Yesteryear: The Cherry Smash

Yesteryear is a new weekly feature on Basement Fever aiming to highlight some ace music from the past that hopefully you won't have heard of, or if you have heard of it, maybe you haven't got around to listening yet. Yeah.



The Cherry Smash seem like an apt first choice for Yesteryear, given that if I stumbled upon them on bandcamp today, they would be blogged without doubt by tomorrow. Thanks go to Reeks Of Effort for turning me onto them a few months back.

Formed in California in the mid-nineties, their only release - 7" West Coast Rip Off - is three tracks of lo-fi jangly/surf pop that I absolutely adored on first listen, which they put out in '96/'97 before they changed their name to Spectacle, toured for a little while with The Brian Jonestown Massacre, and released an apparently unsuccessful full-length. Still, their 7" is pretty ace. Hear the excellent Airport Girl and Nowhere Generation below.


The Cherry Smash - Airport Girl


The Cherry Smash - Nowhere Generation

New: Kid Harpoon

We all remember Kid Harpoon. You know, the one what made that folk music. Well, he's back, and he's, er... well, not very 'folk' any more. Think more Prince-meets-Beach Boys out and out pop. Listen:


Kid Harpoon - Collecting Rain

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Harald Grosskopf

This is incredible, wonderful, unbelievable synth-led beauty from Harald Grosskopf's apparently seminal album Synthesist released in 1980, due to get a reissue in the coming weeks. I'm your average idiot and know very little about the Berlin artist, but even a fool like me can appreciate the brilliance of these songs. I quite often find myself amazed by bands from 30, 40 years ago, but this... Just listen.


Harald Grosskopf - So Weit, So Gut


Harald Grosskopf - Synthesist

RVNG Intl. are reissuing the album in just a few days time, along with a remix album Re-Synthesist. And just to think of which bands the 80s are best remembered for.

Burglarised

So it turns out when I was writing about Dan Amos a few weeks back I might have actually been talking about the band Burglarised. Dan Amos may have been a pretty main member, but still, should have probably got my facts right.

Also, it turns out that Burglarised have a good few releases to their name (according to their MySpace, 7 EPs or LPs, one as recent as last year) including Thunderheart!, which I posted about it. It also looks like Burglarised were played on Radio 1 by Rob Da Bank back in 2006 and also received some online press here and here (some of it pretty amusing in its criticism of the lo-fi sound before it was so common).

Obviously it doesn't make the music any worse. If anything it makes the whole lo-fi thing deserve even more respect in that Dan/Burglarised did it a long time before it was widely popular. But it does make me a rubbish blogger and for this I am sorry. I hope you accept my apologies. I also hope you love their music. I think it's great. Enjoy the utterly brilliant You Can Rest Easy Now, by BAND, Burglarised, below.


Burglarised - You Can Rest Easy Now