways to fill a picture frame to bursting without overstuffing it with superfluous sounds.
Their first full length, A Cuppa Tea and a Lie Down, collected singles and EP tracks going back to the ATs' inception in 1984. The album has its frequent moments, and despite sounding completely sincere and unaffected, it comes off a tad conventional sounding, at least in contrast to what came next. Still a very psychedelic piece of piano/organ pop, like a Left Banke record covered by Gorky's Zygotic Mynci, in English. Check it:
After a lineup shift,1990 broughtHey Spinner! I missed it upon release, and I'm eternally embarrassed and angry that I had to wait six more years to find it. If seen for less than $15 in any format: purchase. Note the Feelies influence on the first track, "Angry Martyr," but then put a pillow on the floor for the next one, "Hold Me I," so your jaw doesn't break. That track, and "Dileen," prove the Feelies influence to be just a starting point for further, better excusions.
They fizzled out by 1996, after two weaker albums, which was a damn, crying, evil shame. I did a lazy look to see if any of them had moved on, but not much else than having shared members with the infamous Flying Nun records band the Headless Chickens. They were probably all in other NZ/AU/TM bands, as was everyone else down there in the eighties, since gov't arts cheese was doled out to new bands by band name, rather than considering the names of members.
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