Skip to main content

Love & Rockets - No New Tale To Tell

This song reminds me of rolling aimlessly around the streets of San Diego in the backseat of Mona Rupe's Honda in 1992. Mona was my girlfriend's best friend. She had a license and she had adventurous taste in music. Rides with Mona provided the scenery for her gothic rock soundtrack. Among her cassettes were Peter Murphy "Deep," The Cure "Disintegration," Nine Inch Nails "Pretty Hate Machine," and I think some Sisters of Mercy. I seem to remember that this Love and Rockets song was somewhere in the mix. Maybe we heard it on 91XFM, our local modern rock station that played the hell out of this song. It was never my favorite, but it definitely captures a space and time for me.

The opening lyrics are sung by David J in that hushed, serpentine voice, over a perfectly mixed acoustic guitar. He draws you in and keeps you poised anxiously for the entrance of the drums.

"You cannot go against nature
Because when you do
Go against nature
It's part of nature too"

Once the song revs up to high gear, there's no going back. 3 minutes and 26 seconds of pure 1980s, college rock perfection.




Comments

Trending Tracks

U.K. - In The Dead of Night

In the late 70s, as punk and post-punk bands spiraled towards their new wave destinies, prog dinosaurs stood paralyzed in the shadows. Bands like the Sex Pistols were meteors, igniting a global firestorm that would trigger prog's extinction. The British music press (Melody Maker, Sounds, NME, etc.), once proponents of prog darlings Genesis, Yes and ELP, now bashed any band releasing songs in odd time signatures and singing about aliens and whales. The punk revolution had turned the U.K. music industry and press on its head within a year (1976-1977). For me, this is one of the most interesting times in pop music. Although prog groups saw their audiences rapidly dwindle (Yes audiences had dropped from 20,000 to 3,000 by 1980's Drama tour), many record labels had built fortunes on the works of prog artists and were willing to foot the bill for some interesting transitional experiments. Yes' Drama , ELPs' Works , Genesis' . ..And Then There Were Three... were p...

Sweet - Love Is Like Oxygen

I've always loved glam rock -- Bowie , The New York Dolls , Mott The Hoople ,  Queen , T. Rex . The flamboyant and gender-bending style. The attitude, sparkly and swagger. The first time I heard Sweet was Fox On The Run . It was my favorite song on the Dazed and Confused Soundtrack. I think it was the swirling, bubbling synthesizer that drew me in. At the time I had no idea that Sweet was a part of the 1970s glam world. Later, I found out that they sang Ballroom Blitz . That's the same band? Then, in college, I bought Action and fell in love with tunes like Lady Starlight and the title track . As I pieced together their discography (in a pre-Internet age), I noticed that the band's sound inexplicably wavered between hard rock, glam and bubble-gum pop. I could never put my finger on what Sweet was all about. I just loved a lot of their songs. This week, I picked up a copy of their 1977 album, Level Headed . The album is anything but steady (as the title would have yo...