Favorite Albums/Recent Spins
Evangelic Girl Is A Gun - Yeule (Ninja Tune, 2025)
Genre: Alternative/Electronic
The summary: The fourth album from singer/songwriter/producer/artistic polymath Nat Ćmiel see her distilling the electronics of her first two albums Serotonin II and Glitch Princess with the shoedaze/grunge elements heard on 2023's softscars, and then some. Acoustic guitars and syntheizers share sonic space on "Saiko" and "1967", and Nat uses her natural voice more often than not, saving her trademark effects to make more impact when called for. The only real complaint comes from the length of this album: All of Nat's long-playing efforts to date have averaged 40 minutes or so; this one is under the 33 minute mark, and the closing track "Skullcrusher" suddenly ends when you're expecting Nat to go full slow-burn headbanger. But Nat has always teased what direction she intended her next album to go in on previous albums, so perhaps that track is a tease of what album number five will sound like?
Flaunt It! - Sigue Sigue Sputnik (Manhattan/EMI, 1986)
Genre: Electronic
Not too many people wanted to take this album, this band, or their music seriously when it first dropped. The hype surrounding the band at the time may be partly to blame for that -- Band mastermind and ex-Generation X bassist Tony James describing the group as "style over substance"; Claims that James had picked four novices for the band and had them learn their instruments on their own; Talk of selling ad space between songs on their album (which they did) and trying to con Sony into paying an endorsement fee to the band for showing Sony products on the sleeve of one of their singles (which Sony didn't go for, apparently). Posing not just as a band but as a cultural corporation offering everything from records to videogames to cybersex. A People magazine article on the band even dissed the band's fanbase (potential and otherwise) as "tineared".
The only problem with those assumptions? The music deserved more respect than that. James' claim that the band was meant to be "style over substance" doesn't hold water in reality considering that he brought in synth pioneer Giorgio Moroder to produce your debut album if there isn't any substance in the first place. Tony's musical vision for the band was Suicide, the legendary duo of vocalist Alan Vega (RIP) and keyboardist Martin Rev, if they had been blessed with a million-dollar recording budget and the presence of Moroder in the producer's chair. And they nailed it: Pulsing synth bass, sloganeering lyric sung with an Elvis inflection, and percolating electronic drumbeats, plus rockabilly guitar leads and samples of classical recordings, sound effects, and movie dialogue... forget about it. This was solid stuff. Too bad they didn't get to buy EMI, as they prophecized on the B-side of "21st Century Boy" and at the end of Side Two of the album -- who knows how things would have gone if that had happened? Maybe the ages of Napster, iTunes, and streaming would have happened fifteen years sooner? Yep, Sigue Sigue Sputnik were ahead of their time back then, and their music still sounds ahead of its time forty years later.
Cherry Red Records issued a four-CD box set devoted to this album a few years ago. Check it out.
One note: the commercials from the original album can be heard on streaming and download, but they aren't on the Cherry Red box set (except for the band's own "Sputnik Corporation" promos).
Alan Vega and Collision Drive - Alan Vega (Sacred Bones, 2026)
Genre: Rock
Those in the know will know Alan Vega as one-half of the pioneering electronic duo Suicide and from a string of heavily electronic solo albums like Saturn Drive (Ze/Elektra, 1983) and Party On To Zero Hour (Musidisc, 1991), most of which didn't become widely available in Vega's home country of the United States until Henry Rollins arranged to reissue them on his own Infinite Zero label.
That string of solo releases started with two albums that owed more to Alan's childhood love of Elvis Presley than to what he and Martin Rev started in the early 70's with an old Farfisa organ and a rhythm ace. After Alan passed away in 2016, his estate arranged to have most of his solo albums reissued by the French label Digging Diamonds in nice digipacks with redesigned artwork, but these two albums for some reason didn't make that list. In fact, their only prior CD releases were as a twofer CD on Infinite Zero in 1996 that itself had been ported from an earlier two-on-one edition from a French label in 1989. Now, these two albums - where the rockabilly influences Alan had hinted at in Suicide come through loud and clear here -- are finally getting their individual due from Sacred Bones, the same label that reissud Vaga's first posthumous album Mutator in 2020. Here's hoping Sacred Bones gets to do the same to the rest of Alan's post-Elektra releases.