Pseudo Echo - Long Plays ‘83-’87
Ah, the heady days of junior high. That’s when I first encountered Australian pop group Pseudo Echo, as they carved an unlikely swath through the U.S. charts with their Euro-synth-ified remake of Lipps Inc.’s “Funkytown”. These days I file Pseudo Echo - and Love An Adventure, the album which spunoff the aforementioned single - under the heading of “guilty pleasures that, if I’m to be honest, I still like quite a lot.” And I do.
Which brings us to this album of remixes. The late 80s were a haven for extended mixes, some of them beautiful examples of the art of editing, others more like the result of sticking fifteen chimpanzees in a room with two tape decks and a big friendly pause button. One of my favorite such mixes, however, was the extended version of “Funkytown”, with its phasing drum solos and a kind of logical pacing that didn’t completely destroy the progression of the song. I had the 12″ inch single of that mix, back when buying vinyl was still an option in most cases, but wound up giving it away to someone later, so it’s good to have it back.
The real prize for me here, however, is the extended remix of “Destination Unknown”, another tune from Love An Adventure, that just about blew my mind. The original had such a cool backing track that I’d always wished I could hear it without vocals - I thought it’d make someone, somewhere, a dandy TV theme song. That teenage wish has finally been fulfilled by a mix that runs through one full verse and one full chorus with no vocals at all, and so help me, it’s still a cool song.
The rest of the tracks here - reworking tracks from both Love An Adventure and its follow-up Race - run the gamut from unremarkable dance floor fodder to remixes which actually reveal some depth to the original songs, which I’ve always felt was the best thing a remix can really hope to do. As few and far between as Pseudo Echo fans may be outside of Australia, I can at least recommend this to them. It’s a decent new take on some old favorites.
- Listening (5:35)
- A Beat For You (7:26)
- Stranger In Me (6:04)
- Don’t Go (6:40)
- Love An Adventure (6:21)
- Living In A Dream (5:39)
- Destination Unknown (5:48)
- Funky Town (6:35)
Released by: EMI Australia
Release date: 1990
Total running time: 49:54
Culled from the tour supporting of his excellent 2001 album Rockin’ The Suburbs, Ben Folds Live gives us a chance to hear Folds unplugged - just one man and his piano…as if that’s somehow a limitation. Folds makes the best of some of the more “produced” numbers by getting the audience to provide some backup (most notably on “Army”, which demonstrates that there were a lot of damn good singers in his audience that night, as does “Not The Same”). In other cases - “Fred Jones Part 2″, “The Luckiest” and “Jane” among them - he doesn’t need any elaborate backing; the songs are strong enough to stand on their own merits.
apologizes for stopping her performance for that explanation. Without even trying to be funny, he still is - and I think all this adds up to something called showmanship without being overly showy.
Quite possibly the first rock album to have a video game based on it (the arcade game Journey actually predates an Atari 2600 cartridge called Journey Escape by several months), Journey’s Frontiers is one of those pivotal, everybody-remembers-it, all-things-to-all-people albums of the 80s. On the good side, it’s got some of the group’s most memorable songs. On the downside, it takes us away from songs like “Lights” and starts Journey on its slippery downhill slope toward being yet another glam hair band.