The Situation - Fun/ I Don't Know What Day It Is

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Distinctly Brit-styled Electronic new wave pop from Florida

Label: President
Year of Release: 1984

I was listening to The Most Mysterious Song On The Internet the other day and marvelling at how much the elusive track had captured everyone's imagination. Once upon a time the decade whose obscure releases caused the most intrigue was the sixties, but there's no shortage of weird one-offs, demos, private pressings and general vanity projects from the eighties which are now starting to catch fire in the same way. Head over to YouTube and listen to the 80zforever channel if you don't believe me.

While this particular record isn't from an unlabelled cassette, and does have full credits and publishing details, it's still a one-off which has led me down a blind alley in my attempts to uncover further work from the people involved. Firstly, the band appear to be from Florida, with one of their members (F. Ehmen) having also been a member of the group The Numbers, who also only had one single out ("Working Girl" on Reel in 1982). Why, then, did this record only seem to pick up a release in the UK on President Records, with all the rights seemingly attributed to that label? Surely the group would have had more of a shot with their local audience back home?

Secondly, if President were keen on developing an American band, why on earth did they give up after this solitary release? Did the group spend some time in the UK promoting this, and if not, what was the actual point of the entire exercise?

There's a chance we're not likely to get any immediate answers, which is a shame. The single itself, however, is clearly very influenced by the Second British Invasion of the eighties, with the glossiest of Anglo New Romantic sounds gently rubbed into its grooves like balm. A quick look at the picture of The Situation on the sleeve also reveals a band who were obviously keen to be lipstick-wearing Blitz boys rather than suntanned Floridians (though the blonde-haired chap looks more like a member of Edwyn Collins' spoof Britpop band Expo 70). 

Reupload - Dex Dexter - Another Car, Another Car Crash/ Car Trek

Label: Trade 2/ Island

Year of Release: 1996

Was there ever a music press hyped scene more mocked than Romo? We could talk about Lionpop if you want, but that really fits under the category of "vague and poorly named ideas which only one person ever mentioned". Romo, on the other hand, was a simple case of bad timing and under-prepared artists. Some of the bands involved, like InAura, would produce material which under the right circumstances may have hit home. The issue was that their travelling companions had barely formed five minutes ago, were still in the process of forging identities of their own, and seemed to have an abundance of confidence which belied the actual material gathered. A romantic modernist reaction against the excessive laddisms of Britpop made complete sense at the time, but many of the acts involved seemed like student performance art revue projects caught halfway through rehearsal time having fully designed the costumes whilst only managing to have written one page of the script. In the end, Britpop died, Pop returned, and that was that. You can't invent the future. Sigue Sigue Sputnik will tell you that.

For a scene so hyped it's also shocking that so few pieces of recorded work slipped out. Orlando were the kings, managing one album and a few singles. InAura had a great album ready which was rejected by EMI, and subsequently issued by an indie two years too late for anybody to notice or care. Boutique were allowed a couple of interesting singles before slipping under the radar.

Dex Dexter were even less noticeable, being given permission to put out this single - with one of the greatest titles for an A side of all time - before being forgotten about almost immediately. The curious thing about the end product is how it sounds more like a late nineties lo-fi British approach to indie than "Romo" per se. Each angular guitar riff, each cheap keyboard drone which sounds rather like Sweep the puppet squeaking in protest, and each novelty car horn noise makes the end product more akin to the Teen C frolics of Bis than any serious new movement. At the risk of using idle comparisons for a second consecutive sentence, it's true to say that the sharpness of early Adam and the Ants is equally apparent, but unlike Orlando or InAura, there's not much in the way of sweeping electronic melodrama going on here. Maybe if Dex Dexter hadn't boarded the Romo bus, they'd have stood a slight chance in the indie world outside.

Their demise seemed extremely swift. I was introduced to the lead singer Seb at the Water Rats in Kings Cross mere months after this single was issued, and asked him what they had planned next. "You know as much as I do," he grumbled, his flamboyant persona dropping almost immediately. There were to be no more releases, but if you want to put the expectations of some music critics into perspective, go away and read Taylor Parkes' review of a Dex Dexter live gig here. Seldom has hyperbole been less justified, but hopefully enough time has passed now for the single to be enjoyed for what it is without any weight of expectation attached.

Boutique - Butterfly & Strawberries and Cream

Label: Trade 2
Year of Release: 1995

Boutique were one of the first bands I wrote about on this blog, and - partly due to the lack of information available at the time, and partly due to inexperience - I spewed out some utterly inaccurate drivel on to the screen. Life is a learning curve, dear readers, and allow me to try and do a slightly better job now.

Arriving at the height of Britpop in the mid-nineties, Boutique almost seemed like a calculated gamble of a signing by the record company, who may have sensed a possible turning tide away from the laddism of the period. Rather than sticking to the tried and tested classic songwriting paths of Blur or Oasis at that point, Boutique were all camp attitudes and art school pretence, owing more of a debt to early eighties synth-pop than sixties mod. At the point of their inception no scene appeared to exist which seemed relevant to their cause, but Taylor Parkes referenced them in a review as an example of a band who might fit a scene he was nurturing called Romo (or Romantic Modernism). Romo would owe a debt to the New Romantic movement of the early eighties, but attempt to also be progressive in its sounds. How well it succeeded on this level is something I'd throw open to question - indeed, I'd argue that for all its rather trad limitations, Britpop did at least allow more creative and extraordinary groups like Pulp and Super Furry Animals to get caught up in its slipstream - but nonetheless nuggets of pop goodness did get spat out of Romo.

Boutique appeared to consist of Chris Johnstone on vocals and Gary Chapman on synths, both of whom were a pair of outsiders from small-town Essex (The PO Reply Box on the back of the record's sleeve suggests Harlow) who, had Romo come along or not, would doubtless have carried on down their own particular electronic pop path in spite of the dominant trends around them. Three singles were issued on Trade 2 Records, none of which managed to even crack the Top 100 in the UK, though they did manage to make their presence felt in the indie chart. This wasn't enough to satisfy anyone at the record company that it was worthwhile issuing their LP, however, and it was filed away in the vaults where it remains unheard to this day.

A slight shame, that, because while all their singles ("Butterfly", "Strawberries and Cream" and "I've Told You Before") were simple, short, sharp affairs, there was an angularity to their style and arrangements that made them compelling. That's keenly in evidence on "Butterfly", where Johnstone's hiccuping, eey-oreing vocals collide with bleeping and gurgling antiquated synths, antiquated by both today's standards and certainly 1995's as well. Even duos like Erasure were trying to constantly modernise and update their synth equipment at this point, so the arrangement here feels consciously dated, in much the same manner that the arrangements of Cast or The Las were in thrall to a certain sixties period.

(Entry continues beneath the sound files)

Label: Trade 2
Year of Release: 1996

For my money, however, the band's best single was their third and final offering, "Strawberries and Cream". There are obvious and cheeky steals from both The Jam's "Start" (or is it The Beatles' "Taxman"?) here as well as David Bowie's "Ashes to Ashes", making it a thoroughly bizarre meshing of two pop cultures. But besides that, it's a two minute wonder of a single, effortless and optimistic while also being plainly strange. The buzzing, ringing synths throughout the chorus try their hardest to convey a perfect summer scene, then the clod-hopping guitars thump in immediately afterwards... and it's an enjoyable confusion of a record created by two people who were clearly in love with many different aspects of pop music, however fashionable those may or may not have been.

Their promo videos have finally been uploaded to Youtube too, meaning you can observe the style of a band who, while they were definitely in thrall to Bowie and the early eighties, seem unquestionably mid-nineties to me as well. Something about their youthful enthusiasm, magpie thievery and spark date-stamps them to an era when faintly dorky kids with huge record collections could gain record contracts and raid the pop charts - and while so much of that time was littered with bilge, if it allowed groups like Boutique to have their little moment, maybe that's an acceptable price to pay.

Butterfly
I've Told You Before
Strawberries and Cream

Inaura - One Million Smiles

Label: Org Records
Year of Release: 1998

Ah, cruel, fickle finger of fate... it could and should have been very different for Inaura. Featuring Dave Formula out of Magazine as their keyboard player, the band had pedigree to begin with, and then seemed to be riding on what was supposed to become the giant wave of a new musical movement -namely Romo, the New Romantic revivalist scene created by the magazine Melody Maker.

I became aware of them at the time the first single "This Month's Epic" was issued, as their press officer phoned me at home raving about this band who (in his words) "are like a combination of all the best bits of The Verve and Duran Duran". Clearly he'd never read my student magazine column (and fair play to him, nobody else did either) or he'd never have bothered using those two acts as being a benchmark of any kind of superior quality. Nonetheless, with nothing better to do I went along to see them live that night and was blown away. In between hard techno squelches and eighties synth pop leanings were indeed enormous, epic, meandering songs which recalled the majesty of The Walker Brothers. There were unquestionably elements of Duran Duran in the mix - only a fool would claim otherwise - but there was more ambition here, and a lot more aggression and frustration in their sound. They had taken eighties pop and given it a much harder edge.

EMI were supposed to have issued the album "One Million Smiles" themselves in 1996, but following the total underperformance of the singles issued from it they immediately appeared to get cold feet. For two years after that, it apparently remained locked in the vaults where it may have remained for good had Org not stepped in to rescue the project. By the time they issued the album, however, whatever interest anyone had in Inaura had totally disappeared, and it was left to bellyflop on to record store shelves in 1998 two whole years after the last single from it had emerged. The subsequent public disinterest surely surprised nobody. If EMI's marketing muscle hadn't persuaded the world about Inaura's worth, then what was a tiny indie going to achieve years after the band had even last been in the mainstream music press?

Inaura's career was actually a very unfortunate case of multiple mistakes. For starters, they were launched as being part of the ill-fated Romo scene in the mid-nineties. Romo was an eighties pop revivalist movement launched by Melody Maker which was supposed to take over the waning lead Britpop had shown the country. Sadly, despite involving a shedload of interesting eccentrics and pretentious buffoons who would certainly have livened up the rather dour meat-and-potatoes music scene of the time, the majority of them really didn't deliver the goods musically, and the scene was quickly buried after a showcase tour which the public chose to completely ignore. Sadly for Inaura, not only were they left off the showcase (instead being given a nationwide support slot with The Human League) they were also one of the only bands amongst it who were astonishing live and also knew their way around a tune - a case of "the exception which proves the rule".

Their second mistake was to release the eight minute long "This Month's Epic" as the debut single, launching their career on a very overblown, dramatic flourish which subsequently gained absolutely no airplay, and aggravated the earthy, laddish music press of the time. Although I happen to think "This Month's Epic" is actually one of the finest singles issued in the mid-nineties, they perhaps could have waited until they'd slipped into the public's consciousness with something a bit more snappy. After all, they had snappy pop tunes by the bundle - "Soap Opera" and "Desire" on this album prove that conclusively.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, their ideas of mixing alternative guitar rock, eighties synthpop and burbling dance music influences were actually extremely ahead of their time, even if they were accused of being retro in the nineties. Whilst we now think nothing of seeing stylish, electronic, New Order referencing and eighties worshipping bands in the charts, in 1996 it was deemed to be a tiny bit silly (unless you were Garbage, for some reason). So, despite it being a bright, shining piece of pop with a credible production team behind it, the band were ultimately always doomed to fail. Sometimes the first person through the thicket is the one who gets his eyes scratched out, whilst leaving the path clear for other people to follow.

I'm always pleased when I see this album being referenced online as "ahead of its time", and I hope that people will begin to wake up to it more over the coming years. I don't hold out hope for an Inaura reformation, but I certainly hope that their work brings pleasure to a wider audience eventually.

(This blog entry was originally uploaded in June 2008, and I did originally plan to offer it for full download again as the old link had gone dead. Somewhat brilliantly, though, I've discovered that it's since been reissued and you can buy it from Amazon here (and doubtless other places too!) Therefore, this isn't a "proper" Left and to the Back Blog entry but a stopgap weekend one to try and draw your attention to the record).  

Dex Dexter - Another Car Another Carcrash

Label: Trade 2/ Island

Year of Release: 1996

Was there ever a music press hyped scene more mocked than Romo? We could talk about Lionpop if you want, but that really fits under the category of "vague and poorly named ideas which only one person ever mentioned". Romo, on the other hand, was a simple case of bad timing and under-prepared artists. Some of the bands involved, like InAura, would produce material which under the right circumstances may have hit home. The issue was that their travelling companions had barely formed five minutes ago, were still in the process of forging identities of their own, and seemed to have an abundance of confidence which belied the actual material gathered. A romantic modernist reaction against the excessive laddisms of Britpop made complete sense at the time, but many of the acts involved seemed like student performance art revue projects caught halfway through rehearsal time having fully designed the costumes whilst only managing to have written one page of the script. In the end, Britpop died, Pop returned, and that was that. You can't invent the future. Sigue Sigue Sputnik will tell you that.

For a scene so hyped it's also shocking that so few pieces of recorded work slipped out. Orlando were the kings, managing one album and a few singles. InAura had a great album ready which was rejected by EMI, and subsequently issued by an indie two years too late for anybody to notice or care. Boutique were allowed a couple of interesting singles before slipping under the radar.

Dex Dexter were even less noticeable, being given permission to put out this single - with one of the greatest titles for an A side of all time - before being forgotten about almost immediately. The curious thing about the end product is how it sounds more like a late nineties lo-fi British approach to indie than "Romo" per se. Each angular guitar riff, each cheap keyboard drone which sounds rather like Sweep the puppet squeaking in protest, and each novelty car horn noise makes the end product more akin to the Teen C frolics of Bis than any serious new movement. At the risk of using idle comparisons for a second consecutive sentence, it's true to say that the sharpness of early Adam and the Ants is equally apparent, but unlike Orlando or InAura, there's not much in the way of sweeping electronic melodrama going on here. Maybe if Dex Dexter hadn't boarded the Romo bus, they'd have stood a slight chance in the indie world outside.

Their demise seemed extremely swift. I was introduced to the lead singer Seb at the Water Rats in Kings Cross mere months after this single was issued, and asked him what they had planned next. "You know as much as I do," he grumbled, his flamboyant persona dropping almost immediately. There were to be no more releases, but if you want to put the expectations of some music critics into perspective, go away and read Taylor Parkes' review of a Dex Dexter live gig here. Seldom has hyperbole been less justified, but hopefully enough time has passed now for the single to be enjoyed for what it is without any weight of expectation attached.

Landscape - European Man

(Edit on 3 Oct: It would seem that the YouTube user has suddenly disabled embedding on this one, so go here instead: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CpRjbl3pX-Q)

Much has been heard about a revival of eighties production values in the last few years, but it's worth reminding ourselves that, like all retro-celebration, only certain parts have been shaved off and repackaged for our enjoyment. When Britpop revived the sixties in the nineties, it was very careful to only dig out the most credible of reference points - The Kinks, The Beatles, The Who and The Small Faces all got a look-in, but there weren't many jolly, smiley suited bands out there doing their best Freddie and the Dreamers or Herman's Hermits impressions. It was exactly like Friday Night at the London Palladium had never happened (although I for one would have killed to see John Powers out of Cast doing a Dave Clark Five footstomp, or perhaps Digsy out of Smaller doing a Freddie Garrety dance).

Selective memory when it comes to referencing previous decades is an ongoing phenomenon, and here we are again, giving nods of respect to Gary Numan (whose past output actually, contrary to any lazy off-the-cuff remark you've heard just about anywhere, really doesn't look especially dated these days) and Duran Duran, but politely ignoring pioneers such as Landscape who seem rather more like a Not the Nine O'Clock News parody of New Romanticism.

Landscape, you see, were one of the first British bands out of the traps to fiddle with synthesisers, had one member (Richard Burgess) who supposedly invented the term "New Romantic" - although I'd wager that's something a few others would also lay claim to - and were so utterly Now at the turn of the decade that they blew my little infant mind. The trouble is, of course, that their vision of the future was so about-cock that it lead to goofy videos like the one above, which is a messy visual salad of arch campness and techno-angst. Like many bands of the period, they also thought that the use of digital pocket calculator fonts in their videos and packaging meant they were being forward-thinking, and thought nothing of putting out album sleeves designed on cheap eight-bit computer interfaces. Even by the time the decade closed they looked like peculiar relics, the sorts of chaps who probably thought we'd all be consulting Ceefax in the 21st Century on special mobile teletext headsets, rather than using the Internet on mobile phones.

To be fair to them, they did release one bona-fide classic single along the way which now never seems to crop up on anything other than Eighties compilations with Rubik's Cubes on the sleeve - "Einstein a Go Go". Besides that, there was also the vicious and marginally disturbing "Norman Bates" which has a much more convincing video below.



Less famously, all the members of Saint Etienne once argued that the Landscape album "From the Tearooms of Mars to the Hellholes of Uranus" was the 'worst ever made'. This is a little harsh for an album that has a few prime pieces of early electronic pop on it, but generally speaking, I would offer the advice not to bother with it unless you see it really cheap. Unless of course instrumental tango tracks played on synthesisers are your bag. Like I said, for a supposedly futuristic band, they weren't particularly gifted at understanding what the future might bring. Perhaps in a parallel universe somewhere there's a world that matches exactly with their predictions, although I'm not sure I'd want to visit it.

Boutique - Strawberries and Cream

Label: Trade2/ Island
Year of Release: 1996

I've already posted Inaura's album in full, and gone into some depth about their problems getting it released - the final product seemingly magically appeared on the racks a whole two years after it had been completed and the last single had been out. As part of the Romo movement, however, I can't help but think they were lucky the product saw the light of day at all. The subject of this entry, Boutique, certainly never managed to leak out a long player.

To be brutally honest, the record company's mercenary attitude seems less mysterious in this instance. Their debut single "Strawberries and Cream" is a short, snappy and delightful little single, somehow miraculously ripping off riffs and feels from David Bowie's "Ashes to Ashes"
and The Jam's "Start!" without sounding as preposterous as you'd expect that to be. The simultaneously camp and strangulated vocals are decidedly peculiar and oddly enticing too. For all that, though, you have to wonder if any aspect of the record really screamed "We have arrived!" to the public at large - despite getting Island Records' marketing behind it (99p in the first week of sale, as you can see for yourselves), it does sound for all the world like one of those indie singles that slips out in a pressing of 500 copies, is put in a transparent bag with a cheaply printed sleeve, and only gets adopted and loved by a few weirdos and friends of the band. It's one of the strangest sounding debut "pop" singles I think I've ever heard, which is either tremendously admirable or willfully perverse depending upon your point of view.

It obviously didn't help that the Romo scene which spawned Boutique turned out to be a damp squib, and nor can its chart prospects have been improved by the slow freezing of the British public's interest towards all things of a slightly quirky or alternative bent by the tail end of 1996.
All in all, I doubt William Hill would have given you very long odds on this flopping, but that doesn't stop me from finding it a curious little track which I still occasionally pull down from my CD shelves and listen to.

It was also a placed track on the Chris Morris site Cookd and Bombd's Top 1000 singles of all time, curiously enough, and no, it wasn't me who nominated it - so this clearly found a small, appreciative audience somewhere.

CD EP Track Listing:
1. Strawberries and Cream.
2. Paraffin
3. Strawberries and Cream 12" extended mix
4. Armchair (Scissorkicks Remix)

http://sharebee.com/b9be39f9

Inaura - One Million Smiles

Label: Org Records
Year of Release: 1998

Since providing you all with a link to the video for "This Month's Epic" some entries ago, I have been nagging myself to upload the full "One Million Smiles" album Inaura issued on the independent Org Records label in 1998. So, finally, here 'tis.

EMI were supposed to have issued "One Million Smiles" themselves in 1996, but following the total underperformance of the singles issued from it they immediately appeared to get cold feet. For two years after that, it apparently remained locked in the vaults where it may have remained for good had Org not stepped in to rescue the project. By the time they issued the album, however, whatever interest anyone had in Inaura had totally disappeared, and it was left to bellyflop on to record store shelves in 1998 two whole years after the last single from it had emerged. The subsequent public disinterest surely surprised nobody. If EMI's marketing muscle hadn't persuaded the world about Inaura's worth, then what was a tiny indie going to achieve years after the band had even last been in the mainstream music press?

Inaura's career was actually a very unfortunate case of multiple mistakes. For starters, they were launched as being part of the ill-fated Romo scene in the mid-nineties. Romo was an eighties pop revivalist movement launched by Melody Maker which was supposed to take over the waning lead Britpop had shown the country. Sadly, despite involving a shedload of interesting eccentrics and pretentious buffoons who would certainly have livened up the rather dour meat-and-potatoes music scene of the time, the majority of them really didn't deliver the goods musically, and the scene was quickly buried after a showcase tour which the public chose to completely ignore. Sadly for Inaura, not only were they left off the showcase (instead being given a nationwide support slot with The Human League) they were also one of the only bands amongst it who were astonishing live and also knew their way around a tune - a case of "the exception which proves the rule".

Their second mistake was to release the eight minute long "This Month's Epic" as the debut single, launching their career on a very overblown, dramatic flourish which subsequently gained absolutely no airplay, and aggravated the earthy, laddish music press of the time. Although I happen to think "This Month's Epic" is actually one of the finest singles issued in the mid-nineties, they perhaps could have waited until they'd slipped into the public's consciousness with something a bit more snappy. After all, they had snappy pop tunes by the bundle - "Soap Opera" and "Desire" on this album prove that conclusively.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, their ideas of mixing alternative guitar rock, eighties synthpop and burbling dance music influences were actually extremely ahead of their time, even if they were accused of being retro in the nineties. Whilst we now think nothing of seeing stylish, electronic, New Order referencing and eighties worshipping bands in the charts, in 1996 it was deemed to be a tiny bit silly (unless you were Garbage, for some reason). So, despite involving an ex-member of Magazine (Dave Formula) and despite it being a bright, shining piece of pop with a credible production team behind it, the band were ultimately always doomed to fail. Sometimes the first person through the thicket is the one who gets his eyes scratched out, whilst leaving the path clear for other people to follow.

I'm always pleased when I see this album being referenced online as "ahead of its time", and I hope that people will begin to wake up to it more over the coming years. I don't hold out hope for an Inaura reformation, but I certainly hope that their work brings pleasure to a wider audience eventually.

Tracklisting:

1. 100 Degrees
2. Virus
3. Soap Opera
4. This Month's Epic
5. Desire
6. One Million Smiles
7. 2-5 am
8. Coma Aroma
9. Las Vegas Leg
10. 90's Itch
11. Sense

http://sharebee.com/b7af8fe9

Inaura - This Month's Epic

(Click on the blog entry title to see the video - Sorry, embedding not allowed again!)

Label: EMI
Year of Release: 1996

Ah, cruel, fickle finger of fate... it could and should have been very different for Inaura. Featuring Dave Formula out of Magazine as their keyboard player, the band had pedigree to begin with, and then seemed to be riding on what was supposed to become the giant wave of a new musical movement -namely Romo, the New Romantic revivalist scene created by the magazine Melody Maker.

I became aware of them at the time the first single "This Month's Epic" was issued, as their press officer phoned me at home raving about this band who (in his words) "are like a combination of all the best bits of The Verve and Duran Duran". Clearly he'd never read my student magazine column (and fair play to him, nobody else did either) or he'd never have bothered using those two acts as being a benchmark of any kind of superior quality. Nonetheless, with nothing better to do I went along to see them live that night and was blown away. In between hard techno squelches and eighties synth pop leanings were indeed enormous, epic, meandering songs which recalled the majesty of The Walker Brothers. There were unquestionably elements of Duran Duran in the mix - only a fool would claim otherwise - but there was more ambition here, and a lot more aggression and frustration in their sound. They had taken eighties pop and given it a much harder edge.

"This Month's Epic" in particular is marvellous. It's rare that songs longer than eight minutes justify their own run times. Most just repeat and repeat and forget to fade. TME, on the other hand, begins atmospherically, builds into a woe-ridden chorus, then eventually soars in the manner that The Stone Roses best songs all soared. It may sound rather pretentious in places, but then great pop very frequently is.

Rather unfortunately, the music press totally hated them, killing their career off straight away. In their Duran Duran theiving electronic noises, combined with an indie sensibility, though, you can hear a lot of modern noughties music, not least The Killers. It's just this is so much better. Listen and you'll agree

Freur - Doot Doot

Year of Release: 1983
Label: CBS

Of course, Karl Hyde out of Underworld would probably love us to forget that he was ever in a crimp-haired, futuristic synth-pop outfit called Freur, but rather unfortunately for him the modern Internet allows us to conclusively prove his past.

Not that (dubious hairstyles aside) he really has much to be ashamed of. "Doot Doot" is the kind of atmospheric, marginally eerie, subtly catchy synth-driven thing that could always be found hovering somewhere outside or around the Top 40 in the early part of the eighties. The track evolves gradually into the big instrumental hook at the end, which is actually rather pleasing in an epic sort of way. Nice. The only major criticism which can be made of this venture is the fact that the band decided to represent their name on the sleeve and record label as a giant squiggle, an attempt to invent band names of the future that really didn't meet with any success (unless your name was Prince).

Karl would of course go on to much better things, but I don't really think this is juvenalia to stay awake at night worrying about.