Funk F·XRII
Linn Klimax DS (Renew)
TEAD Mastergroove
TEAD Vibe 1.5 / Pulse 2
TEAD Linear A
TEAD Model One
No Great Pop Supplement today. Just the first three singles of the new Polyvinyl singles club. The deal is that they’ve passed a 4-track (remember those?) around a dozen bands, pressed up a dozen singles, and will send me one every month. From America. By air-mail. It’s costing me a fortune, and I bought it when I came home from the pub, when clearly it seemed a great idea. You get a box too. I don’t much like records in boxes. It’s a bit like animals in the zoo: I prefer to see them in their natural habitat, which is on a shelf, or the floor.
I’ve never heard of Telekinesis (the band, not the non-existent “psychic phenomenon”) before. So let’s take things at face value. Lovely purple vinyl. (Which matches the back of the sleeve. Excellent. This stuff matters.) Slightly psych-ey, trace elements of proggish space rock, but still pretty much guitar based pop on the A-side. Then — you’ll never believe it — a cover of Outdoor Miner. I don’t think I’ve bought a record with a cover of Outdoor Miner on it in several months, so I was momentarily surprised. It starts off in a Frank Sidebottomesque (Sidebottomian?) fashion with the 4-track on the wrong speed. You could do that you see: run the tape at double speed for better sound quality. I was never sure it made a whole heap of difference myself. My most coveted cassette multitracker back in the day was the Yamaha MT8X. Eight tracks. EIGHT. I wanted one of those so much it hurt.
Lots of tape hiss here, and he’s got the record level too high on the vibes. Melancholic, mellow country sounds. Perhaps like you might hear in The Dukes of Hazzard when one of the boys finds out his girlfriend done wronged him with some city slicker. B-side, Strange Birds (I’ve had a couple of those myself - ROFL!!!!) has a pretty nasty FM piano sound and is a bit like Ben Folds going honky-tonk in a 1980s Casio showroom. I approve. This is more purple vinyl, but the blue end of purple rather than the pink end (fnarr fnarr) that Telekinesis bagged.
Some years ago I had a crooked finger when I detached the tendons from the last knuckle of the middle finger on my right hand. I had to wear a plastic splint for a couple of months. I couldn’t get change out of my pocket, and it made me look like a pervert.
Finally, a band I’ve heard of, albeit one I’ve never been an enormous fan of. I ought to like them. Noisy, wilfully difficult, strange sounding, Japanese-female-fronted. It’s made to measure, but it doesn’t quite fit. Here they’re more towards the Blonde Redhead end of that multi-faceted spectrum than the Melt-Banana end. B-side is called My Husband has no Courage in Him, which is quite Japanesey, if not easy-peasy. Blue vinyl this time.
I thought at first that the sleeves were going to fit together to make the front of the box, but they don’t.
Still, I like the design of the artwork and the packaging of the series as a whole. Looking forward to the next one.