ROCK • A • RAMA

Rock a Rama

LORI LIEBERMAN—Letting Go (Millenium):: The big number here is "Jingle," which chronicles Lori's failed audition to become the voice that sings the Burger King anthem. She doesn't get the job because she can't imitate any famous singers, and it's pretty ironic that she found this strange. Guess she never had a Whopper. B.A.

DEAD FINGERS TALK—Storming The Reality Studios (Pye)/GLOpiA MUNDI—IIndividual (RCA):; There surely are some strange people emerging from British record companies at the moment. D6ad fingers talk and so do dead heads and hands and feet. The question is what they talk about and these days we get lyric sheets to spell it all out. The message is Gothic gloom and Lou Reed still has a lot to answer for. Mind you, scrap the lyric sheets and I'd like both these records quite a lot. The Dead Fs are less pretentious, more fluent, neatly guitared, while Gloria Mundi, despite their awfully art school-cute image, are nuttier, a little bit UK anarchistic. Recommended. S.F.

BERNARD HERRMANN—Torn Curtain (Film Music Collection/Warner Bros.)::"Theirs is a flesh creeping sound, almost literally, physically, sick unto death, one which could be used as a peculiarly and diabolically refined species of torture; for nobody could live with such a sound over an extended period without becoming a raging lunatic." Sounds like Edgar Allan Foe on the Sex Pistols but actually it's a nugget from the otherwise sane and staid liner notes of this recording of Herrmann's infamous Torn Curtain score which Universal bullied Hitchcock into rejecting as not commercial enough. Having seen the film the rejection is a bafflement—Hitch's lazy $py flick could have only been helped by Herrmann's intensely Bosch-like landscaping. The quote above refers to Herrmann's use of twelve flutes (Elmer Bernstein conducts the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra here, Herrmann being dead) and obviously this record is only for the hard core. Others are advised to stick to their Star Wars albums. R.C.W..

MICHAEL STANLEY BAND—Cabin Fever (Arista)::Cleveland's Michael Stanley has perfected the act of bubbling under to an art. With a new label and producer (Robert John Lange of Graham Parker and City Boy fame), he's finally come up with an LP that crosses faceless Midwest rock with the genuinely talented song stylings of his first solo LP years ago. This record won't set the Cuyahoga river on fire, but it rocks along with a nice clip. Excepting "Why Should Love Be This Way," where Clive Davis claims co-producer credits in his attempt to Manilowhandle Stanley's sound into submission (and makes a case for keeping Clive miles from any studio where an artist under the age of 40 is recording), Cabin Fever is one of those good albums that may never approach greatness, but just might help keep Stanley's catalog in the top ten of the cut out bins. R.P.

THE AKRON COMPILATION (Stiff)::Some American music, I'm glad to say, is more easily available in England than it is in America. This is a wonderful Stiff package of the Akron sound (and smell—the sleeve stinks of rubber). Not that there is a Akron sound but lots of different ones—e.g. Jane Aire's assertive feminist primitivism, Tin Huey's witty obscurity, Rachel

Sweet's Midwestern country punk, the Bizarros' flash velvet, the Waitresses' eccentric tribute to the Shangri-Las, the Rubber City Rebels'" Nuggets out-take, Idiots Convention's version of English progressive rock, circa 1970, Terraplane's version on Jonathan Richmond, circa 1978, Chi Pig's devo ted chanting, etc. Everything sounds better together than apart and this must be better than anything that's actually happening in Akron. S.F.

This month's Rock-a-ramas were written by B/Hy Altman, Simon Frith, Richard C. Walls, Rob Patterson and Richard Riegel.

U.K. SQUEEZE (A&M)::As my everperceptive spouse pointed out, this Angloid New Wave-cum-beefcake aggregation just may be the answer to Indiana's (& the World's) own muffdivin' Gizmos. Yep, wholesale lyrical apostasy, that's the name of the game. A little Deaf School for these long hot summer nights, i.e., Limey-incubated humor ("Wild Sewerage Tickles Brazil") put to Jphn Cale's titanium pacemaker. And just check out that catalogue of fetishes in "Out Of Control"; this band is nothing if not entertaining! R.R.

ADVERTISING—Jingles (EMI)::Jingles indeed! What we have here is a self-consciously cute set of tongue-in-cheek pop, something like early lOcc but prettier. The lyrics aren't as clever as they think they are but the tdnes are and this is the sort of music which could give teenybop a good name. S.F.

BENNY MARDONES—Thank God For Girls (Private Stock):: Here's a fascinating item —an album of love songs by a singer/sdngwriter who is indeed very much in love—O&ith himself. "So far in my life/Weil, I met a lotta girls/ And it's really hard/Not to take em all home," he sings on the title cut. Here's my favorite: "I used to be a lady's fool/Pd love em just as long as they're breathing/But now I've changed my ways/I don't put it where's there's not any feeling"—charitable bloke, ain't he? This record is so offensive that when the girl hangs up the phone on him on "All For A Reason" you're tempted to applaud. I think I'll keep this one; it'll help explain women's lib to my grandchildren.

B.A.