just a quick one about a recent 45 purchase--

Milk & Cookies - Tinkertoy Tomorrow/Wok N Woll

They were an American band who went to London to record in 1975. A first generation powerpop band, they in fact presaged new wave with their lean, quirky sound--sort of like Sparks without the cleverness. The guitarist was Ian North, who went on to form the short-lived new wave band Neo, and then released a couple of vaguely Gary Numan-ish albums in the early '80s. The bassist was in fact a friend of mine, Sal Maida, who had previously played with Roxy Music and later played with Sparks (see, I told you) among others. I'm told that when they started out their gimmick was that they all wore baseball uniforms, but Sal says that when he joined the band he put the kibosh on that. The B-side is almost a bit glammy, sort of like a stripped-down Bay City Rollers or something. They made one album, which I haven't heard. It didn't come out until 1977, by which time the band had already broken up.

John Bender - Compact Cage

The work of John Bender is, as they say, shrouded in mystery. He was an electronic/experimental musician from Cincinatti, OH who released a series of highly regarded DIY projects in the early '80s, self-released in inherently limited editions, as underground as underground gets. Compact Cage is a bootleg CDR that compiles tracks from a bunch of Bender's cassette-only releases. Bender usually falls under the heading of "minimal synth," and while that's certainly applicable, it doesn't tell the whole story. The grace, darkness, and pure human soul at odds with purposefully robotic arrangements, all mark Bender as sui generis; equal parts Suicide-like post-punk and avant garde experimentalist, with even a dash of danceability thrown in. The hipsters who haunt the Williamsburg electroclash nights would shit themselves over this stuff if they heard it, but they still wouldn't get the full import of it.

Boyce & Hart - Test Patterns

Tommy Boyce and Bobby Hart are best known as the guys who wrote the lion's share of the Monkees' hits, as well as hits for Jay & the Americans, Paul Revere & the Raiders, and others. When the Monkees started to really take off, they took advantage of the situation and started their own recording career. This is their 1967 debut album, and it's a first-class piece of pop-psych/sunshine pop, whatchamacallit. They're both good singers, at least as good as the Monkees, the arrangements are excellent, and the songwriting is top-notch. It's a bit more psychedelic than their Monkees material, but not in a trippy, fuzzed-out way, more in a harpsichords-and-filtered-voices/kaleidoscope-eyes kind of way. A number of the tracks start out in classic '60s LA sunshine pop mode before their middle sections break down into sitars and dreamy marshmallow melodies. One cut, "Shadows," is a particularly fine piece of Baroque pop that could have come straight off the first Left Banke album. Sad to discover that one of the guys, I forget which, killed himself in the '90s due to alcoholism and depression, but at least he outlasted a lot of his contemporaries.

PS - thanks to Teri for recommending this one to me