Stuff Only I Listen To

Ever get the impression that you’re the only person listening to a given band or artist? It happens to me. It’s almost as common as the Mystery Melody Malady that overtakes me at various times of the year, compelling me to find and hear a song I know I’ve heard at some point in the past, and whether it’s through a CD purchase or a download, that curiosity must be quelled.

Okay, maybe that’s a phenomenon which is unique to me. I am, after all, a recovering ex-disc jockey, so there’s got to be something wrong with me.

But when the Mystery Melody Malady hits me, I’m likely to go digging through the CD shelf in search of music by the Umajets, the Rumour, Sunglass, Sharkbait, or any number of artists you may have never heard of, let alone heard.

I’m here to rectify that. And perhaps to inspire you to go on your own quest outside of the musical box.

Umajets
Like Jason Falkner, Roger Manning and Tim Smith of Umajets are both Jellyfish alumni, though Smith only played on the band’s second and final album in 1993. They later formed Umajets and quickly meshed into a folksy power-pop duo with a distinctive sound. Their debut release, Demolotion (1996), betrayed their Jellyfish roots a bit with a very plugged-in sound and some of the best 70s-style pop to emerge from anyone’s studio in the 90s, with songs such as “Daphne’s Disease” and “Fly” sticking out particularly. “Mother,” an all-acoustic ballad with some excellent vocal harmonies, was the one track that best exemplified their future direction.

Most of their second CD, Swollen & Tender (1999, available primarily as an import since these guys can’t seem to get their due in their native land), is also unplugged. It was a bit of a culture shock to me after having spent a couple of years with Demolotion, but I’ve gotten to like Swollen & Tender quite a bit since then, especially its unlikely Thomas Dolby cover tune, “Screen Kiss.” If you too are mourning the passing of Jellyfish, I highly recommend Umajets to you as a way to recapture that lost vibe.

Munchener Freiheit
This may be the one band you have the best chance of having heard out of this entire article. It was this group’s marvelously anthemic “Keeping The Dream Alive” that snapped a lot of people to attention at the tail end of the soundtrack album from Say Anything, and indeed that’s where almost any American fans the band has first heard Munchener Freiheit. Going by Freiheit outside of their native Germany, Munchener Freiheit has run the gamut from hair-band pseudo-rock to something a little more drum-machine-and-sequencer driven, but whatever instrumentation backs them, these five guys pack a vocal harmony punch like no one since Queen.

Their American debut, Fantasy (actually the same set of songs as the German edition, Fantasie, only with vastly reworked lyrics sung in perfectly accent-free English), went almost without notice despite being released in the wake of the aforementioned John Cusack cinematic opus. And this is the loss of the listening public, since Fantasy also had some synthesized impersonations of orchestral ensembles which gave the band a very ELO-ish sound which perfectly suiter their vocal wall of sound. One further album was released in English as Love Is No Science, and the band has since abandoned any aspirations toward breaking into the American market. If you can find Fantasy, walk straight to the checkout counter of whatever used music store you’re in and buy it. It’s worth it.

Ralf Illenberger
Ralf’s actually gotten some mention on things like NPR jazz and new age music showcase programs, but they barely scratch the surface of his repertoire. Ralf Illenberger got his start with fellow German guitarist Martin Kolbe, and the two became famous for setting up two amps and launching into their incredibly intricate jams wherever and whenever the fancy struck them. Illenberger launched his solo career with 1988’s Circle on the Narada label (noted for its roster of new age artists). Circle, now out of print but not that hard to find in a decent used music store, is still his best work in many ways – imagine, if you can, a swirling, guitar-based musical phrase which seems to aurally describe something circling or spiralling, and you get a good idea of Circle’s near-hypnotic sound. Illenberger’s long-time backing band, including saxophonist/multi-instrumentalist Budi Siebert, lends his music a distinctive sound, and Siebert’s sax takes center stage on a number of songs.

1990’s Heart & Beat experimented with more traditional rock stylings without really carving its own musical niche. In 1993, Illenberger released Soleil, another winning set built around a theme of the sun’s place in the life cycle; it also proved to be his final project on Narada. Since then, Illenberger’s home has been In Joy, a small label which has released his last three albums, Sedona, The Gateway (which explored some very Mike Oldfield-esque territory), and last year’s longform experiment in guitar-based symphony, The Kiss: Five Waves Of Bliss. These three have their strong points and weak points, but I still strongly advise seeking out Circle for an entry-level introduction to Ralf Illenberger. It’s some of the most incredibly relaxing stuff out there.

Sunglass
One of the most wildly obscure entries in my library, this is another duo, this time from Australia, and may even be a release that was intended solely for local consumption. How it got to me, don’t ask, but I have enjoyed it tremendously for the past five years or so. Simon Honisett and Penny Hewson don’t do anything vocally that couldn’t be done live on stage, but it’s their instrumentation, songwriting and arrangement that grabs my attention here. There’s no hesitation to add accordian, pedal steel guitar, or other things that usually aren’t part of the rock music repertoire. The whole thing has an almost lo-fi, home-studio country music feel to it (in some cases, the drums or other instruments are only heard in one channel of the stereo image, though this seems to be a stylistic/production choice rather than a limitation).

The lyrics have a truthful feel to them as well, whether they’re comforting (Most Days) or condemning (the post-fight bitterness of For Real). The music itself is sparsely arranged, and sometimes slips into a mesmerizingly repetitive groove that some might even consider a bit boring – but it works somehow. Again, as with Freiheit’s Fantasy, if you see this, get it – you’re not likely to see another one again if it vanishes. Want to know how obscure Sunglass is? During Napster’s heyday, I couldn’t find a single mention of them anywhere. And here I thought that was a unique level of obscurity reserved for my own home studio noodlings; at any rate, that obscurity is most certainly undeserved for Sunglass.

Oceania
The brainchild of New Zealand poet Hinewehi Mohi and Jaz Coleman, former bassist for the Killing Joke (and fellow Kiwi), Oceania – which released its self-titled debut in 1999 – is a bit of an attempt to combine cultural significance with new musical flavorings. The cultural significance part of the package comes in the form that this is quite possibly the only commercially released non-academic collection of music sung entirely in the native Maori language of New Zealand’s earliest Polynesian settlers, and almost certainly the only new music in that language in quite a while. The usual South Pacific guitar-and-drum sound, however, is a thing of the past – Oceania is awash in lush instrumentation and heavy, earthy beats, though it does retain a lot of authenticity; some songs feature a break during which a soloist performs a karanga (a kind of anguished spoken/almost-shouted vocal), and the polyrhythms, though not always played with traditional percussion, are dense and hypnotic, another hallmark of Maori music. Hopefully we’ll hear more out of Oceania.

The Rumour
The Rumour is a 1970s British oddity known only to conisseurs of a rarified brand of Brit music known as “pub rock” – a category also inhabited by such rock legends as Dave Edmunds and perhaps best examplified to the uninitiated by the band portrayed in the movie The Commitments. This particular band gets a little bit of a visibility boost – at least in trivia circles – by virtue of being Graham Parsons’ backing band. The Rumour broke out on their own and achieved a bit of a cult following in England, now fronted by Brinsley Schwartz (who also wrote the bulk of the group’s catchy tunes), and even wound up with some celebrity fans, including Mick Fleetwood of Fleetwood Mac fame. Of their handful of albums, The Rumour’s most distinctive is one also infamous for its anything-but-politically-correct title. Frogs, Sprouts, Clogs & Krauts tanked on the charts in Britain, owing largely to the fact that no radio station would publicize it with that title, and some stores wouldn’t even stock it. The centerpiece of it was a tongue-in-cheek song called “Euro,” which seems to back up the epithets of the album title with a few cultural stereotypes about Germany, Denmark and other European countries – when it’s actually a tribute to “the European man.” Somehow I don’t think anyone got the joke. This album is very hard to find, another see-one-in-ten-years specimen along with Fantasy and Sunglass, but worth the wait.

Sharkbait
A San Francisco-based punk/industrial group, Sharkbait owes a little something to The Art Of Noise, a little something to Enigma, and probably about $250 to the local junkyard. In addition to synths, samplers, some standard DJ equipment and a few other more or less traditional instruments, Sharkbait’s repertoire leans heavily on such instruments as the chainsaw, the fifty-gallon oil drum, and the junked car. This band – and I’m not even sure they’re still in operation – gets the beat by beating the hell out of stuff! Sometimes they sample it, and sometimes they just let the sounds of destruction run their aural course.

The one album of theirs I have, 1991’s Blowtorch Facelift (!), is uneven at best, but interesting – two tracks, both titled “God Devil Head,” feature nothing more than a heavily processed voice screaming “God! Devil!” over and over again. The album’s highlights are ultra-percussive tracks like “Vertical Assault” and the 14+ minute “War Crush;” the Enigma influence shows most on “Arabia Deserta” and the best piece on the entire CD, the hypnotically rhythmic “Song For Trees.” Given the odd nature of the completed product, I’m not sure I can recommend Sharkbait’s Blowtorch Facelift as wholeheartedly as I can the other albums covered in this review, but it’s definitely different. To some extent, one wonders if more recent works such as Blue Man Group’s Audio weren’t influenced by Sharkbait. You really have to be in a mood to listen to it from beginning to end, though I can thumb straight through to “Song For Trees” anytime.

This is the sort of stuff an ex-disc jockey comes across when trying to find music that’s as far away from top 40 radio as one can possibly get.

So there you have it – seven artists you’ve more than likely never heard of, let alone heard. But they’re all worth a listen, and if not a cure for the Mystery Melody Malady, then at least a darned tasty placebo. Trust me on this.