Total Girl – May 2021

35 years after its original release comes this 2 CD digipak edition of the band’s third studio album “Perhaps” plus related bonus tracks.
The Associates were leading lights of the New Pop movement from the early 1980’s. Hailing from Dundee on the east coast of Scotland, the band signed to Fiction Records before spells working with and recording for both Situation Two and WEA Records. Originally released in February 1985 after exhaustive recording sessions, Billy Mackenzie finally followed up the 1982 Associates album Sulk with this 10 track offering. The album was a long time in the making and featured four different producers, Heaven 17’s Martyn Ware, Martin Rushent, Dave Allen and Greg Walsh…

This two disc 40 track compilation features some of the biggest Rock hits recorded by some of the most famous artists of all time, many of them taken from the esteemed EMI catalog.
Queen, Pink Floyd, Phil Collins, Van Morrison, Peter Gabriel, Foreigner, The Pretenders, Genesis, Mike Oldfield and many more.

This is Polish trumpeter and composer Tomasz Stanko at his most confounding. Paired with Janisz Skowron on synthesizer, Stanko claims that these pieces are nothing more than short little musical stories - not fully realized compositions, but sketches. That's reasonable enough, but when certain pieces - such as the opener - are nine minutes in length, that becomes somewhat tenuous as an explanation. The 12 pieces that make up this "suite," if indeed it can be called that, are ephemeral roots and seedlings of ideas not yet realized and not meant to be. This, too, is acceptable as a notion, but why record them? Perhaps Brian Eno can get away with nonsense like this since he's not - by his own admission - a musician, but Stanko is an ambitious talent, a sophisticated composer whose control over an ensemble brings out the sublime in them.