Loquacious Music

The “new” album by The Atlantics is finally available. Here’s my review for kevchino.com. Feel free to visit The Atlantics @ MySpace to find out more about this incredible, lost band.

The Atlantics
The Atlantics
Something.Hot Communications
2006
Album
13 Tracks
Rating: 9

My sister started college at Tufts University in the fall of 1979. I had been born the previous July. While I was eating, sleeping, and pooping, she was attending college in Boston. By the time she graduated in 1983, I was reciting the alphabet and going to daycare.

The early 1980s were a great time to go to college in Boston. Frankly, I’m jealous. Talking Heads, The B-52s, the Cars…All of my favorite bands were starting up and taking off while I was learning how to walk. My sister heard, and saw, them all. What a time to be alive.

Fortunately, one of those Boston bands, The Atlantics, have snuck back into our new wave consciousness with the belated release, in 2006, of their second album. Formed in 1976, they took Boston by storm. Their live shows, now chronicled only on dusty video tapes and on YouTube, were incendiary. B. Wilkinson, founding member, main songwriter, and bass player, wrote power pop songs with the best of them. Their first album for ABC Records, entitled “Big City Rock,” suffered from little or no promotion and a miserable production and mixing job. To teveryone’s surprise, The Atlantics never made it off the ground, disbanding in 1982 – but not before they had toured with the likes of Roxy Music, Talking Heads, Cheap Trick, and The Ramones. If you were a part of the college music scene in Boston in the late 1970s, you knew The Atlantics.

B. Wilkinson’s sister Bev, a colleague and a close friend, is the one who introduced me to The Atlantics. When her brother died in 2000, she inherited a ton of albums, singles, and test pressings. Since I’m the only person I know who still has a turntable (and at age 27, no less!), I became “keeper of the flame.” And when Paul Caruso and Tom Hauck, former Atlantics themselves, decided to release the “lost” album, I annoyed Bev on a near-weekly basis: “How’s the Atlantics album coming? How about now?” As the project came together, she shared the songs, the artwork, and the challenges with me. Tragically, Paul died suddenly last spring, shortly after overseeing the cleanup of the original tapes. Thankfully, Tom’s work continued.

And then a funny thing happened. Those men and women who had been in Boston with my sister started to leave messages at The Atlantics’ MySpace page asking when the album was coming out. They had remembered their music fondly, and they lamented the fact that the band never made it big. They hadn’t thought about songs like “Pop Shivers” and “Weekend” for 25 years, but, all of a sudden, they were reliving their college days. They wanted more Atlantics.

“The Atlantics” is truly a labor of love. The songs that the remaining band members have decided to include run the gambit, having been recorded any time from 1979 to 1982. However, there is a consistency, both in songwriting and in sound, between all of these tracks. Each song delights. My all-time favorite Atlantics song, “Weekend,” sounds incredible here, propelled along by Paul’s frenetic drumming and B.’s rocking bass. Bobby Marron, the band’s lead singer, spits out the lyrics to “Lonelyhearts,” a modest hit for the band; Fred Pineau’s guitar line for “Pop Shivers” rips the cones off the speakers. This album captures the band’s live sound much more closely than its first, commercially-released album.

Of course, this is also what makes “The Atlantics” such a damn shame. They were so close to being big; so close to being as much of new-wave household names as Ric Ocasek or Fred Schneider. But the planets weren’t aligned, and the band never got their big break. Commercial success or not, though, this is one album that belongs on your shelf in between “Fear of Music” and “Heartbeat City.” “The Atlantics” is a taste of a band that could have been – and now, in 2006, that finally is.

The new version of iTunes is incredible. You should download it. Now.

As part of my Music Library cleanout, I discovered a cache of both original and cover songs that I haven’t yet finished recording. Since I’ll probably never get around to finishing them, I’m just going to post them, as is, on the blog. They give a bit of insight as to how I work (sometimes backwards!) when I’m recording. Most of the time, the lucky songs have been half-mixed; usually, the instrumentation is about 60% of what I want it to be — if it even exists at all. The compression is all off, and I haven’t yet ironed out mistakes. But that’s more fun, ain’t it?

1) “Christine” was written by the late B. Wilkinson, bassist for The Atlantics and founding member of Ball and Pivot. It’s taken off an unreleased B&P album from the late 1980’s. As you can hear, I’ve gotten a lot of the song completed, but it’s hard to finish. I do love it, though. It’s too bad B. never made it big.

2) I decided to do a cover of Warren Zevon’s “Splendid Isolation” as a live track, recording piano and vocals in one take and together. I threw a bit of reverb on the vocals; that’s it. I didn’t even clean up the bum notes.

3) This cover of “Everybody Move It” by Teddy Thompson was going to be great. Going to be. It never got off the ground.

4) Vocals for “Love To Be Loved” never got recorded. I couldn’t duplicate Peter’s high notes. Too bad. For all you XTC aficionados out there, the clank is indeed the fire extinguisher that starts “Towers of London” off.

5) This is a real find: the earliest version of “Come Over To My House”. As I recall, I wrote most of this song as I was lying in bed, trying to fall asleep. I stumbled out to the computer in my Scooby Doo pajama pants and recorded this with the internal microphone of my iMac…just so I wouldn’t forget it. I’m singing quietly so I don’t wake the kids in the hallway. It must’ve been about 11:30 at night.

6) I remember this one, tentatively titled “Gloria Excelsis.” The melody for the chorus came first, of course. It always does. “I won’t gloria excelsis / In deo…” I don’t know what it means. But you can hear me slumming sounds through the verse so I can get to the chorus, can’t you? Yikes. What did Kurt Cobain say? “VERSE / CHORUS / VERSE!”

7) Jesus, is anything more obvious than a sloppy, unfinished cover version of Babybird’s “To Die For” that begins with a sample of “Grass”? I don’t think so. This one is totally embarrassing.

Anyway, I hope this gives you an insight into my world. If not, then never mind. But thanks for listening anyway!

For everyone who’s visiting from the Babybird site, here are the three new tunes that I’ve “ripped” from online radio broadcasts.

Divorce Song (AAC, 3.8 MB)
Too Much (AAC, 3.9 MB)
Snails (MP3, 3.3 MB)

You can listen to “Old Skin” and “Dive” by going to the MySpace Official Babybird site.

If anyone from Stephen’s management or record company wants me to take the songs down, please e-mail me by clicking here. Otherwise, I hope everyone enjoys this lo-fi taste of Stephen Jones’s next great masterpiece…

An anonymous commenter asked where the picture of The Skateboard was.

This summer, two of the students from the second session of Young Writers’ Workshop gave me a skateboard that the class had all autographed. Now it’s a shelf in my hallway. Pretty cool, ain’t it?

These were taken from Stephen’s live. in-studio appearance on Mark Radcliffe’s show on the BBC. If the Beeb gets all snooty, I’ll take them down. But I hope they don’t. What songs!

Both tracks are taken from “Between My Ears, There Is Nothing But Music.” You can listen to two more by clicking here.

Divorce Song (AAC, 3.8 MB)
Too Much (AAC, 3.9 MB)

Need to download iTunes to play your music? Do so here.