New Wave for the New Week #98 BONUS ENTRY! BY REQUEST!

[All throughout the month of November, all NW4NW entries are based on requests made by you, dear readers. Because of the amount of requests received, there will often be more than one entry per week during this month - I recommend signing up for email alerts on the left-hand side of the screen so that you don't miss any of the fun! I cannot take anymore requests for this month, but please always feel free to suggest bands you might like to see featured in future NW4NW posts. You may do so either in the comments section of this post, on Twitter, or on the Facebook Fanpage.]

Cover of Let's ActiveOver on the Facebook Fanpage, my friend Tom Grochowski, who I've known since the 8th grade and who is a great person to discuss music, film, politics, and Morton's Pot Pies with, wrote, "I was initially hesitant to request, given your remarkable thorough-ness. I'm pleased to find at least a few omissions to keep [New Wave for the New Week] going!"  Thank you for the compliment, Tom, but thorough-ness? Far from it!  One of the things that has amazed me about the suggestions that have come in for this NW4NW All Request Month is that you folks have stocked me with enough suggestions to fill Mondays almost all the way up to All Request Month 2011!  Tom's "hesitant" request is a great one:

When North Carolina's Let's Active released the five-song Afoot EP in 1983, they sent music critics everywhere rushing to their thesauruses to find synonyms for "jangly" and "cheerful." Led by wunderkind producer, songwriter and musician Mitch Easter, the trio made tasty little nuggets of bubblegummy ear candy that melted into gooey goodness in your brain, giving you that sugar rush that demanded more! But all was not exactly as it seemed on the surface: once you broke the spell of the giddy pop sloshing over your eardrums and started to pay attention to the lyrics, well, maybe "cheerful" wasn't the best description.  The big "hit" from the record is one of the most spot-on break-up songs ever written, "Every Word Means No." Beneath its ringing guitars and shimmering cuteness is a very sad narrator who wishes he could have back what is now forever lost.

And so it was with Let's Active: always that juxtaposition of joyful noise and mournful message.  Easter formed the group in 1981 with drummer Sara Romweber and bassist Faye Hunter, but it wasn't until Easter made his name producing early R.E.M. records that people started to take notice.  The band's unusual name, by the way, was taken from one of those Japanese T-shirt slogans that was written by someone who knew just enough English to get it wrong.  After Afoot was met with critical accolades, the trio went about creating a full-length album.  Cypress built on the foundation that Afoot put in place, beginning to explore more psychedelic sounds and complex themes, but still cloaking it all in shiny Southern new-pop charm.  The lead single, "Waters Part," became a college radio hit; their cover of an obscure single by unknowns The Outskirts, "Blue Line," is among their best efforts ever. (Afoot and Cypress were later reissued as single CD.)

The success and acclaim of his continuing production and session work for other bands made Easter a highly sought after commodity.  As a result, Let's Active came to be viewed more or less as "The Mitch Easter Show," and Hunter and Romweber soon departed.  The third Let's Active album, Big Plans For Everybody, turned out to actually be "The Mitch Easter Show."  Writing and singing all of the songs and playing damn near every instrument on the album (with a few friends helping out here and there), Easter single-handedly kept the band name alive with the hopes of finding a new permanent line-up in the near future.  The record has its rough patches, but the majestic "Fell" is worth the price of admission alone.  1988's Every Dog Has His Day was again largely Easter himself, although Angie Carlson (who would spend a brief period as Mrs. Mitch Easter) took some of the instrumental load this time around.  Together they found a couple more folks to round out a fairly stable touring line-up, but Let's Active never went back into the recording studio.

Easter focused his efforts more on the production side of things throughout the 1990s, but in the past decade has played with the bands Shalini and The Fiendish Minstrels, as well as recording a solo album.  

In order to fill Tom's request for Let's Active, please enjoy both "Every Word Means No" and "Blue Line." Thank you for your request, Tom!

New Wave for the New Week #86

Put The Specials, R.E.M. and Oingo Boingo in a sonic blender, and the result you get might not be all that different from the sextet known as The Pressure Boys.

Energetically bursting out of Chapel Hill, NC, in the early 1980s, The Pressure Boys began life as a band of high school classmates who fumbled their way through covers of Madness and Specials songs at parties in and around Chapel Hill.  As their musicianship improved, they began widening their scope of musical influences.  Bringing aspects of bands like XTC and the aforementioned Oingo Boingo into the mix, The Pressure Boys soon created a unique sound that was slightly off-kilter, but nonetheless peppy and enjoyable.

They soon came to the attention of the noted southern-alternative-music production team of Mitch Easter and Don Dixon, who produced their first release, Jump! Jump! Jump!, in 1983.  The record's lead cut, "Tina Goes To The Supermarket," encapsulated everything that made the band so popular at home: the somewhat syncopated take on the basic ska beat, the frenetic pace, the audible fun the band was having.  That sonic recipe, given the Easter/Dixon stamp of approval, helped The Pressure Boys break out of the local Chapel Hill scene and land on college radio playlists everywhere.

The following year saw the release of the four-song Rangledoon ep, which included their most ambitious outing to date, "Where The Cowboys Went." Turning the ska down a notch and upping the southern charm, "Cowboys" was clearly a stab at college radio stardom.  Sounding a bit like Green On Red's goofier siblings, "Cowboys" is an excellent song that caught the ear of a major label: Epic Records included the cut on their 1985 compilation Epic Presents: The Unsigned, a collection of (as the title describes) bands that had not yet signed with a major label.

Unfortunately, Epic passed on signing the band, and it was back to the drawing board. 1987 saw the release of Krandlebanum Monumentus, the band's most polished vinyl release. Boasting a sparkling new re-recording of "Tina Goes To The Supermarket," and promoted by a video clip for "Around The World" that got the band introduced to the MTV's 120 Minutes crowd, the record is highly recommended. 

That would turn out to be the last anyone heard of The Pressure Boys until a retrospective CD, The Incomplete Recordings: 1981-1988, appeared in 2008 in conjunction with the band reuniting for a couple of live shows to benefit research for a cure for cystic fibrosis. Containing all of the band's essential material from "Where The Cowboys Went" to "Around The World" (including the re-recording of "Tina Goes To The Supermarket"), it's an excellent starting point for those new to the band.  The CD, like all of The Pressure Boys' releases, has fallen out of print, but can be had as an mp3 download from Amazon.com.

Here are two clips for this week's NW4NW entry: first up, the very DIY video for "Where The Cowboys Went;" following that is the band performing a live rendition of "Tina Goes To The Supermarket." Enjoy!

New Wave for the New Week #48

There came a point, about the middle of 1983, when the standard in music videos changed from the early shoestring-budget chromakey clips of bands singing their songs amid various cheap-o video effects to high-minded "concept clips" that told a story. What was once a three-minute promo clip for a song became twice as long, with some sort of scene played out using the band as actors before getting around to the song itself.

Usually, only the big-name major-labels had the budgets to create these mini-movies, but in early 1984 a little-known indie label out of North Carolina, Dolphin Records, created one for their band-of-the-moment in hopes of gaining a slot in MTV's airplay rotation and the national exposure that came with it.

Although the clip was timely (a take on the Indiana Jones saga so popular at the time) and well done, and although the song was fantastic and the band local cult heroes in Durham, NC, "Change Gotta Come" by The X-Teens never received the airplay that was hoped for.

Kitty Moses (vocals and bass), Robert Bittle (guitar), Ned Robie (drums), and Todd Jones (keyboards) formed The X-Teens in 1980 and immediately released their first of three excellent records, ...big boy's dream. Mixing ideas and sounds gleaned from Elvis Costello, Pylon, and The B-52's into a twitchy, poppy blast, The X-Teens found an eager audience in the early '80s North Carolina New Wave scene.

Two more albums would follow: X-Teens in 1983 and Love and Politics in 1984; but the band was getting frustrated that their regional success was not translating into a wider fan-base. When "Change Gotta Come" failed to break them big, the band split up.

The X-Teens remain well-known in their home state, and are often pointed to as forerunners of what would become known as "The Chapel Hill Sound" of the mid-to-late '80s as defined by NC bands like Let's Active, The Connells, and The dB's. Indeed, all three of The X-Teens records were produced by Mitch Easter and Don Dixon, whose trademark sound practically defined that subgenre. All three records are well worth your efforts in finding, but for now, here's our first NW4NW entry for 2010 (and a fitting title as we enter a brand new year with hopes of better days than 2009 left behind!), "Change Gotta Come" by The X-Teens. Enjoy!