Archive for the 1981 tag

Our Daughter’s Wedding: Lawnchairs

If you come to Atomic a lot, you might know Marc. Actually, Marc was there before Atomic was, and he's one of several regulars who occasionally tips me off to some of the gaping holes in my collection. Well one day, Marc sends me an email asking if I have this song. I didn't, but sent an mp3 of it back abooooout 60 seconds later. I'm not saying where I got it, because Marc now thinks I'm some kind of music-finding magician.

I'll admit that I didn't remember it at all, but I liked it, so I played it. Maybe I shouldn't have been surprised that half the regulars were already familiar, but Our Daughter's Wedding was around for barely longer than it took me to locate that mp3. Formed as a rock band in New York in 1977, they quit in 1978, reformed again in 1979 with a more electronic sound, and broke up for good in 1982, "Lawnchairs" having been their only slight taste of fame.

From Nightlife, available on Amazon
MySpace page

Allez Allez: Allez Allez

I got a text from the manager of the club the other day.
"Did you play Yeah Yeah Yeahs last night? Or the Ting Tings? Something you played late."
"I got it. Tegan and Sara..."

I knew someone was going to ask me this. If I didn't know better, I'd probably think it was the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, too. Given the current resurgence of post-punk and new wave, this song doesn't necessarily sound like it was released in 1981. And I'm pretty sure that at least one of Karen O's personalities believes that she actually is Sarah Osborne*. Listen, though, and you'll hear the band's name chanted throughout the song. They want you to know that they're not Tegan and Sara, or Ting Tings, or Yeah Yeah Yeahs, or all that was to come after...

From their album African Queen, and also available on their Best Of [released just last year]

*A bit of '80s new wave trivia: Sarah Osborne left Allez Allez when she married the lead singer of Heaven 17.

Kraftwerk: Computer World

I felt it was only appropriate to start with Kraftwerk. These Germans made modern electronic music what it is today. There may have been some doing it earlier, but, in the end, no one did it better. Their rhythmic, synth-driven sound influenced much of the music that was to follow. So much music has borrowed and/or stolen from them. Hip hop, House, Trance, New Wave, and Electronica, all borrowed material from Kraftwerk, especially from the Computer World album. Duran Duran, U2, Soft Cell, Gary Numan, Depeche Mode, Jay-Z, Afrikaa Bambaataa and Soul Sonic Force, Coldplay, Senor Coconut, Laibach, and Peat Bog Faeries (a Celtic fusion band, thank you Wikipedia) have all used material from Kraftwerk or covered their songs.

Their early albums are usually themed. The album Radioactivity is all songs about radioactivity in the sense of radiation—“Geiger Counter”, “Uranium”, and “Radioactivity”—or activity involving radio—“Airwaves”, “Antenna”, and “Transistor”; Trans-Europe Express (an album named for a train) has the title track and “Metal on Metal” (wheels on rails) as examples. Vocals are sparse on any Kraftwerk album and are usually altered through some kind of vocoder or other sound altering device.

The easiest point of entry for someone wanting to explore Kraftwerk is the aforementioned 1981 album Computer World. Listen to this album and you will hear the source material for the samples of countless songs from the 80s and beyond. All the songs from this album—"Computer World" (1 and 2), "Pocket Calculator", "Computer Love", “Numbers”, "Home Computer", and “It's More Fun to Compute"—are solid tracks. Start your Kraftwerk tour here:

Kraftwerk on Amazon