I'm listening to a CD a guy I work with, Mike, gave me a few weeks ago, Urban Verbs, the self-titled album by a band he used to go see back in the early 80's. They were a Washington, D.C. new wave band that formed in '78 and released two albums on Warner Brothers in 1980 and 1981, respectively, and then were dropped and broke up. Mike had a burned copy of their first self-titled album on CD, but recently he got a proper copy with artwork, and gave the old burned version to me, I think because I'm the only one at work that he can talk to about music from that era who ever has any idea what he's talking about. Apparently the Urban Verbs suffered from a lot of comparisons to the Talking Heads at the time, stemming largely from the fact that singer Roddy Frantz was the brother of Chris Frantz. And they were signed based on a 2 song demo produced by Brian Eno, although he ended up not producing anything else for them. They don't really sound especially Heads-y to me, though, more like the British post-punk groups at the time, like Wire after they got synths. Roddy Frantz's vocals are a little Byrne-ish at times, though. He has this funny schtick on some songs where he sings a line in a kind of normal voice, and then shouts the next line, like "hold hands in public..BUT THEN WE’LL LOOK LIKE WE’RE MARRIED!", or "is this love...OR JUST A FEELING?". They seem kind of forgotten by history; both albums went out of print for 20 years, and although Rykodisc once expressed interest in reissuing them, a tiny indie label specializing in reissues called Wounded Bird Records ended up reissuing only the first one recently. It's kind of a weird timepiece to listen to, definitely of its era, and it hasn't aged well. There are a couple songs that I kinda like ("The Angry Young Men" and "The Good Life"), and some of them are kind of entertaining in a goofy way, but I don't think I'll get motivated to listen to it very often.

Labels: story time

This entry was posted on Sunday, May 29, 2005 at 1:37 AM. You can skip to the end and leave a response.