Audiodoodahday: Baby Ray -- To Define Yourself in Opposition to the Spectacle is to Participate in it
The Noise, February, 1998
Audiodoodahday: Butch and Brenda
Five stars (excellent)
"Never Know My Name" is kinda like Magazine taking on Captain Beefheart's "I Love You, You Big Dummy" and improving it from the Lick My Decals Off, Baby version about 250 per cent. Why in hell weren't they playing this, instead of "Nearer My God To Thee" when they were rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic, I'll never know. All the rats would have run back to steerage! "Buster Pig Man" sounds like Tull (!) strained through Syd and mixed down by Robyn Hitchcock and Todd Rundgren with Go To -era XTC grinning their approval. "Snipe Hunter" ditto, at 16 & 2/3 RPM--it should be called something like "Control of the Nuclear Arsenal in a Disintegrating Soviet Union," or maybe "Set Controls For the Heart of the Slum." The remake of "Big Sun's a-Comin'" loses something from the late-1996 demo version--OK, so it's shrewd Situationist Internationalism instead of avant twittery, but I prefer the earlier version. "Porky's Prey" puts me in mind of the Talking Heads' "Thank You For Sending Me An Angel" (which I mean to have played at my funeral). The middle-eight is wows-ville--not since Bim Skala Bim's "Snake In the Grass." Pnuematic. Rad. And other outmoded teen argot. I know 'BCN is hankering to play more local music--OK, boys, how about "The Ballad of Baby Ray"? It's better than "Thick as a Brick" and more recent than "The Mayor of Simpleton," and with a hook nearly as good as the latter and about one-twentieth the length of the former. Finally, the jolly elegaic John Fahey/Leo Kottke folk of "Check It Out" is exquisite. The band is certainly worthy of inclusion in the sub-Beatles Nilsson-Kinks-XTC axis, genre-wise. This one is my pick for tape of the month.