Tag: sistersofmercy

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30 records in 30 days from 2 collections from one household, day 23: Gang of 4, Hard.

A Challenge: 30 Platten in 30 Tagen / 30 records in 30 days Gang of 4, Hard

30 records in 30 days goes into the 23rd round: A piece of your heart can be found in every good car.

Today we will close my musical new wave era with one of the best albums from my whole collection, Hard by Gang of 4. As always, I took a quick look at Wikipedia to get an assessment of the music genre. It was quite surprising what I found about Gang of 4:

“The band played a stripped-down mix of punk rock, funk and dub, with a lyrical emphasis on the social and political ills of society. Gang of Four are widely considered one of the leading bands of the late 1970s/early 1980s post-punk movement. […] Their early 80s albums (Songs of the Free and Hard) found them softening some of their more jarring qualities, and drifting towards dance-punk and disco.”

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gang_of_Four_(band) )

As audacious as it sounds, it’s a very good description of the sound of this LP. Have fun listening to it.

Man with a good car: https://youtu.be/XvNmQGol9FM
Woman town: https://youtu.be/bR-y-I9qTUk
Is it love: https://youtu.be/xQOJ6Va03B0

Stay tuned

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30 records in 30 days from 2 collections from one household, day 22: Joy Division, Substance 1977-1980.

A Challenge: 30 Platten in 30 Tagen / 30 records in 30 days Joy Division, Substance

30 records in 30 days goes into the 22nd round: love will tear us apart, and then we travel to Warshaw.

After talking about the commercialization of punk yesterday, today we’re going to take a step back. Joy Division is for me – similar to Alien Sex Fiend – a missing link between the synthesizer-heavy new wave music and the punk of the seventies. This album is really good, but the group lacks the anarchistic sound and synth experiments of Adrian Sex Fiend.

Don’t misunderstand, this in no way devalues the group’s sound, they are just different. Joy Division are so unexcitingly punk-oriented to me that this album is simply a joy to listen to. Quite typical for me: “Leaders of man” and “Warshaw”. It is also not aggressive (nice sample “Love will tear us apart”), like some other punk records, where you would like to tear down the neighbor’s house after two times listening.

Love will tear us apart: https://youtu.be/zuuObGsB0No
Leaders of man: https://youtu.be/s4prQ11orEM
Warshaw: https://youtu.be/gtSFtvXgeRk

Stay tuned

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30 records in 30 days from 2 collections from one household, day 21: PIL, This is not a Love Song.

A Challenge: 30 Platten in 30 Tagen / 30 records in 30 days PIL, This is not a love song

30 records in 30 days goes into the 21st round: no more love songs….

This song is a very nice example of what can happen when you get pulled onto the commercial side of the force. Or in other words: what happens when the hard core punks start making money.The Sex Pistols singer Jonny Lydon founded PIL (Public Image Limited), his personal successor band to the Sex Pistols. The pure punks will have despised him for it, I celebrated him. And by the way: this is not a white sheet of paper, this is the original record cover.

This is not a love song: https://youtu.be/Az_GCJnXAI0

Stay tuned

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30 records in 30 days from 2 collections from one household, day 20: Sisters Of Mercy, Walk Away.

A Challenge: 30 Platten in 30 Tagen / 30 records in 30 days Sisters of Mercy, Walk away

30 records in 30 days goes into its twentieth round: I’m gone for a while.

Now we come to one of the groups I celebrated not only during my student days, but right up to here and now. The Sisters of Mercy. And for once, there’s a story to go with them. I will never forget the one and only Sisters concert I went to with a friend. I’ve forgotten the location, because of course I didn’t keep the ticket.

The atmosphere was fascinating. The singer Andrew Eldritch in a black coat, the rest of the band members in black clothes on stage. In the middle of a dry ice fog. Indirectly lit from the back of the stage. That’s how I remember the whole stage set-up. Ingenious.

The fact that you could only see the four of them dimly created a very strange, unreal atmosphere. As if there were no people on stage, but ghosts or aliens. Brilliantly done. Something like that should be realised in a club.

Here are the two most popular tracks from the maxi-single:

Walk Away: https://youtu.be/dxucr5TSxDg
Poison Door: https://youtu.be/zsccNOHMVro

Stay tuned