Customer Reviews

Night Music

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4 star:		(1)
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Excellent collection by an excellent band... but "Everything" is cheaper, domestic and has all of these songs and more including the must-have "Performance".

Get this if you can't find the other.

This CD is a close-to-complete collection of the solid body of work produced by Daniel Ash (ex-Bauhuas, current Love & Rockets) along with the help of Glenn Campling (Bauhaus raodie) and Kevin Haskins (ex-Bauhaus, current Love & Rockets) which was scattered on numerous 12" vinyl releases over about a 5 year period. * Tones On Tail was originally a pet project of Ash's while he was still in Bauhaus. And some of the tracks on Bauhaus's last album "Burning from the Inside" sound identicle to TOT ("Slice of Life" in particular"). * The music has a definate electronic body to it unlike most of Bauhaus, but Ash's trademark quirky electric guitar and spidery accoustic guitar work remain to round out the dark synth pop very well (Ash often called it "weird pop"). * All in all, TOT were ahead of their time, and may still be considering very few artists have achieved the unique balance of guitars and electronics that this band did. * This is a must have for any fan of dark electronic music. * (Other bands similar to TOT: Gary Numan, Dead Can Dance, Coil, Tear Garden, and of course, Bauhaus, Love & Rockets and Daniel Ash's solo work.)

The segues alone make this the one to have. Everything! is great, but Night Musuc is truly that... it flows from beginning to end in a well-laid out path. So much so, that you don't realise it's deliberately sequenced that way... just lose yourself in it. Good wintertime after-dark music whilst driving about in the city.

I know you are thinking I am guilty of blasphemy, but this CD could quite possibly be better than the group's earlier incarnation, Bauhaus. After all, who really thought Bauhaus last CD, Burning, was anything special? It was like a Pink Floyd garage session. This CD has amazing atmospheric original work, with combinations of eerie guitars and spacey keyboards. -Real Life- and -Rain- are perhaps the best songs ever made by Ash and company.

My life as a depressed teen began with the Cure, but my bleak, goth-ridden, liberating fate was sealed the moment I saw, not heard, Bauhaus. A few months after getting hooked on the sounds of the first two Love and Rockets album (Seventh Dream of Teenage Heaven, Express), I followed the sign in the record store's "see also Bauhaus" sign to find said band's greatest hits. I was immediately struck at by the art-rock titles: "Bela Lugosi's Dead", "Terror Couple Kill Colonel" and "Stigmata Martyr" seemed like the words to some incantation, but it was the picture of the band that held me. Peter Murphy's cheek bones, accentuated with full glam-rock makeup; Daniel Ash's glorious spiked mullet and piercing stare; Kevin Haskins' tightlipped smirk, barely visible, looking like he's got a thousand stories to tell (he's a drummer, for hell's sake); David J's timeless shades and neo-Cesar cut... All of them gaunt as hell! They didn't look punk or new wave, and I didn't understand why, but I was smitten and had to own everything I could afford at the moment.

That band means the world to me, but discovering them was a gateway to my discovery of a group who has yet to receive the recognition they deserve. Tones on Tail were a side project featuring Ash, Haskins and Glenn Campling (a Bauhaus roadie) that essentially recorded during and just after Bauhaus's breakup in 1983.

Tones on Tail released a number of singles and one album (Pop) which garnered very little attention, and with the exception of the track "Go!", sampled by Moby (for his originally titled "Go!") and featured on various '80s compilations, a Starburst commercial, the More Grosse Point Blank soundtrack and a Mary Kate and Ashley feature (I died a little when I learned this), Tones On Tail remains a cult band more than anything, but based on what I witnessed at a Daniel Ash show in San Francisco (shirts, bras, panties all thrown on stage when Ash launched into "Go!"), what a following it is. I'm one of the most devoted fanatics of everything the band did during their short life. Of the several compilations of Tones on Tail's music, Night Music is the one that I hold dearest in my memory. Maybe it was the lurid dreams I had during the few weeks after I ordered it ($30 in 1987), the song order, the Elvis cover...or maybe it's just the naked girl on the front, posing like some new wave cheerleader, but I've kept Night Music in my personal top five for the last seventeen years. I've formed bands around the premise, "let's be like Tones on Tail", and most of my first four-track songs were attempts to create something as monumental as their work.

That said, when I'm asked, "What does Tones on Tail's music sound like?" I'm stumped. I've learned that it's best to burn a few choice songs (or loan out a copy of the disc if you're really nice to me) and recommend a late-night date with a dark room and headphones. Really, the only common thread throughout the disc is Ash's voice: apart from that, you need a map to trace Night Music's winding path. Opener "War" begins with a false start of guitar feedback, but quickly launches into a steady stream of hi-hats and Campling's signature picked bass-line ostinatos. The kitschy keyboard stabs scream '80s synthpop, but the raucous vibrato guitar and Ash's chant style vocals take the track to another galaxy. OK, does this mix of elements seem a bit skewed to you? It certainly through me off for a long time, but this mystique and my longing to understand how such disparate elements, pieced together with such a minimal aesthetic, is what keeps the album so intriguing after so many years. I mean, Campling plays pretty much the same riff over and over on each track, Haskins rarely rolls his snare, and often leaves the hi-hat up to your imagination, and you can count Ash's guitar chord repertoire on two hands -- but what Tones on Tail do, they do well.

As the disc unfolds, the squiggly line of continuity becomes thinner and the band's penchant for eclecticism shows no limit. The aforementioned "Go!" deserves first mention as far as innovation is concerned. The driving tempo, carried by a thumping bass drum and thunderous handclap, accented by a cowbell lick (?) and Ash's nonsensical "yah, yah, yah, yah, yah, yah, yah, yah, yahhhhh" was as much a model for club music as "Blue Monday". "Christian Says" lends credence to the "Goth" tag that perpetually smothered Ash and Haskins's music (talk of vampires, Lord Christian who desires "everyone to love him / you can be happy being this way"). Ash's e-bow work is legendary, and his melody lick is the most unmistakable hook in my collection -- it gives me chills. The production on the drums, vocals and acoustic guitars is stellar, and it makes you wonder why Ash's newer solo releases suffer from such muddy sound. "There's Only One" marries a post-disco guitar line with a twelve-bar blues form, propelled by cheap drum machine preset patterns and random guitar generated special-FX. "He wants two, he wants three, they want four...there's only one", paired with ideas regarding "popcorn chews", makes little sense, but this early display of Ash's lyrics shows the birth of his distinctive lyrical style. It's hit and miss on paper, but like the supermodel who can get away with not knowing the name of the current president, his sexy English croon turns even the silliest words into gold -- he generally writes lyrics ten minutes before recording sessions, so the fact that he comes up with what he does is pretty damn remarkable.

"OK, This is the Pops", my favorite song here, is probably the closest Night Music comes to a "rock" song. Ash's megaphone vocals and guitars cut through Campling's bass and Haskins's backbeat (your guess is as good as mine who brought back the cowbell...again). Innovative track number two is "Happiness". This is a jazz song/etude, but not the jazz you're used to. Rather, you might hear it in a cantina in a galaxy far, far away: gentle brush strokes over snare, timpani accents, slinky bass, whispered vocals and creepy synth organ lines? Well, whatever you call this, it was the reason I bought brushes that cost nearly as much as my $40 drum kit.

At this point, the disc takes a turn for the mellow. There's the instrumental "You, the Night and the Music", with its ambient drones and sax noises, makes my cat crazy; the bitter ballad "Burning Skies", with the classic line "I love you like you love me not"; the mysterious "Lions", based around a Yamaha organ Samba pattern and mandolin-style guitar picking. The lanky and lugubrious "Movement of Fear" was featured on Blair Witch Project soundtrack and sampled by the Fun Lovin' Criminals on their "hit", "Scooby Snacks". "Real Life" is a bi-formal exploration of a repeated lyric ("Give me something for nothing / give me too much too soon / I'm so damned sick of your stupid rules") and a rapidly repeated open-string guitar riff whose two sections are separated by stark silence and boldly a capella chants of "Real Life". I promise to stop using the word innovation after mentioning "Rain", but after skipping past this song for years, I finally realized how maverick and pioneering it was in 1984. The track begins in a lethargically evolving duet of synth drones, and eventually slips into a wash of arpeggiated bells. Bass guitar and a kick/snare drum make up the rhythm section, forming a five-note pattern that recurs for the next four minutes while tripped out vocals soothe you with messages about...rain. Seeds of post-rock, ambient electronica and minimalism can all be found within these nine minutes, but sadly, as could be said about majority of Love and Rockets and Bauhaus's albums, it simply fell to the side -- it was a bit too far ahead of its time.

A few more instrumentals (including what should have been the theme to Terminator 2, "When You're Smiling"), the tricky disco of "Twist" and the set closes with an odd choice, a live cover of Elvis's "Heartbreak Hotel". The quality isn't great -- it sounds like a bootleg from an audience member, captured on a portable cassette and later dropped in a toilet -- but the energy is still there. Instead of comping on the song's theme, Haskins and Campling plod along in a dirty groove while Ash merely strums the chords to "Movement of Fear" and growls the words. There's no trace of the original melody in sight.

Now that I'm a little older and a tad more educated about music, I guess I could label Night Music "Post-Modern", as it seems to follow some sort of model with roots in that movement (i.e. endings that leave a great deal to be desired). Or maybe it's a Modernist display of art, a rejection all that was going on at the time, musically. Or perhaps I could compare and contrast the influence of the Bauhaus movement (Paul Klee, Walter Gropius, Germany) on the ensemble or the album's form and function, or how the genius of its craft allows for it to fit any mood or scenario (car, home, picnic). However, I prefer to remember it as I did the first time I put it on: dreamy, enigmatic, fun, confusing and comforting.

There's some really cool (at the time, one might say avant-garde) tracks here, that exhibit an ambient/techno-esque style. About as arty as Bauhuas, but much easier to slip into and enjoy like L&R.

I bought this years ago. Tones on Tail's newer compilation has their only full length LP "POP" in it's original form, along with another disc with all their other collective output. The newer compilation has everything "Night Music" has and the sound quality is vastly improved, making this compilation pointless.

This is a great album if you like to listen to music with the lights out and some candles lit. A real sleeper of a CD - the same guys from Love and Rockets created some beautiful, introspective sounds. If you haven't heard this album I can't recommend it enough.

Looked all over town for this CD and no one carries it... Went online to Amazon and found it right away...The best Tone on Tails song... GO