december 26, 2019

Jellybean - Wotupski (1984) - €10,00

John Benitez (born November 7, 1957), also known as Jellybean, is an American drummer, guitarist, songwriter, DJ, remixer and music producer of Puerto Rican descent.
He has produced and remixed artists such as Madonna, Whitney Houston, Michael Jackson and the Pointer Sisters.
In December 2016, Billboard magazine ranked him as the 99th most successful dance artist of all-time.

He relocated to Manhattan in 1975, attending disco nightclubs, which sparked his interest in becoming a disc jockey (DJ). He worked at a nightclub called Experiment 4 & Electric Circus. In 1980 Benitez enrolled and attended Bronx Community College, where he studied Marketing and Sales Promotion.
Benitez worked as a DJ at Electric Circus, Hurrah, Xenon (nightclub), Paradise Garage and Studio 54. In 1981, he was hired as the resident DJ at Funhouse. He hosted a weekend dance radio show at WKTU.

Benitez started to remix singles, such as Jimmy Spicer's "The Bubble Bunch," Rocker's Revenge's "Walking on Sunshine," Afrika Bambaataa's "Planet Rock" and Stephen Bray of the group Breakfast Club. Benitez met Bray's bandmate at the time, Madonna.
A two-year romance developed. Benitez became involved with remixing Madonna's self-titled debut album in 1983, including the singles "Everybody", "Borderline", and "Lucky Star." He also produced "Holiday."

Originally released on EMI America, Wotupski!?! included the Top 20 hit "Sidewalk Talk" as well as "Was Dog a Doughnut," "Compromise," "Dancing on the Fire," and "The Mexican."


Side A
A1.  Compromise  (6:39) 
A2.  Sidewalk Talk  (6:06) 
A3.  Dancing On The Fire  (6:30) 

Side B
B1.  Was Dog A Doughnut  (7:59) 
B2.  The Mexican  (8:44)


Companies, etc.

Credits


Notes
Release:  1984
Format:  LP
Genre: Electro Dance, Freestyle
Label:  EMI America Records
Catalog#  1A K062-2003916

Vinyl:  Good
Cover:  Good

Prijs: €10,00

december 22, 2019

Spandau Ballet - Diamond (1982) - €10,00

Diamond is the second studio album by Spandau Ballet. It was released on 5 March 1982 by Chrysalis Records.

With the new romantic movement they'd helped spearhead on the way out, futurist icons Spandau Ballet began thinking seriously about the future on their second album.
The seeds of the group's transition to a slick, MOR soul outfit can be heard in hits like "Chant No. 1," the best song Spandau Ballet had come up with. More funk than rock, "Chant No. 1" got punctuation from the horn section of the British R&B act Beggar & Co., who were apparently a major inspiration for the track.
Diamond features other tentative moves toward an authentically soulful sound; the tuneless single "Paint Me Down" is all chattering rhythm guitar and popping bass, while "She Loved Like Diamond" offers an inferior trial run at the approach that would produce the global mega-hit "True" (this version has an underdeveloped melody, which is OK, since still-improving vocalist Tony Hadley wasn't ready yet for a better one).
The rest of the album sounds like the group had been listening too long to the second side of David Bowie's Heroes. "Pharoah" is off-kilter funk reminiscent of "The Secret Life of Arabia" -- a dubious choice for emulation -- and the gentle, oriental balladry of "Innocence and Science" segues into "Missionary," a percussion-filled mood piece light on actual substance.

Although it's an improvement on their debut, Diamond showed Spandau Ballet was musically still far behind likeminded acts such as Duran Duran, Ultravox, and Visage -- a situation that would change somewhat with the band's next, most successful album, True.


Side A
A1.  Chant No. 1 (I Don’t Need This Pressure On)  (4:07)
A2.  Instinction  (4:47)
A3.  Paint Me Down  (3:45)
A4.  Coffee Club  (5:32)

Side B
B1.  She Loved Like Diamond  (2:56)
B2.  Pharaoh  (6:37)
B3.  Innocence and Science  (4:27)
B4.  Missionary  (7:00)


Personnel
  • Tony Hadley – lead vocals and backing vocals
  • Gary Kemp – electric guitars, cheng, synthesizers and backing vocals
  • Martin Kemp – basses and backing vocals
  • Steve Norman – bongos, congas and tablas and backing vocals
  • John Keeble – electronic drums and acoustic drums with electronic toms

Additional members
  • Canute Wellington – trumpet
  • David "Baps" Baptiste – saxophone and flute
  • Nathaniel Augustin – trombone

Notes
Release:  1982
Format:  LP
Genre:  New Wave
Label:  Chrysalis Records
Catalog#  204514

Vinyl:  Good
Cover:  Good

Prijs: €10,00

december 19, 2019

The Kinks - One For The Road (1980) – €20,00

After fifteen years, founding Kinks members Ray and Dave Davies boast a nearly unique record of sustained combat in the guitar army. Like their peers in the Who and the Rolling Stones, they know that such longevity only makes them more vulnerable. All three bands must constantly face down their seniority — what if you gave a grand rock gesture and nobody came? — because they’re perched so visibly in the pantheon.
One for the Road — a cleaned-up, carefully sequenced culling of live Kinks performances from six American cities and Zurich, Switzerland — succeeds in sounding like a single night’s work. It argues that experience can keep you alive in the trenches — as long as you keep moving. Using few overdubs and a minimum of talky transitions between cuts, the Kinks show their smarts by being very straightforward.

Ray Davies could be pretty fashionable now, but it’d be the kind of fashionableness he excoriates here in “Prince of the Punks.” He’s not the sort who’d mention that artists as au courant as the Pretenders (“Stop Your Sobbing”), the Jam (“David Watts”) and David Bowie (“Where Have All the Good Times Gone”) have all covered compositions that the Kinks reclaim on this double LP. Why bother, when you’ve already begun the album by pinning everybody’s ears back with 103 seconds of string-popping instrumental intensity known the world over as “You Really Got Me”?
Sputtering feedback left and right.
Dave Davies rips the wadding off “You Really Got Me” to uncover a snake charmer’s melody line under the crunchingly familiar riff. Throughout the record, the Kinks vivisect their own classics to make them sound fresh. “Till the End of the Day,” for example, gets a ska treatment that seems to rise organically from the original.

One for the Road isn’t anything like The “Live” Kinks, a 1968 LP that had the blood-sloppy grandeur of an lggy Pop bootleg and was accurately pegged by critic Nik Cohn as “amphetamine rage.” It’s not like 1972’s Everybody’s in Showbiz either.
At that time, Ray Davies was such a brokenhearted clown that he filled the in-concert half of the disc with Noel Coward-style posturings and suffocating campiness. Happily, the new album’s bywords are control and momentum.
One for the Road doesn’t catalog Davies’ psychic maladies (though “National Health” pivots on the starkly downbeat lines. “Valium helps me for a while But somehow Valium always seems to bring me down”). Instead, it’s a shake-yer-booty record whose connective tissue is Mick Avory’s earnest, rock-steady drumming.
Even “Celluloid Heroes” is transformed from the plodding set piece it’d become onstage into a finely felt recital with a tough new guitar intro capped by poignant synthesizer trills. “Stop Your Sobbing” picks up on the Pretenders’ Phil Spector-like stylings by including an unmistakable cop from “Then He Kissed Me.”

Kinks concerts, once the chanciest of propositions, now have the friskiness and precision of One for the Road as a model with which to be compared.
Perhaps the single biggest factor in the resurgence of the Kinks as a hot live act has been Dave Davies. Except for a period during the early Seventies when he sulked on stacked heels while older brother Ray camped it up, Dave has always been the epitome of a ripped-pants, skin-it-back, roadhouse Johnny B. Goode.
On his first solo album, AFLI-3603, Dave Davies finally gets a chance to see where his own extravagant tastes might lead him.
His wryness has often threatened to turn brutal, so naming the LP after its catalog number (with a blown-up universal pricing code replacing the artist’s portrait on the front cover) is an entirely characteristic bit of social comment.

Dave Davies’ lyrics reveal a man contrary and anarchic to a degree that would probably have shaken up 1976’s most antipro-grammatic punk.
He matches a hip-socking Eddie Cochran guitar style to the barbaric vocal yawp of Little Richard. It’d take a long time to explain the pulse acceleration that hits me when Dave drops a couple of random power chords into his torrid treatment of “Nothin’ More to Lose”: “Well if we’re all so clever and technology rules/Why is it we’re so scared/I got a rocking psychosis/And my juke box has blown a fuse.”

Though this Dave Davies-dominated disc (besides producing, he plays most of the instruments throughout) boasts the trebly echo and buzz-bomb dynamics of heavy metal, it’s really the cat-in-heat, rockabilly hiccuping that Dave displays in songs like “Move Over” that makes AFLI-3603 so distinctive in its honest frenzy.
The Kinks have gone over the top once more — Dave, particularly, sticking his neck out — and gained ground when they could have been left holding their entrails. Does this make 1980, at last, the band’s big fiscal year? After fifteen years of konspicuous Kinks kourage. I’d have to say that it doesn’t really matter.


Side A
A1.  Opening – 1:43
A2.  The Hard Way – 2:42
A3.  Catch Me Now I’m Falling – 4:47
A4.  Where Have All The Good Times Gone – 2:16
A5.  Intro : Lola – 0:54
A6.  Lola – 4:48
A7.  Pressure – 1:35

Side B
B1.  All Day And All Of The Night – 3:44
B2.  20th Century Man – 6:19
B3.  Misfits – 3:38
B4.  Prince Of The Punks – 3:55
B5.  Stop Your Sobbing – 2:30

Side C
C1.  Low Budget – 6:06
C2.  Attitude – 3:50
C3.  (Wish I Could Fly Like) Superman – 6:32
C4.  National Health  – 4:13

Side D
D1.  ‘Till The End Of The Day – 2:44
D2.  Celluloid Heroes – 7:21
D3.  You Really Got Me – 3:40
D4.  Victoria – 2:26
D5.  David Watts – 2:05

The Kinks
with:
  • Nick Newall – additional keyboards
Technical
  • Michael Ewasko – engineer
  • Barry Ainsworth, Mike Moran, Arnie Rosenberg, Brooks Taylor – recording
  • Howard Fritzson – art direction
  • Lauren Recht – photography
Notes
Release:  1980
Format:  2LP (Gatefold)
Genre:  Pop Rock
Label:  Arista Records
Catalog#  300932

Vinyl:  Excellent
Hoes:  Excellent

Prijs: €20,00

december 17, 2019

John Foxx - Metamatic (1980) - €10,00

Metamatic is the debut solo album by John Foxx, released in 1980. It was his first solo project following his split with Ultravox the previous year.
A departure from the mix of synthesizers and conventional rock instrumentation on that band's work, Metamatic was purely electronic in sound.
The name 'Metamatic' comes from a painting machine by kinetic artist Jean Tinguely, first exhibited at the Paris Biennial in 1959. The album peaked at #18 on the UK Albums Chart.

Foxx's solo debut after leaving Ultravox!, Metamatic, achieves the same emotional transcendence as his previous group's early highlight, Systems of Romance, despite a new reliance not just on synthesizers, but on a musical framework dependent on them.
On Metamatic, Foxx cultivates a curious air of disinterest that never seems truly bored, but is much more extreme than even his unarguably distant vocal style for Ultravox!. It holds up as one of the peaks of the early-'80s fascination with emotionless, Kraftwerk-inspired synth pop.

Metamatic was recorded at Pathway, a small eight-track studio in Islington, and was engineered by Gareth Jones.
Foxx's electronic equipment included ARP Odyssey, an Elka 'String Machine' and a Roland CR-78 drum machine.
Several of the synth parts were played by John Wesley-Barker.
Six of the tracks referenced automobiles or motorways, most obviously "Underpass" and "No-One Driving". Foxx re-worked the former track as "Overpass" on the live Subterranean Omnidelic Exotour in 1998; he also re-used its distinctive riff for the track "Invisible Women" on 2001's Pleasures of Electricity with Louis Gordon.
The song "He's a Liquid" was influenced by a still from a Japanese horror film depicting a suit draped across a chair in such a way as to suggest that the wearer had liquified; Foxx's lyrics also alluded to the 'fluidity' of human relationships.
The final track, "Touch and Go", included psychedelic aspects.
Although Foxx had performed "He's a Liquid" and "Touch and Go" live with Ultravox before leaving the band in 1979, the band was not credited for them on Metamatic.
When Ultravox adapted the tune from "Touch and Go" for the song "Mr. X" on Vienna (1980), their first album following Foxx's departure, Foxx was not credited.


Side A
A1.  Plaza  (3:55) 
A2.  He’s A Liquid  (3:01) 
A3.  Underpass  (3:56) 
A4.  Metal Beat  (3:00) 
A5.  No-One Driving  (3:47)

Side B
B1.  A New Kind Of Man  (3:42) 
B2.  Blurred Girl  (4:19) 
B3.  030  (3:18) 
B4.  Tidal Wave  (4:17) 
B5.  Touch And Go  (5:36)


Personnel
Keyboards used on the album include the Minimoog, ARP Odyssey, clavinet, Elka Rhapsody 610, piano, Farfisa string synth, and Hammond organ.


Notes
Release:  1980
Format:  LP
Genre:  Electronic, Synth-pop
Label:  Virgin Records
Catalog#  201434

Vinyl:  Very Good Plus
Cover:  Very Good Plus

Prijs: €10,00

december 14, 2019

Prince - Controversy (1981) - €10,00

Controversy is the fourth studio album by American recording artist Prince, released on October 14, 1981 by Warner Bros. Records.
It was produced by Prince, written (with the exception of one track) by him, and he also performed most of the instruments on its recording.

Controversy reached number three on the Billboard R&B chart and is certified Platinum by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA).
It was voted the eighth best album of the year in the 1981 Pazz & Jop, an annual critics poll run by The Village Voice.
Controversy opens with the title track, which raises questions that were being asked about Prince at the time, including his race and sexuality. The song “flirts with blasphemy” by including a chant of The Lord’s Prayer. “Do Me, Baby” is an “extended bump-n-grind” ballad with explicitly sexual lyrics, and “Ronnie, Talk to Russia” is a politically charged plea to President Ronald Reagan.
“Private Joy” is a bouncy bubblegum pop-funk tune, “showing off Prince’s lighter side”, followed by “Annie Christian”, which lists historical events such as the murder of African-American children in Atlanta and the death of John Lennon.

The album’s final song, “Jack U Off”, is a synthesized rockabilly-style track.
This was the first of his albums to associate Prince with the color purple as well as the first to use sensational spelling in his song titles.
Controversy continues in the same vein of new wave-tinged funk on Dirty Mind, emphasizing Prince‘s fascination with synthesizers and synthesizing disparate pop music genres.
It is also more ambitious than its predecessor, attempting to tackle social protest (“Controversy,” “Ronnie, Talk to Russia,” “Annie Christian”) along with sex songs (“Jack U Off,” “Sexuality”), and it tries hard to bring funk to a rock audience and vice versa.
Even with all of Prince‘s ambitions, the music on Controversy doesn’t represent a significant breakthrough from Dirty Mind, and it is often considerably less catchy and memorable. Nevertheless, Prince‘s talents as musician make the record enjoyable, even if it isn’t as compelling as most of his catalog.


Side A
A1.  Controversy  (7:15)
A2.  Sexuality  (4:21)
A3.  Do Me, Baby  (7:43)

Side B
B1.  Private Joy  (4:29)
B2.  Ronnie, Talk to Russia  (1:58)
B3.  Let’s Work  (3:54)
B4.  Annie Christian  (4:22)
B5.  Jack U Off  (3:09)

Personnel
  • Prince – lead vocals, sitar, all other instruments, producer, arranger
  • Lisa Coleman – keyboards, backing vocals (on “Controversy”, “Ronnie, Talk to Russia” and “Jack U Off”)
  • Dr. Fink – keyboards (“Jack U Off”)
  • Bobby Z. – drums (“Jack U Off”)

Notes
Release:  1981
Format:  LP
Genre:  Funk / Soul
Label:  Warner Bros. Records
Catalog#  WB 56950

Vinyl:   Excellent
Cover:   Excellent

Prijs: €10,00