Mr. Mister - "Welcome to the Real World" (1985)

Rating: 3

Mr. Mister was a group of L.A. session musicians who formed in the early 80s to put their own spin on the pop-rock style of bands like Toto and Chicago (that sentence should tell you all you need to know about this band, but I shall proceed nonetheless). Indeed, lead singer Richard Page was offered the opportunity to lead both those groups, but declined and was rewarded with two #1 hits in "Kyrie" and "Broken Wings." Commercially, Mr. Mister was briefly very successful before fading into oblivion. Artistically, not so much.

I listened to the first three tracks on the first side and heard nothing but flat stadium rock with dopey keyboards and sludgy power chords in place of riffs. So I was prepared to turn the record off before even making it to the end of side one but then noticed that the three major hits on the album (the two aforementioned, plus top 10 single "Is It Love") were all aligned in a row on the second side. I'm not sure if Mr. Mister thought that would give them some credibility or perhaps force listeners to pay attention to their faceless music of the first side, but either way, definitely not a good move. Sometimes you just have to admit your limitations and front-load the album because that's all anyone wants to hear anyways.

Of course, it's not like those hits were particularly good, which I strongly suspect to be correlated with Mr. Mister's subsequent decline. "Kyrie" has the catchiest chorus on the record but said chorus is indistinguishable from Toto's "Africa." "Broken Wings" is the only song here that I recognized ("take... these broken wings") and I would call it the worst song on the album if I had actually listened to every song on the album. It's a prototypical power ballad, and like many 80s power ballads of ill repute, the group seemed to think that playing the entire song at a dragging tempo and having Page offer up somber platitudes is the same thing as writing a heart-wrenching love song. It isn't. 

So while allmusic.com may give this album four stars by default for being the Mr. Mister album with the most hits, that just makes me terrified to imagine what their other albums might be like. Blue bin!

Blue Bin Singles

As I tend to be an album-oriented person, I have found myself neglecting the small pile of singles that I acquired as part of my record collection. Though there are some worthy singles to be found in it (i.e, The Beatles' "Real Love"), there is also, of course, much to be jeered at and scorned. This post is about those unlucky singles that fall into the latter category.

The Young Moderns - "Body Won't Obey/(she's a) Disposable Girl"


The Young Moderns supplant whatever random jazz artist last held the title for Most Obscure Musical Act in my collection. My customary search on allmusic.com turned up no results for the group whatsoever. I then located this very single on rateyourmusic.com, with exactly one rating on its page and no other works by the Young Moderns listed. For this apparently hip, youthful group that featured both a male and female Jamie (as I inferred from the back of the single cover), this single was their one chance to make it big. And with the results sounding like the Sex Pistols if Yoko Ono were their lead singer, they failed.

Billy Ocean - "When the Going Gets Tough, the Tough Get Going"


Robotic R&B dance-pop lacking the charm of Ocean's most famous single "Get Out of my Dreams (And Into My Car)." The most entertaining thing about this single for me is that the B-side is an instrumental version of the A-side, as if anyone would ever want to hear five minutes of a three-note electronic bass line played over a drum machine.

Dion - "Abraham, Martin & John/From Both Sides Now"


From the crooner most famous for "The Wanderer," this single found Dion attempting to recast himself as a sensitive folk-rock performer. On the A-side, Dion contemplates the assassinations of Lincoln, King and Kennedy but has nothing interesting or meaningful to say ("But it seems the good they die young/I just looked around and he's gone") nor despite laying on strings and organ, is the song anything but boring.

R.J.'s Latest Arrival - "Shackles"


Dating back to 1983, this was, for all I know, this was a pioneering rap single. Unfortunately, this R.J. or perhaps his latest arrival had yet to pioneer quality in rap. Once again, the B-side is an instrumental so you get to hear a lot of scratched turntables if you're into that kind of thing.

Art & Dotty Todd - "Chanson D'Amour"/Johnny Crawford - "Cindy's Birthday"


Pre-Beatles pap. To make a Bayesian inference, the odds of me enjoying a song by the performers Art and Dotty Todd are close to zero.

J. Frank Wilson and the Cavaliers - "Last Kiss/Hey Little Girl"


Hey, it's that song Pearl Jam covered in the 1990s! But there can only be one great early 60s song about the death of a teenager and that song is "Leader of the Pack." Okay, I like this song too, but it's not the original version, and this obscure cover isn't particularly noteworthy.

Mike Cross - "Rock 'n' Rye" (1980)

Rating: 4

This album is definitely one of the most obscure records in my collection, having obtained exactly one rating on rateyourmusic.com (and zero reviews). Even allmusic.com didn't review this album, though Mike Cross does at least have his own biography. Because of this, I know that he went to UNC-Chapel Hill, thus joining James Taylor in the annals of mediocre musicians hailing from the town where I currently live. Oops, did I spoil the surprise?

Although I had the impression from the album cover of the other Mike Cross album I own (yes, I have two) that this would be some sort of Irish folk album, it is in fact mostly straight-up country, with some occasional electric guitar and fiddle thrown in. It is at least 'old-school' country, i.e., not just an insular ode to the redneck lifestyle like modern country, but with lyrical subject matter mostly about broken hearts and getting drunk. I am not particularly inclined towards even this kind of music, but much like with blues, the songs are all pretty much the same, so it is safe to say that a country record succeeds largely on the passion and sincerity of the singer. And although Cross seems to be a genial fellow, his slow songs aren't wracked and anguished enough for my liking, and his fast songs not funny enough. I'm not going to pop a boner for just any country record made before 1990, so there's only one judgment I can give Rock 'n' Rye: blue bin!

James Taylor - "Gorilla" (1975)

Rating: 4

Frankly, I can't stand James Taylor, Chapel Hill lineage or no. To quote allmusic.com, "when people use the term 'singer/songwriter' in praise or in criticism, they're thinking of James Taylor." Indeed Taylor is who I associate with the term "singer-singwriter" and I absolutely mean it in criticism the majority of the time. Gorilla is a fairly lightweight album, exploring more poppy acoustic arrangements, so isn't exactly like the man's most famous (or infamous) work, but does share the same critical flaw that there isn't a single memorable melody to be found on the record. Perhaps I exaggerate, but this record does nothing to correct my impression that behind Taylor's warm, smooth vocals and pleasant guitar playing, there isn't much interesting musically here. Lyrically, there are some interesting moments, but this isn't exactly supposed to be a 'deep' album anyways, not that it would impress me much more if it were. Someday I'll listen to Sweet Baby James and decide once and for all if there is anything in James Taylor's discography I would enjoy, but if there is, it certainly isn't here. Blue bin!

Stanley Turrentine - "Have You Ever Seen The Rain" (1975)

Rating: 4

Basically the same thing as his 1974 release Pieces of Dreams. Slightly better due to two tracks ("T's Dream," "Tommy's Tune") which are much closer to classic jazz than the orchestrated pap that makes up the rest of the album, but there's still the matter of the orchestrated pap that makes up the rest of the album. On the other hand, his token pop/rock cover is less inspired this time around since jazz CCR makes significantly less sense than jazz Stevie Wonder. But on the third (?) hand, this one has a pretty sweet album cover. Obviously I don't have much else to say besides the obvious: blue bin!

Stanley Turrentine - "Pieces of Dreams" (1974)

Rating: 4

For some reason, I own three records by tenor saxophonist Stanley Turrentine. In the early days of this blog, I reviewed his 1976 release Everybody Come On Out and (barely) decided it was worth keeping. Today, I feel not quite so sympathetic and am reconsidering my verdict on his other record as well. If I were more of a jazz connoisseur, I suspect I would be grievously offended by Turrentine's 70s schtick. The reason is that the music is heavily orchestrated, with saxophone solos played over the strings in a warm, inoffensive tone, never straying too far from the main melody. In other words, easy listening, dentist's office jazz. 

I am not a jazz connoisseur, so it's hard for me to feel too outraged by this material. But I still found it to be, on the whole, boring. I'm sure it would work fine as the soundtrack to a TV show or as faintly heard background music riding in an elevator, but as active listening material, it failed to engage me. The only potential point of interest for me is that there is a version of Stevie Wonder's "Evil" on the second side, but when all Turrentine does is play the vocal melody on saxophone, it's hard to see the point. Sure, the chord changes are still cool, but Stevie's version is far more interesting. Blue bin!

Eddie Money - "Playing for Keeps" (1980) & "Can't Hold Back" (1986)

       

Rating: 2 and 4

I didn't think I had anything interesting to say about one Eddie Money album, so why not review two at once! Even better for this sort of premise, allmusic.com gave 1980's Playing for Keeps 2 stars but gave 1986's Can't Hold Back 4.5 stars, which potentially makes for an interesting compare and contrast exercise. Was Money really that much more successful with his 1986 effort than his 1980 effort? And if so, why?

Wait for it.

Wait for it.

No, of course not. Both albums suck. 

Okay, Can't Hold Back is definitely better. On Playing for Keeps, Money attempts to cast himself as a straight-up classic rocker, but his music lacks any of the elements that make good classic rock successful, and winds up boring and faceless. Eddie's voice is like Rod Stewart's without the rasp. In other words, it's not really much like anything at all. 

On Can't Hold Back, Mr. Money (or perhaps his production team) conceded that he was really in this for radio success, added keyboards and horns, more melodic choruses, and the result was his most famous single ("Take Me Home Tonight") as well as renewed commercial success. I could almost be convinced that this is a good album, because I can't deny that the songs have hooks, and it's surprisingly consistent. And then Money's lifeless vocals remind me that there is really no reason to listen to even Can't Hold Back, presumably his best, more than once. Blue bin for all!