Rare Opals

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In the mail at the weekend, a pair of reissued Opal CDs that I didn’t expect to see any time soon, Happy Nightmare Baby (1987) and Early Recordings (1989). Opal were an American group who were active throughout the 1980s but they didn’t record very much, only releasing these two discs towards the end of their career. Both albums sank from sight in the early 1990s, and had been unavailable in any form when CD reissues were announced in late 2019 on guitarist David Roback’s own label, Salley Gardens. The reissues were withdrawn shortly before the release date, possibly as a result of Roback’s illness and subsequent death in February 2020. All of this is niche stuff but aficionados of the niche in question may like to know that I bought these new from an eBay (UK) seller for a fraction of the price you’ll pay at Discogs or elsewhere. (Here and here.) I’d seen reports that copies had been shipped before the cancellation was announced but hadn’t seen any on sale outside Discogs until last week. I’ve also seen suggestions that there might be bootlegs circulating but if these are boots then someone has managed to imitate the matrix numbers on the discs which I don’t think is an easy thing to do.

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Opal is a group you seldom see mentioned today but plenty of people know the name of Mazzy Star, the group that Opal became after the departure of singer Kendra Smith in the late 1980s. David Roback was the key member, the link between Mazzy Star and the neo-psychedelia of the Los Angeles Paisley Underground which gave rise to both Opal and Roback’s other outlet, the Rain Parade. The Paisley Underground was never as psychedelic as I hoped it might be, only the Rain Parade could be classed as a bona fide psych band, but the groups associated with this loose scene—The Bangles, The Dream Syndicate, The Three O’Clock, et al—were all preoccupied with the music of the late 1960s, and of the early 70s via Neil Young and Alex Chilton. Opal followed the trend, being less oneiric than Mazzy Star would be, more concerned with reviving older musical styles than creating something new. Early Recordings, a collection of singles, EPs and other songs, owes less to psychedelia than it does to late-60s balladeering: guitar and vocals, lots of reverb and minimal percussion and keyboards. Kendra Smith, formerly of The Dream Syndicate, sings almost all the songs on both albums. The origin of the Opal sound may be found in the cover versions on Rainy Day (1984), a one-off album that David Roback recorded with Kendra Smith plus members of The Bangles, Rain Parade and The Three O’Clock. Lou Reed’s I’ll Be Your Mirror is the early Opal sound in miniature, especially in the version by Nico and The Velvet Underground which Roback emulates with Susanna Hoffs.

Happy Nightmare Baby has a rather prosaic monochrome cover but this is where the psychedelic rock comes to the fore, with Roback breaking out the fuzz box and wah-wah pedal to fashion a heavier sound that would later be heard on Mazzy Star songs like Ghost Highway. I said that only the Rain Parade warranted the psych label but Happy Nightmare Baby certainly gets there on songs like Magick Power and the slow explosion of Soul Giver, the latter being the closest that Opal get to the Rain Parade’s finest moment, No Easy Way Down. There’s also a touch of glam in the opening number, Rocket Machine, which harks back to the T. Rex of Electric Warrior. Happy Nightmare Baby is a fiery debut—and Opal could be even heavier live—but it’s one of those albums that you’d expect would be surpassed by later releases, instead of which all we have is Early Recordings*. The two albums are dissimilar enough to almost be the work of different groups; together they suggest that David Roback spent most of the 1980s trying to orient his music in a way that honoured his influences while also accommodating all his favoured modes of expression, from fuzz squall to languid blues to nocturnal drift. The first Mazzy Star album, She Hangs Brightly, is the place where the influences and intentions fused to create something new. And Roback found his ideal singer in Hope Sandoval, of course. Kendra Smith is okay but her voice can get monotonous over a whole album, she lacks Hope Sandoval’s mystique and emotional range. Opal were good but you can’t imagine many people wanting to cover their songs the way people have done with Mazzy Star. But then without Opal there might never have been a Mazzy Star. Niche stuff this may be but it doesn’t deserve to be buried for another thirty years.


* Or almost all. There is another album, Early Recordings Volume 2, a collection of unreleased songs and covers. But this has never been given an official release.

Previously on { feuilleton }
Balloon parade
The Dukes declare it’s 25 O’Clock!
Strange Things Are Happening, 1988–1990

El Lissitzky record covers

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Your Generation (1977) by Generation X. Design by Barney Bubbles.

Continuing an occasional series about the work of particular artists or designers being used on record sleeves. El Lissitzky (1890–1941) is an interesting candidate in this area since his pioneering abstractions have greatly influenced subsequent generations of graphic designers. As a result of this you’re just as likely to find his Suprematist style being pastiched on an album cover as find one of his paintings decorating the sleeve. Pastiches are difficult to locate unless you already know they exist—or unless the album credits acknowledge the style they’re imitating—so this list will no doubt be incomplete.

Barney Bubbles’ design for the debut single by Generation X is the earliest example I’m aware of that makes use of the El Lissitzky style. It was also one of Bubbles’ first sleeves for a punk band, and a significant break with his often florid hippy designs.

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Die Mensch Maschine (1978) by Kraftwerk. Design by Karl Klefisch, “inspired by El Lissitzky”.

Kraftwerk’s seventh album uses Lissitzkian typography and graphics on its front and back covers. A very popular album with the post-punk crowd that would have been the first introduction for many people to El Lissitzky’s name. Kraftwerk still use that vibrant arrangement of black, red and white in their stage shows.

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B-2 Unit (1980) by Riuichi Sakamoto. Design by Tsuguya Inoue.

More pastiche, this time borrowing from El Lissitzky’s Suprematist book for children: About Two Squares: In 6 Constructions: A Suprematist Tale (1922). The book’s two characters of a red square and a black square appear on the vinyl labels. This is a great album, incidentally, still my favourite by Sakamoto.

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Continue reading “El Lissitzky record covers”

Weekend links 185

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L’uomo che piantava gli alberi (2013) by Sofia Rondelli. Via Form Is Void.

• I’m looking forward to hearing the new album by Chrome Hoof, a band whose ambition and attitude makes many of their contemporaries seem lukewarm at best. Mick Middles gets to grips with Chrome Black Gold here. John Doran interviewed the group in 2010, a piece which includes a Chrome Hoof mix of tracks by other artists.

Jay Roberts: “I was a young Marine scout sniper, definitely his type. And for a single, unforgettable afternoon, Orange County’s most notorious serial killer coaxed me into a place from which many didn’t escape.”

Jonathan Meades: “Why I went postal … and turned my snaps into postcards.” “Meades isn’t your average architectural fanboy,” says Rachel Cooke who went to talk to him at his home in Marseille.

“Faced with a Nabokov novel,” Zadie Smith writes, “it’s impossible to rid yourself of the feeling that you’ve been set a problem, as a chess master sets a problem in a newspaper.” Certainly, while Humbert asks the reader “not to mock me and my mental daze”, the suspicion is that the power dynamic in his tale is a little different.

Tim Groenland on the difficulties of writing, publishing and reading Lolita.

Cosmic Machine is a double-disc collection of French electronic music from the 1970s & 1980s. Justice enthuse about the music here where you can also preview the tracks.

The Midnight Channel, Evan J. Peterson’s horror-poetry homage to the VHS era, is available now from Babel/Salvage. There’s a trailer here.

• “Our age reveres the specialist but humans are natural polymaths, at our best when we turn our minds to many things,” says Robert Twigger.

• Another musical Chrome: Richard Metzger on newly resurrected recordings by one of my long-time cult bands.

• Hermes Trismegistus and Hermeticism: An interview with Gary Lachman.

• A stunning set of photos of London in the sweltering summer of 1976.

Pye Corner Audio live at The Outer Church, Madrid, November 2013.

Judee Sill, the shockingly talented occult folk singer time forgot.

• Designer Jonathan Barnbrook answers twenty questions.

• Don’t trust the painting: Morgan Meis on René Magritte.

Laurie Anderson’s farewell to Lou Reed.

Philippe Druillet at Pinterest.

• The Chrome Plated Megaphone Of Destiny (1968) by The Mothers of Invention | March Of The Chrome Police (1979) by Chrome | Chrome (1981) by Debbie Harry

Weekend links 126

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Mala Reputación (1991) by Dogo Y Los Mercenarios. Cover art by Nazario Luque.

Artist Nazario Luque was Spain’s first gay comic artist who’s also known for the drawing which appeared (without permission) on the sleeve of Lou Reed Live – Take No Prisoners in 1978. On his website Nazario says he’s been described as “Exhibicionista, solidario, provocador, agitador moral, rompedor, arriesgado, polifacético, transgresor, canalla, pintiparado, morigerado o simplemente superviviente…” Via Música, maestros, a two-part post (second part is here) about album cover art by comic artists.

The BBC Radiophonic Workshop Returns. And quite conveniently, Ubuweb posts some original Radiophonic creations by electronic music genius Delia Derbyshire. Ms Derbyshire is profiled along with her other pioneering colleagues in an hour-long TV documentary, Alchemists of Sound.

• Tor.com celebrates the fiction of Shirley Jackson. Too Much Horror Fiction has a substantial collection of Shirley Jackson book covers.

Phantasmagorical and all but plotless, Nightwood flings itself madly upon the night, upon Wood, and upon the reader. Its sentences pomp along like palanquins and writhe like crucifixions. They puke, they sing. Their deliriums are frighteningly controlled. […] TS Eliot loved Nightwood so much that he shepherded its publication and wrote the introduction to the first edition. Dylan Thomas complimented it with his left hand by calling it “one of the three great prose books ever written by a woman” and with his right hand by stealing from it. […] Nightwood’s Dr. Matthew-Mighty-grain-of-salt-Dante O’Connor, florid monologist and transvestite, seems to have been a model (along with Captain Ahab) for Judge Holden in Blood Meridian. The difference is that Cormac McCarthy’s Judge is essentially Satan, whereas O’Connor is essentially Christ; they’re only just on opposite sides of the border of madness.

Austin Allen on The Life and Death of Djuna Barnes, Gonzo “Greta Garbo of American Letters”. There’s a lot more Djuna Barnes at Strange Flowers.

• Out at the end of the month, Extreme Metaphors, interviews with JG Ballard, 1967–2008, edited by Simon Sellars & Dan O’Hara.

• The favourite Polish posters of the Brothers Quay. Over at Cardboard Cutout Sundown there are more Quay book covers.

The Mancorialist: people on the streets of Manchester are given the Sartorialist treatment.

The Liverpool International Festival Of Psychedelia takes place on 29th September.

The Caves of Nottingham are explored in a detailed post at BLDGBLOG.

• In Remembrance: Bill Brent, Groundbreaking Queer Sex Publisher.

Confessions of a Bookplate Junkie

The Uranus Music Prize 2012

Fuck Yeah René Lalique

Dr Who: original theme (1963) by Ron Grainer with Delia Derbyshire | Falling (1964) by Delia Derbyshire | The Delian Mode (1968) by Delia Derbyshire | Blue Veils And Golden Sands (1968) by Delia Derbyshire.