Dynastie Crisis "Vivre libre" b/w "Faust 72" France 1972

It was my intention to post a compilation this past weekend, but I was hit with a computer virus that took me most of the weekend to clean out of my machine.  I have a backlog of LPs to post, mostly compilations, but editing and labeling those audio files takes a lot of time, so for now here's a single and I hope to post an LP this coming weekend.

It would be nice to claim that this was a cool find on a trip or at a flea market, but it was simply an eBay purchase that I was the sole bidder on.

With a bunch of hair farmers and one baldhead, these guys look a bit like Spirit, and honestly given the variety of sounds that classic band gave us these guys can be said to sound something like them in places as well.  For some reason many French, Italian and other Romance language speakers seemed to have trouble producing rock'n'roll rhythms smoothly in the '60s, and although some gems were produced from those countries, early on many of the records from southern Europe up through the garage era sound awkward to me in a sense I have trouble describing.  Something about the rhythm section is often just a little bit off, as if the musicians had rock'n'roll verbally described to them once without ever hearing it in person.  (I sometimes think this is somehow related to language as Germanic and Slavic and some other speakers don't seem to have had these problems for the most part, but on the other hand neither did Latin Americans, so who knows...)  Many of my favorite '60s French recordings are things like Serge Gainsbourg productions that aren't really even trying to replicate straight rock'n'roll.  Once we get to the '70s and harder rock and prog, the different groove that France was in actually seems to have worked for them and produced some cool sounds.

The A-side here has some interesting percussion in a good way, almost Latin, and the addition of some flute puts this in the mid-ground between any hard rock early '70s band, Santana and Jethro Tull.  The B-side is even better, a blend of hard rock and prog with interesting keyboard sounds.

The band was only together for a few years, releasing only two studio albums.  More info here.

Live free or die.

Sue Saad and The Next "Gimmie Love / Gimmie Pain" b/w "It's Gotcha" USA 1980

Just doing a quick post today so excuse the somewhat blurry photo.  This is an Italian release of a single by a California band.  And, yes, this means yet another single from the 4 for 10 euro stack bought in Rome several weeks back at a used bookstore.

Sue Saad and The Next have a detailed Wikipedia page, which I refer you to for their history.  They released one album and a few singles, none of which charted in the top 100 anywhere.  A career highlight appears to have been their work in the 1980 movie Roadie, both on the soundtrack and in the film.

The sleeve announces in English that this is the Sound of the '80s and then in Italian I believe it says that this is "changing the colors of rock", both of which are overstatements.  The label is Planet Records.

The band has a very New Wave look, a little too polished to be quite punk.  This also describes the music, at least on the A side.  Sue herself has a nice commercial mainstream rock voice and despite a very punk title "Gimmie..." sounds like some mixture of ... let's say... The Knack, Blondie and maybe Heart with a familiar touch of any commercially succesful rock or even country female vocalist the past few decades.  Not bad rock but nothing to get too excited over.

The B side is much faster and more in a punk direction, although the production and performance are too clean for this to be included on any Killed by Death compilation.  Still worth a spin and the main reason that I'm posting this at all.

Gotcha.