Faust - 'Seventy One Minutes Of...' (ReR)

Usually if the duration is in the title, I find the task of listening daunting. Maybe that's the reason I never gelled with Seventy One Minutes Of Faust, which is really a combination of their last LP Munich & Elsewhere with some 70s-recorded miscellany, released much later. This hodgepodge lack of cohesion is also part of the problem - even though there's some great, zany art rockin' at play here (the blown out "Baby', or 'Don't Take Roots'), it's certainly not a coherent, self-standing statement like So Far or IV. And the presentation is murky and confusing - the titles are even hard to read on the back of the CD, the artwork rote and uninspiring. It feels a bit like the Faust version of Incesticide, scraping the barrel for completists, at least before their 90s reunion and subsequent split into two competing strains of Faust. Listening today, it's a lot better than I remembered it being, though there's no classic cuts, and the fact that there are seven tracks named 'Party' makes it hard for any to be memorable. These 'Party' tracks are actually the stronger material, though I'm not sure how many of them were intended for release; the fidelity is very crisp (the electronics on 'Party 1' float above the gurgling improv swamp, sounding like something from a more contemporary electronica-indie scene) and they just feel a bit jammy, even for Faust. There's some alternate versions of known Faust commodities; the first 'Party' is a slower take on the song from the beginning of Tapes, with a really nice layer of spacey guitar that brings this into Cosmic Jokers territory. 'Party 5' sounds like British art-rock, maybe some post-Art Bears RIO band. The closer, 'Party 4', includes everything and the kitchen sink (and lots of babbling in English and German). Despite how satisfying most of these tracks are if taken individually, it somehow doesn't add up to feel like much. Yet this stays on the shelf, and will be upgraded to a vinyl edition if one comes by, because, well... you never know.

Family Fodder - 'Savoir Faire: The Best Of' (Dark Beloved Cloud)

When Dark Beloved Cloud released Savoir Faire in '98 it came a time when this collective seemed defunct and long-forgotten; nothing had been heard since 1983's somewhat messy All Styles and this hybrid post-punk/experimental/art-pop band was music to my ears. The title track, opening things off, set the pace - a fast bit of aggressive art-pop with a French-sung bridge and two members of This Heat playing along. I was hooked and fell in love with this disc, which to this day is still the go-to Family Fodder record for me. Probably the greatest hits nature here is beneficial for this band, a ragtag collective that mostly gravitated around Alig Fodder and Dominique Levillain; being a completist gets you a few extra gems for sure (some of which we talked about on the vinyl blog) but the average Joe can survive for a long time with just this. There was a time almost 20 years ago where I could not believe such crazy sounds were hidden in rock's recent past; this was before the reissue fatigue set in and this sort of very British experimentation wasn't as commonplace. There's still an audacity and ridiculousness to 'Playing Golf (With My Flesh Crawling)', merging Residents/Snakefinger riffs and Eno-esque vocal delivery into something so fundamentally absurd it's become a classic. That it hews to a clever pop structure as well, with hooks, tension and release all delivered at the appropriate moments, is also key; Family Fodder are experimentalists in affect, lyrics, and production a lot of the songwriting is just bubblegum. Take 'Cold Wars', which in an alternate universe would have been a chart topping smash, or 'Film Music' (spoiler: it's empty); if only this songwriting talent had been used for less Gestalt purposes! But this is how I love it, a demented kitchen-sink mentality that did a lot to inspire my own music at the end and in the years following. Most of the Family Fodder singles are on here, which is nice as they are harder to find; this includes the double-punch of the Blondie 'Sunday Girls' cover (done actually pretty straight) and then the spastic rave-up 'DEBBIE HARRY', which at the time this came out was more well-known via Unrest's two sorta-covers, 'Winona Ryder'. A lot of British music in the early 80s was embracing dub and reggae forms and you hear a bit of this in Family Fodder, most notably in the dub take on an Erik Satie Gymnopede (or is it a Gnossiene?), though the curation of this disc otherwise stays away from that tip. Even still, it's a long way from an Adrian Sherwood production, being too self-consciously goofy. The last few tracks are where things trail off, containing their absurd 'Dinosaur Sex', a song I don't actually enjoy yet I can't imagine releasing a representative disc of Family Fodder without it, and a few later pieces from the 80s, previously unreleased, none particularly memorable. The last few years have got the band back together, though they haven't seemed to make much of a splash and I personally haven't heard any of it.