Cassettes in the Car
So I still have not fixed the CD player in my car and have resorted to digging through my crates of tapes to listen to, occasionally finding interesting stuff along the way.
I saw a video for Tyranny, the title track from the sole release by The Stabilizers; a synth pop/AOR band from Erie of all places. It kind of has that mark of "Go West and Depeche Mode meet Michigan". If anything, the album was a pleasant disappointment. It was not as well crafted and produced as a Go West or having as much depth as Depeche Mode, but it had enough meeting in the middle to make for a good debut worth repeated listens and hope for subsequent efforts.
Alas, no subsequent efforts were to come of them.
They wrote some decent lyrics that in spots appeared to mine territory similar to the Fixx or Simple Minds, with anthemic hooks. The problem was the production was a little flat, making much of the album sound like a-Ha filler tracks; good enough, but a little sterile. They should have gotten someone like Rupert Hine (the Fixx, Saga, Rush) or Walter Becker (Steely Dan) to bring out the full potential of the material...but paying them probably would have killed the recording budget in one fell swoop.
If you find this little guy in a cutout tape bin for 2 quarters as I did, andyou like that mid-80s synth pop sound, pick this up. I literally grabbed it after 10 years of never seeing the album anywhere in shops or even online (although apparently a cd reissue was released in Germany not too long ago) and consider it a useful waste of half a dollar.
I saw a video for Tyranny, the title track from the sole release by The Stabilizers; a synth pop/AOR band from Erie of all places. It kind of has that mark of "Go West and Depeche Mode meet Michigan". If anything, the album was a pleasant disappointment. It was not as well crafted and produced as a Go West or having as much depth as Depeche Mode, but it had enough meeting in the middle to make for a good debut worth repeated listens and hope for subsequent efforts.
Alas, no subsequent efforts were to come of them.
They wrote some decent lyrics that in spots appeared to mine territory similar to the Fixx or Simple Minds, with anthemic hooks. The problem was the production was a little flat, making much of the album sound like a-Ha filler tracks; good enough, but a little sterile. They should have gotten someone like Rupert Hine (the Fixx, Saga, Rush) or Walter Becker (Steely Dan) to bring out the full potential of the material...but paying them probably would have killed the recording budget in one fell swoop.
If you find this little guy in a cutout tape bin for 2 quarters as I did, andyou like that mid-80s synth pop sound, pick this up. I literally grabbed it after 10 years of never seeing the album anywhere in shops or even online (although apparently a cd reissue was released in Germany not too long ago) and consider it a useful waste of half a dollar.
posted by theloniusfunk at 4:10 AM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home