supersoul

A beautiful album, listened to and replayed several times. Unlike the dirty and oblique Howlin Rain, Lucero leans more towards the "reassuring" side of great American singer-songwriters like Springsteen, Petty, Bob Seeger, and John Cougar Mellencamp. Even (may God forgive me) if I close my eyes and imagine a big ballad like “On the way back home” or “The Wight of Guilt” sung in Italian, I think of Ligabue!!!! The strange thing is that the producer is David Lowery from Camper Van Beethoven, and personally, I would have never expected such a free spirit to produce an album so attentive to the tradition of the great American singer-songwriters mentioned. “I Can Get Us Out Of Here” is pure Springsteen in the style of "Thunder Road."

"always good and sincere," says anfoxx, huh? I want to be honest myself and say they've always seemed like fakes to me. Take a young lad coming from the poppettino of the New Dada, and given the British turn of the new wave, the two Chrisma dress in black, bleach their hair, and put on some piercings just to show the connection to punk, which will arrive here, as usual, late. As sfascia says, they were the precursors in Italy of what was already going wild abroad. I remember back then when they appeared on television, I would smirk at them—plagiarisms all over the place, both aesthetically and musically, sincere? Far from it.

But it's not true that in Italy people know little about Huey Lewis & the News; I believe that anyone who was old enough to drink a beer back then remembers them fondly. The Clovers even play as a supporting band on Elvis Costello's first album. They are a very American group that gave their best in the early albums up to Sports, and that best doesn't make them (in my opinion) immortal names to be passed down to posterity (those who weren't of drinking age). The fact is that each of us becomes fixated on a band and expects the whole world, from China to Patagonia, to recognize its value, which is immense to us. Sometimes this precious value is universally recognized, but other times we should aim a bit lower because, honestly, there are (thankfully) quite a few bands like Huey Lewis.

You really have to be naive to think that Naples was like this twenty years ago. Perhaps it was in the nostalgia that De Crescenzo felt for that of L'oro di Napoli. Twenty years ago, the Camorra was already instilling fear, and o' prufessore from Ottaviano would leave the corpses of enemies without heads in parked cars on the streets; they didn’t send out tax collectors like "Core ingrato" to collect bribes, offering extensions and taking advantage of the situation to do a side job like selling fake watches to shopkeepers forced to pay the protection money. A film born already old, magnificent in its exaggerated caricatured style.

In fact, this is not the cover of the original album that was released only a couple of years after Radio Birdman disbanded; it actually came out (for the tapes that Deniz Tek had) just when Younger, Tek, and Gilbert agreed for the Australian tour of New Race in 1981 along with former Stooges Ron Asheton and Dennis Thompson. This cover is from the 1995 reissue, or rather it's the one from 2002 that has the same photo as the 1995 version but with a different logo. Radio Birdman were devoted to the double Detroit deity of MC5/Stooges (as already mentioned in grey velvet, where I would replace the name of BOC with that of Blue Cheer), and in their concerts, they slipped in a lot of their covers, like Ramblin' Rose, TV Eye, Search & Destroy. The keyboards of the good Pyp Hoyle were always more supportive than Doors-like; they were more like garage style, for example, in the Fuzztones vein. Nevertheless, a big credit goes to the Pixies for digging up this great record, perhaps less forceful than the first, but still solid. The discussion about NME and Madonna, more than being trite and predictable, diminishes the greatness of the Radios, who do not deserve such comparisons even as a contrast. We shouldn't overlook the reunion, because if it gave us an album like "Zeno Beach" made with muscle and heart, then we must be grateful—it trumps and re-trumps any other promise from NME. ;)

cucamonga, I have the coin too, along with at least a hundred other old friends from my town, and it can't be found in the States...

Ah, here we go. So don't you think it's more correct to say "that in the early '80s, when there was new wave in Europe, nobody cared about it"?

And how do you know that in Europe no one cared about hymen? Have you read one of those books reviewed by sfasciacarrozze about the 500 or 1000 essential records for rock? Or were you there in the early seventies?

if they didn't know they were, someone tricked them, because Closer to Home was already a platinum record in 1970, and subsequently every album was a golden goose, that's why for me the "my" Grand Funk stops at "Closer to Home", after that they knew how to fill the safe. Ehehehe "you can clearly understand why they didn't have luck" I am still cracking up "LIFE IS NOW!

ehehe ugly panda returns to the scene of the crime, much better than the already reviewed Rein Sanction... Damn you for bringing back past shivers, listen to "Stand By" and you'll see the light. Chick Graining's voice hits my favorite tones, from Rod Stewart's albums with Beck (and the first three solo: stunning) to Ethan Miller from Howlin Rain. In this case, Anastasia didn't scream in vain, what do you say... shall we wait for Luca Fanelli's visit?