What a weird tangent
I’ve collected and lost a lot of music in the last 20 or so years, and the things I let go didn’t have much of a hold on me anyway. So I’m not sure why I spent time looking for some of that stuff this morning while I did some Christmas shopping.
I’ve been listening to some best-of collections of R.E.M., Siouxsie and the Banshees and the Replacements. In the spectacularly-off chance I might find some Replacements on eMusic, I did a search for the band. Nada, of course. But somehow, I started clicking on some random links from that search and ended up on a page for All About Eve. Wow. That’s a name I hadn’t heard in a long time.
I listened to the excerpts of Return to Eden, and it got me thinking of other bands whose music I bought around that same time.
I remember a number of Depeche Mode clones at the time. I got my brother into a German band named Camouflage, who seem to still be around (and stuck in the early ’90s, evidently.) Myself, I gravitated to another clone based out of Los Angeles who called themselves Cause & Effect. It sounds like they’ve gotten more into electronica nowadays.
The ultimate search, though, was for a band called We Are Going to Eat You. I bought their one and only album Everywhen (on cassette) just because their name intrigued me. The music was all right, but it was a bit too homogeneous for me. I did a search for the band, and the only remnant of music I managed to find was a video. And it’s not even posted on YouTube.
I almost had a hankering to listen to that album again, just to remind myself why it didn’t really stay with me. I went so far as to find the album on eBay, but I resisted the temptation to acquire it.
Right now, I’m browsing an old, old list of cassettes I used to own. I sold them all to Half-Priced Books when I moved to a smaller apartment in 2002. There were some real relics there.
I just sampled a few tracks of Pump Up the Jam by Technotronic on iTunes. That album is so dated and so timeless. I remember a few years back when I was working at Waterloo Records, a customer asked about Last Exit. I recognized the name because I owned Iron Path a long time ago. I still wouldn’t mind seeing some In Tua Nua reissued. The Waitresses too for that matter. (Chris Butler has a weblog!)
A common complaint among people who work in the music industry is that there is too much music. That was true when I was back in high school. Who today are the Technotronics, Camouflages, Causes & Effects and We Are Going to Eat Yous? (Should I make "Yous" possessive?)