Skip to main content

Kerosene Hat

Camper Van Beethoven had been one of my favourite bands of the mid-to-late '80s, and I was more than ready to see what David Lowery's next group Cracker came up with, only to feel that their first, self-titled album was something of a disappointment. Their follow-up Kerosene Hat, on the other hand, I loved. I think I must have bought it on cassette when it came out, but my memories on that point are hazy. Nor am I exactly sure when I acquired my currrent CD copy.

I'd just missed out on catching Camper Van Beethoven play what turned out to be their final London show, but did eventually see Cracker live, ca. '94, in a low-key gig at the Fleece in Bristol. As I recall, that evening brought my first encounter with the song 'Eurotrash Girl', which appears as a hidden track on the CD (but which wasn't, if I'm not mistaken, on the cassette). It, along with 'Nostalgia' and 'Take Me Down to the Infirmary', are my favourite songs on the album. 

My ertswhile affection for some of the other tracks on the disc ('Movie Star' and 'Get Off This', for example) has rather faded over the years, and, where I once owned five Cracker CDs, this is the last one remaining on my shelves. It occurred to me while writing this that I'd never once heard Jerry García's original version of the song 'Loser', the album's sole cover version. Thanks to YouTube, I have now belatedy rectified that omission, and know Cracker's rendition to be a reasonably faithful homage.

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Complete String Quartets

While the string quartets of Nikolai Yakovievich Myaskovsky (1881-1950) were all published in the Soviet era, a few of them had pre-revolutionary origins. Two quartets he wrote in 1911 and '09 while a conservatory student re-surfaced some twenty years later designated as Quartets Nos. 3 and 4.  An even earlier "schoolboy" piece was later re-worked more radically as Quartet No. 10, premiered in 1945. Myaskovsky partook of an ample share of the turmoil and tragedy of his times: he was wounded and shell-shocked after service on the front line in World War I, and his father, who had been a high-ranking military engineer, was brutally murdered by a revolutionary mob. Despite that, his music, even at its most sombre, hasn't the black bile or biting sarcasm of Shostakovich's, or of his friend Prokofiev's. Of the works collected here, in excellent early '80s performances by the Taneyev Quartet, only Quartet No. 1 has any significantly metallic tang of early S...
Post a Comment
Read more

All Wrapped Up

Here's another of the compilation cassettes I bought this summer, having taken home a Denon twin-deck hi-fi cassette player from the local charity shop. All Wrapped Up is a 1983 compilation of singles by The Undertones, with Side One filled with A-sides, and B-sides on Side Two. A cassette must be the least desirable medium for such an arrangement, with a long rewind required if one just wants to hear the hits repeatedly. The Undertones were unapologetically provincial and anti-fashionable, with their songs sharply-written slices of life that pointedly avoided any mention of politics, or of the then-continuing violence in their native Derry. My favourite tracks are the obvious choices: 'Teenage Kicks', 'Jimmy Jimmy', 'Here Comes the Summer', 'My Perfect Cousin' & 'Wednesday Week'. Their later singles showed increased sophistication but lack the some of the straightforward charm of their earlier work. The B-sides, not unexpectedly, are mo...
Post a Comment
Read more

Ein Schattenspiel, etc.

Georg Friedrich Haas is a contemporary Austrian composer of "art music". "Haas's style recalls that of György Ligeti in its use of micropolyphony, microintervals and the exploitation of the overtone series; he is often characterized as a leading exponent of spectral music" says wikipedia. Only a relative few of his many compositions have been issued on CD - many more of them can be found on YouTube. On this 2020 disc are three of his works in which standard classical instrumentation is augmented and altered by "live electronics". Two are string quartets and one is for solo piano. Is a string quartet still really a quartet if there are meanwhile some other people with laptops busily twizzling the sound? There is a live performance video of the 'String Quartet No. 7', the first work on the disc, where the JACK Quartet are supplemented by a trio of sound boffins to realise the composition. Whether it's properly a quartet or a septet is neithe...
Post a Comment
Read more