Kings of the Wild Frontier

I have to say that Itunes is the greatest impulse-buy-enabler since Amazon. The other day, I bought "Kings of the Wild Frontier" on a whim, an album that I used to own on cassette (probably still do, in some box somewhere).

Wow. This album is a lot better than I remembered. Whether it wears any better than it did when I was in high school remains to be seen, but I can honestly say that I was pleasantly surprised with my first listen in the last 20+ years. If you haven't heard it in a while, give it another shot. What sounded like a random grab-bag of influences in 1981 sounds surprisingly distinctive today.

I loved Wild Frontier and it definitely holds up still. Dirk Wears White Socks has its moments and is not a bad little post-punk album. Friend of Foe was great.

Nearly everything else poor Adam did blows.

Punk: Attitude was on cable quite a bit over the weekend and Ants guitarist Marco Pirroni was interviewed extensively and I think it was a toss-up between he and Mick Jones as to which punk has aged the worst. Although Marco looked like he was already 50 back in 1977. I remember reading the Sniffin' Glue review of the first Siouxsie & The Banshees show at which Marco was the guitarist, and it referred to him as "an older gent" and he was probably younger than Siouxsie.

AND YES - checking Wikipedia quickly, I found that Marco Pirroni is in fact 2 years younger than Siouxsie - He was born in 1959, which means that "older gent" was in fact 18 years old in 1977.



Post Edited (01-04-07 13:51)

It's silly stuff but a few tracks are catchy. I can't listen to KotWF without feeling forced to accept its merits as either serious or serious kitsch. It has a strange tone that's erstwhile serious but equally bubbly-gum-absurd. That alone makes it interesting, eh?

See this thread



Post Edited (01-03-07 17:33)

I think I prefer Dirk to Kings Of The Wild Frontier but what I find interesting is the choice to download the album rather than to purchase the CD. I know this is the preferred option among the general pop music buying public but I wonder if it is the preferred option across the board. Please note that I'm not passing any judgment or criticism against those who solely download their music as I realize that the actual music is the most essential thing here and in some cases certain artist's work is not available anywhere else but online.

Even though it is more convenient, faster and cheaper to just download music, the following post in the Greatest Hits thread struck a chord with me:

"i bought rem's irs years comp last week even though i already had a decent burn just because i wanted to actually OWN the danged thing."

Maybe it's just my perspective, but there is something to be said for preferring the genuine article as opposed to just a burned/mp3 copy of an album. I suppose I'm a purist in this respect much in the same way that I don't particularly care for Best-Of compilations unless they are truly necessary although I believe the real purists out there are the ones who still collect vinyl.

For me, there's just something about having the actual album exactly as it was released by the artist that makes it much more satisfying than merely downloading the songs off the internet and burning them to a blank CD.

I realize I'm almost contradicting myself here since most of the music I listen to is burned from my CDs and onto iPod anyway but I think there's credence to having some sort of reference point to who and where the music came from. I think I would be missing something if I never saw the cover to Fun House that seemed to match the music that Iggy immersed himself in or Go Girl Crazy for the same reason or Holly Beth Vincent's blue album which is as striking as the music it contains.

I'm not even particulary thrilled with the 2 on 1 CD packages some companies have put out. I suppose I can live with my Gram Parsons' G.P./Grievous Angel, Chrome's Alien Soundtracks/Half Machine Lip Moves and DB's Stands For Decibels/Repurcussion combos but I would much prefer Big Star's first two LPs on separate CDs.

Maybe the time has passed but I always thought that the music and the album's contents (front and back cover, artwork, liner notes, comments from the artist, song credits, etc.) would be forever intertwined.



Post Edited (01-04-07 12:21)

Shizzle wrote:

> I think I prefer Dirk to Kings Of The Wild Frontier but what I
> find interesting is the choice to download the album rather
> than to purchase the CD. I know this is the preferred option
> among the general pop music buying public but I wonder if it is
> the preferred option across the board. Please note that I'm not
> passing any judgment or criticism against those who solely
> download their music as I realize that the actual music is the
> most essential thing here and in some cases certain artist's
> work is not available anywhere else but online.
>
> Maybe it's just my perspective, but there is something to be
> said for preferring the genuine article as opposed to just a
> burned/mp3 copy of an album.

I agree with you 100%. In principle.

First off, I'm a guy who still owns his LPs by Elvis Costello, David Bowie, XTC, King Crimson (and others) even though I bought all those albums on CD years ago. Those, to me, are the "genuine articles". Or maybe I'm just paranoid and waiting for the day when all my CDs disintigrate and refuse to play.

However, in this case:

a) It was an impulse buy. Never underestimate the power of impulses. My wife was amazed to see that I had "Antmusic" on my Ipod (from a comp), and told me that Adam Ant was one of her favorites (the things you learn after two years of marraige...). That, and the fact that I had liked this album in High School, was enough to justify the impulse buy, and ordering it off of Itunes was easier, faster and cheaper than ordering the CD online ($12.40 from DeepDiscountCD.com, and I've gotten enough cracked jewel cases to be leery of ordering from them) or traipsing around town trying to find a CD copy (even in Boston, good luck).

I suppose the real "DIY" way to do it would have been to find a copy of the LP in the $1 or 50c bin and burn THAT to CD, but my stack of "LPs to burn" is so huge at this point that I'm not eager to add any more to it (and, working from home, I'm lucky to hit the used record stores once every three or four months).

b) It was not an album that I had any particular emotional attachment to. My previous copy was a cassette I taped off of a friend's LP.

c) I just got an Ipod for Christmas, and I'm beginning to see that I will probably be listening to a LOT of my music via this device in the future. I'm not ready to swear off buying CDs altogether yet, but for a barely-remembered high-school fave such as this, Itunes seemed like a good alternative to finding the album, ripping the album, and transferring the album to the Ipod.

Same thing for the new Buzzcocks album (which is also awesome, by the way). Now, they are most definitely one of my favorite groups, but again, I don't have the emotional attachment to their recent material that I do to their original albums, so in weighing "I want to hear this album today" vs. "I'd like to own a pressed copy of this CD", "today" won out again.

This is only my second week with the Ipod, so it remains to be seen how quickly (if ever) downloads will replace physical albums for me, but there are certain cases where, even for a middle-aged music geek like me, downloading seems like the most logical way to buy an album.

And, speaking of downloading, has everyone here checked out Carbon/Silicon, the current band from Mick Jones and Tony James? They have (if I'm not mistaken) all of their albums available for free download on their own website and they're not bad.

To reiterate, my question was not a criticism but one that wondered whether the LP/CD had really started to fall out of favor for the quicker, cheaper download. I was not making any judgment about what the proper music buying protocol should be outside of my own preference.

It appears that you generally own the albums by the artists that mean the most to you but download some of the ancillary ones. I have a few of those as well usually via the ones that have been lent to me at one time or another. In one particular instance that I can remember iTunes was invaluable to me for tracking down Tim Buckley's Starsailor which had been long out of print and seemingly only available for around $100. I was stunned to see that iTunes actually had it.

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there is something to be said for preferring the genuine article

MP3s are the genuine article, now. With today's young listeners there's less interest in cover art and credits.

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I think I would be missing something if I never saw the cover to Fun House

Yeah, kinda sad innit? It's hard to separate the two; this won't be the case, though, for the next generation. It will become a quaint concept and then an antique concept. We're very close to the cheap constant-display wireless devices for music (and online connect w/music) but apparently not to headphones with a decent response through all frequencies. What gives with that?

Dude! Scratchie married somebody without first popping the Adam Ant question! Did u also fail to question her about Mark Farner or Steve Lillywhite?

In conclusion, rois de la frontière sauvage.



Post Edited (09-18-12 16:00)

LOL. I can assure you that she has no knowledge of Mark Farner nor his shirtless lyrics. I'm either too old, too young or too tired to get the Steve Lillywhite gag, though. I know he's been working with some dicey bands lately, but I remember when he seemed to be producing most of my favorite albums. He may have been the second record producer (after George Martin) whose name even registered on my consciousness.