Finally!
boeanthropist | Cambridge, MA | 05/03/2000
(5 out of 5 stars)
"Since amazon hasn't provided a track listing, here's what's on here:1. Just A Conversation 2. Paradise Express 3. I Got Evil 4. Little gIrl's World 5. Tuankhamun 6. Mono Plane 7. Blue Flower 8. I'm All Alone 9. Who's Gonna Help Me Now 10. Small Hands of Stone 11. Sort Of 12. Heading For Kyoto 13. Jumpin' Jonah ** (bonus track)I've had this on tape for decades, but an actual copy of it has forever eluded me. Back in the mid-1980s, when ACNALBASAC NOOM first came out they were reissuing all the Faust albums, RecRec for some stupid reason only rereleased this in an absurdly limited pressing. I'm told Polygram/dor clutched the rights to it to their chest with the claws of a frigging harpy, they same way they have with the first two Faust albums. Anyway, finally it's out -- the first recorded document of "Naive Rock, the Douannier Rousseau sound." Taking advantage of Blegvad's association with Faust (the band, not the unfortunate Doctor...) and Faust's symbiotic producer Uwe Nettelback, Peter, anthony and Dagmar camped out at the Wümme compound and let the Faust folks fill in some of the gaps in their sound. It really is "naive rock", generally lacking all that dada subtlety which their later efforts would employ to such effect (and which has tended alternately to wax and wane in all three members' subsequent output) -- simple, tiny songs based around some charming joke/pun or pleasingly childlike rhyme scheme ("Just a Conversation"). Opal use to do a stoked cover of "Blue Flower" live; their Mazzy Star reincarnation recorded it less successfully about ten years ago and never bothered to credit Slapp Happy. "Tutankhamen" beat Steve Martin by a few years in the "first pop song written specifically about King Tut" category (unless you want to count Bob and Dor's "I'm a Mummy"). "I got Evil" is anything but, "I'm All Alone" shows Dagmar at her little-orphan-anniest, "Monoplane" is just that, a song about a monoplane, and "Heading For Kyoto" calls to mind the coy lyrical meditations-on-the-Orient-from-afar which would briefly capture and hold Brian Eno's attention a few years later. And they even slapped on a bonus track (sadly, not "Alcohol" which was on the bonus single that came with the RecRec reissue). As strange and charming as one of those long conversations you sometimes find yourself having with some enormously precocious child."
Track Listings (13) - Disc #1
