ROCK • A • RAMA

ROCK A RAMA

This month’s Rock A-Ramas were written by Richard Riegel and Richard C. Walls

BUSTER WILLIAMS—Dreams Come True (Buddah)::Much of this is sappy, as you’d expect, but just the weirdness of trying to convert a bass player into a commercially acceptable lead soloist makes the record worth nothing. Also pianist Kenny Barron and trumpeter Eddie Henderson lend jazz authenticity to a few cuts and the best of this sounds like a very low-keyed bop session while the worst sounds like a kind of ersatz disco. A doomed project, probably, but not without interest. R.C.W

THE TOURISTS—Reality Effect (Epic);: Okay,' so a few other scribes beat me to the Byrds and Renaissance comparisons in pigeonholing these coed Limey popsters. To get on with the annotating, let’s just say that the Tourists are so refined they make the Talking Heads sound like Sam the Sham on his wooliest nights—you fans who queue up for the powerpop proprieties will know who you are. Yes, and the Tourists would sound great on the radio if the democratic-eclectic (ca. ’65) playlists ever make a comeback. Some overexcitable types might even characterize this LP as “prepsychedelic,” when they hear Ann Lennox’s plunging-neckline organ on “In the Morning (When the Madness Has Faded).” R.R. GILL SCOTT-HERON & BRIAN JACKSON—1980 (Arista)::The usual collection of tracts, political, mystical, social, blended with joyously insinuating music. Scott-Heron never minces words and wouldn’t dream of sacrificing the thrust of his polemic for the sake of a welltuned phrase—he’s be a righteous bore if it weren’t for his melliflously soulful voice and mastery of the light-handed funk tune. For people who like to mellow out and be nagged at the same time. R.C.W.

URBAN VERBS (Warner Bros.)::File under “Talking Heads-related (sibling division),” as Urban Verbs vocalist/lyricist Roddy Frantz just happens to be Chris Frantz’s brother, not to mention Tina Weymouth’s brother-in-law. And, to really lay it on thick, bassist Linda France is a real-life graduate of the prestigious Rhode Island School of Design, so you know these kids are expertly trained to out-Bauhaus the pop competition any day of the week. Roddy Frantz even phrases like head Head David Byrne, though his voice never ever crafcks, thereby taking some of the edge off the modern workday neuroses the Urban Verbs hope to portray. Still, there are

m^ny nice lyrical touches, as in “The Good Life,” a Kinks-style suburban vignette updated with last month’s “convenience stores” and “houseplants” inserted among the traditional “ranch house” boogermen. Forewarned is fourarmed. R.R.

CRUISING: Music From the Original Soundtrack (Lorimar)::Not so discoid as you gaybaiters are clucking right about now, neither is this soundtrack as exploitative as all the alternative-lifestyle folks claim the movie to be. Rather, it’s a neat collection of all types of contemporary pop (sexual preference optional), of tunes not readily available in yer average K-Mart before now. Three (count ’em, 3) cuts by the label-less, still-essential Willy DeVille; one-wayor-another street theatre from Rough Trade; back-to-the-punk-basics from the Germs; angry young John Hiatt ripe for more; even the rollicking good time disco (yes!) bombastics of Mutiny .

R.R.

THE SIREN (Posh Boy)::T don’t pretend to understand all the L.A. punk-chauvinism intramural rivalries that apparently impelled the release of this collection, but I am gonna say that if the limeys are gonna go & get refined on us again, like they did in the late 60’s, I’ll keep this flying frisbee of a disc on my turntable night and day. Pure! noise cuts the mustard best of all, I always say. Shucks, of the three bands on here, only the (real-) adolescent Red Cross are from L.A. anyway, but their songs are shorter and

more raggedy than even the Ramones’, so lively that you end up finding S.F.’s 391 and'Utah’s (!) Spittin’ Teeth just as charming. Punk-plunk once more, as extracted from the wild, the innocent, and the East-of-Eden shufflers. How come the Cretones didn’t know about this stuff?

R.R.

ANGEL CITY—Face to Face (Epic)::Steve Cummings of the Sports assured me that the Angels would be the next big thing to emerge from his Australian homeland, and he guaranteed ’em to be AC-DC-like bowserwowsers with, however, rather more thoughtful lyrics. Somewhere in mid Pacific the promised powerchorders became “Angel City” (presumably to avoid confusion with those virginal clothes horses whck.record for Casablanca), and their American debut LP fqllows the Sports’ game plan to the letter, by compiling diverse selections from their miscellaneous Australian releases. As such, Face to Face is a regular tour de force of pop styles of the late 70’s, from heavy metal to punk to power pop and back across the International Date Line again. Redeeming Commonwealth-pop vocal accents abound in these grooves. R.R.

THE TAZMANIAN DEVILS (Warner Bros.):: Is this stuff only cosmetically “power-pop”...? Ah, here it is, these guys are from Marin County, and the music certainly is mellowdic, as “they” say up in them thar hills. Almost exactly Pablo. Cruise, if those jazzbos were just coming onto the scene nowadays, post-Knack. Lyrics generally worthy of Kansas’ kaffee-klatschers, though the T. Devils’ “West Coast” is a struggling, tortured, half-articulated beginning at satirizing the Califhippie myth from the inside. For that, and for'lifting a genuine Anais Nin title (“Spy in the House of Love”) whole, I’ll grant these Californian perpetrators 25 extra points. R.R. MI-SEX—Computer Games (Epic)::Who happen to be authentic New Zealanders who had to go to Australia to make it big. Per MiSex, “Graffiti Crimes” are committed “in shopping malls” (complete with aerosol paint spray v sound effects), and their synthesizer-riffed sermonettes provide timely, topical psychodrama for us family types. Mi-Sex are gentle satirists, apprentices in the Kinks’ hallowed work-release program ofpoking fun at hapless suburbanites (cf. “Stills”, not about Stephen), and they’re turning into Shangri-La Lane about now. R.R.