everything marked, everything 'membered

My brother paid a visit to Armagideon Time HQ last Saturday and asked if he could borrow some CD's from our extensive archives. Some of the albums he was looking for fell into the as-yet-undigitized category, which meant a taking a trip to the attic to mine for musical gold amongst the piles of haphazardly stacked retrological detritus. (The above picture is extremely out of date. Multiply the stuff depicted by a factor of three for a more accurate idea of the present state of affairs.)

I tend to forget it until a third party points it out to me, but the wife and I really do have a surfeit of really weird and geeky stuff. I suppose we could make some respectable money hawking some of it on eBay and the collector's market, but neither of us are the type who part with things easily. You will take my promotional Lunar: Eternal Blue punching Ghaleon puppet when you pry it from my cold dead hand.

As I spent part of my Saturday afternoon enaged in a high-stakes solo game of packing crate Jenga (where defeat meant being crushed beneath a stack of vinyl LP's), I was astonished by the number of albums I had either completely forgotten about or didn't realize we owned in the first place. Most of the latter category were purchased by my wife during the dark days of the mid-1990's, when she cast her nets wide in hopes of finding something, anything worth listening to amidst the seas of soundalike alternapap.

Here are a few choice selections pulled from some albums my brother passed on borrowing (in favor, I might add, of Bananarama's Greatest Hits):

Servotron - I AM NOT A (Voice Activated Child Identicon) (from No Room For Humans, 1996) - Working in a similar vein as Devo, only with the devolution aspect jettisoned in favor of robotic rebellion, Servotron was one of a small cluster of acts (along with the Pulsars and Satisfact) which attempted (without much success) to keep the new wave/postpunk flame alive during the Clinton Era.

Unfortunately the unwashed masses were too busy listening to The Wallflowers and the Goo Goo Dolls to notice. In a just world, a band whose repertoire includes songs about Magnus, Robot Fighter and (in the track featured above) Vicki from Small Wonder (as a murderdroid) should have rocketed to the top of the charts.

Slowdive - Catch the Breeze (from Just for a Day, 1991) - Though I'm our household's designated shoegaze aficionado, it was my wife (a woman apparently immune to Lush's hypnotic allure) who bought this album. The purchase was based on having heard some of the band's later work used in the Doom Generation, a movie the wife didn't particularly care for but whose soundtrack caught her attention. Little did she know that she'd develop a crush on James Duval a few years down the line.

Tuscadero - Latex Dominatrix (from The Pink Album, 1996) - Femvox indie rock with power pop leanings out of Washington, D.C. Another "deserved better than they got" band, my wife bought this album after catching a live in-store performance of theirs at the Newbury Comics in Harvard Square, and she used to listen to it quite a bit. Maybe this post will rekindle her interest. (Or, in all likelihood, she'll just listen to The Gits' first album for the umpteenth time.)