B.T. Express – 1980 (1980)

 

B.T. Express
1980
Released 1980, Columbia JC 36333
 
 
 
Takin’ Off     3:52
Heart Of Fire     3:52
Does It Feel Good     5:43
Give Up The Funk (Let’s Dance)     6:25
Closer     3:35
Have Some Fun     5:23
Better Late Than Never     5:33
Funk Theory     4:22
 
Produced for Mighty M Productions
Mastered at Sterling Sound, N.Y.C.
Recorded and mixed at Counterpoint Studios, N.Y.C.
Additional recording at Music Grinder Studios, L.A.
Additional mixing at The Hit Factory, N.Y.C.
B.T. Express is:
Carlos Ward – Alto Saxophone, Flute, horn arrangments on ‘Give Up The Funk’
Rick Thompson – Guitar
Wesley “Pike” Hall, Jr. – Lead Guitar, Vocals
Bill Risbrook – Tenor Saxophone, Vocals
Dennis Rowe – Percussion, Vocals
Jamal Rasool – Bass, lead vocals
Additional musicians:
Buddy Williams – Drums
Gary Scott –  Arrangements and conducting, keyboards, synthesizer
Howard Westley “Butch” Stevens – keyboards
Recorded and mixed by Alan Meyerson and Gary Chester
Additional recording engineers – Gary Skardina, Ryan Ulyate
Assistant engineers – Ben Wisch, Karl Westman, Michael Ruffo
Mixed by – Gerry Block
Mastered by Greg Calbi
Additional production and arranging – Morrie Brown
Concertmaster – Marcy Dicterow
Executive Producer (supplied the coke) – Fred Frank
Barcode and Other Identifiers
    Matrix / Runout: AL 36333
    Matrix / Runout: BL 36333

If you’ve never listened to a record by B.T. Express, this probably isn’t the place to start.  Not that it is a bad album, it’s just not a really good album – but the good cuts on it are pretty damn good.  The quintessential 1970s funk sound of the band’s classic years is being “updated” for a new era here, complete with futuristic themes in the cover art and a little bit of the music.  Take the opening cut, “Taking Off!”, which appears to be about getting an aerobic workout in outer space.  It’s important to stay healthy in zero gravity, after all.   This song only becomes listenable after about the two-minute mark, when a blast-off of delay on the vocals signals that it’s time for the Express’ best asset, slinky horn lines.  Over all, though, the song is pretty awful, flirting with a “yacht rock” sound that is absurdly becoming hipster-trendy and undergoing a “revival” by certain contemporary music artists  who want to argue for it’s musical sophistication while they tell their audiences not to yell out during concerts or show up in football jersey’s because that’s too low-rent for their wine connoisseur pretensions.  Seriously, “yacht rock” and AOR are the new crate-digging frontier?  What’s next, Madlib remixes of Barry Manilow tracks?  Sorry but I’ll pass and wait for the next fetish they come up with, I ain’t biting on this revival.

Oh right, I was discussing a B.T. Express album.  Well, the Michael McDonaldisms get put away and things get more enjoyable.  There are a lot of non-band members on this record, most likely assigned to it by Columbia  after their previous album failed to do much on the charts.  There is something shameless about the interference in the band’s work ethic here, and the attempts at FM-crossover hooks in the choruses doesn’t always work for me.  I mean the second track is called “Heart Of Fire,” for Pete’s sake.  It’s almost like it was intended to confuse a slightly drunk person at a jukebox looking to for Earth Wind & Fire’s “That’s The Way Of The World” aka Hearts Afire.  Aside from the title, though, the similarity ends there.  It’s a good disco-funk burner, and has subtle poetry in lines like, “But my love for you, it keeps on comin’ and comin’ and comin’ and comin’…”    The third song, however, sounds to my ears like almost a direct theft of the tune “Don’t Hold Back” by Chanson to a degree that would even embarrass  Robin Thicke and Pharell.  I can’t objectively say anything about this tune.

The big track that people remember from this album, the one that charted, is “Give Up The Funk,” which sports another profoundly unoriginal title.  Thankfully there are no Parliament ripoffs to be found here, and no references to “the bomb,” as the sound is 100% B.T. Express with an updated sound, including the ray gun ‘pew pew pew’ of electric tom tom drums.  The tune also brings back the Express’s best trademark:  long, darkly-hued horn phrases used to punctuate the jams in a an understated  way, as if Maceo Parker took a few Valium and was trying not to be noticed off somewhere near the back of the stage.  Sax player Carlos Ward may have shunned the spotlight, but it’s the big failing of this record – and evidence of typical major label short-sightedness – that the one and only track that he arranges is also the only one to be a hit.  The others are all arranged by outsiders Morrie Brown and Gary Scott.  It should be noted that this cut contains an unusual spelling, “F-F-U-F-U-N-K”, which the band determined was the way our Alien Overlords were going to spell their favorite genre of music, due to their leader having a chronic stutter.

Side Two opens with the ballad “Closer,” the first ballad of the album.  I was talking to a friend a few weeks ago about how so many albums from this period would open with a tight, upbeat song for four minutes to get you dancing, then on the second track they would go all Barry White.  Too soon, man, not even Barry moves that fast.  So bonus points to B.T. Express for holding back until the second side.  This track is melodic and smooth, but not overdoing either one of those qualities.  The best thing about it is a completely nonsensical saxophone solo at the end, which begins each bar all Grover Washington but ends all Eric Dolphy.  What would Barry think of that?  Barack?

“Have Some Fun” is a good mid-tempo roller-skating tune, and the only time they dust off the old Hammond organ that featured so prominently on earlier albums.  Again, the chorus sounds written by committee, a formulaic hook that is pretty forgettable an hour later.   It has a nice breakdown with cool riffing on flute, organ, and guitar that makes me pretty happy, though.  It’s probably been sampled a bunch of times.   The next song, “Better Late Than Never,” probably could have just gone with “never,” I don’t have much to say about this tune either.  In fact you could probably just stop the record after “Have Some Fun” and preserve a better memory of this album, because the closer “Funk Theory” is pretty bad.  While  putting together this post I noticed that it seems reasonably popular on YouTube, so what the hell do I know?  The title sort of says it all, it’s as if a bunch of number crunchers wrote a program in DOS that would churn out FM-friendly funk hits, with lyrics that would look better on a chalk-board written a hundred times by an errant, unfunky student.

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Candango do Ypê – Vol.3: Lambada (1979)

Front cover of "Lambada Volume 3" showing a woman in knee-high white boots and a white onesy leotard dancing with Candango do Ypê

 

Candango do Ypê
Vol. 3 – Lambada
1979 Copacabana COELP-41213
Carimbó das Guianas
Carimbó Agarradinho
Carimbó de Dezembro
Carimbó da Crioula
Carimbó dos Namorados
Gafieira Pernambucana
Feira de Troca-troca
Forró Lascado
Ciranda do Navio
Marcha da Cobra
João Felicidade
Festa de Nazareth
Arrangements – Pachequinho
Recording engineer – Deraldo
Mixing engineer – Zilmar
Recorded at Somil (Rio de Janeiro) and Dó-Ré-Mi (São Paulo)
Cover photo – Micheloni
Lay-out – Impulso Marketing & Propaganda Ltda
Direção artistica – Paulo Rocco
Direção de Produção – Talmo Scaranari
Vinyl -> Pro-Ject RM-5SE turntable (with Sumiko Blue Point 2 cartridge, Speedbox power supply); Creek Audio OBH-15; M-Audio Audiophile 2496Soundcard ; Adobe Audition at 32-bit float 96khz; Click Repair light settings; individual clicks and pops taken out with Adobe Audition 3.0 – resampled (and dithered for 16-bit) using iZotope RX Advanced. Tags done with Foobar 2000 and Tag and Rename.

As I have mentioned repeatedly in the sparse posts over the last six months to a year, it’s been a very busy time for Flabbergast, filled with momentous “real life” things that were extremely demanding and required all of my attention, and thus have kept me away from blogging.  Foremost among these been the absorbing work I put into proposals for the Lego Ideas initiative whose mania is sweeping the nation!  Unfortunately my efforts brought me nothing but frustration and headaches.  My first attempt was a scale model of Motown Studios which I designed after one visit to their Detroit museum back in 1999 and a postcard that I’ve kept ever since as a souveneir.  It was going pretty well – I even had the moveable drum riser, built out of Legos! – when I received a “cease and desist” letter from Berry Gordy’s estate and was forced to abandon the project.  The last thing I needed right then, especially when trademarking my name back in 2013 failed to produce any revenue whatsoever, was a lawsuit.  Sadly, litigation was exactly what I would get from my next project, a scale model of the Berlin Wall.  The city kept telling me that I needed something called a “permit” and told me that the armed Lego guards were scaring the townsfolk.  But what really killed the project was a lawsuit from both Phil Spector and ex-Pink Floyd guy Roger Waters, who had heard about my run-in with Berry Gordy’s people and automatically assumed my giant Lego wall must be music-related and so obviously somehow about them.  I think I had a pretty good chance of winning the court case, but since I couldn’t find a lawyer who would accept payment in Reddit gold, I decided to just abandon that project too.  For payback, I mailed Spector a Lego gun but apparently the prison deemed it an unacceptable gift.  But don’t worry about me, I always land on my feet.  I’m not interested in any trendy get rich quick schemes anyway, I’m a guy who likes to commit to the long haul.  Legos!  It’s such a fad, I’ll bet you twenty dollars (in Reddit gold or possibly Bitcoin) that nobody will even remember what they are five years from now.

Alright, so let’s just establish right at the outset that I bought this record because of the cover without knowing anything about it. It was definitely buying it just from the front photo – after all it has popcorn in it, sitting next to a bowl of ice! But then I flipped it around and saw that more than half of it was carimbó music, which would have sealed the deal had I not already made up my mind.

Rather fittingly for the cover, in the grooves is a so-so party record of tunes that will grow on you but that probably won’t end up on your regular party playlist.  In spite of being called “Vol.3 – Lambada” there is only one tune which flirts with that genre here, the outright awful “Carimbó das Guianas.” The tightest thing here is the track Carimbo de Dezembro, a funky little number meant for celebrating New Years Eve, and which I included on Flabbergasted Freeform No.10 .  The runner-up might be Carimbó da Crioula which starts out at a slower tempo and keeps speeding up until it’s pretty frenetic.  Candango gets bonus points for authoring all his own tunes, with a handful of writing partners, including Pinduca on one track.

Mr. Candango has kind of a weird voice, one that is suited for the forró music here.  Based on the range of his repertoire and  his accent, I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that he might have been a Northeastern transplant to Pará, the birthplace of carimbó.  A little lazy searching turned up the fact that he apparently lived for a while in Ilheús, Bahia.  If he wasn’t a nordestino then he was certainly playing to an audience that appreciated the region’s music.  Along with some genres native to Pernambuco (which is, as a matter of fact, where I found this record) like frevo and ciranda here, you also get fandango / marujada, and the aforementioned forró.  But then he also takes a stab at a samba de roda.  He seemed to be a jack of all trades, as further sleuthing turns up that he made at least one record of seresta / serenata music, as well as an entire album of fandango.  But I know little else about him.  He may have worked in construction of the modernist capital city of Brasília: candango is a name given to the construction workers there, and he seems to have been old enough to have done it.  He could have invented this off-road Jeep, the Brazilian version of the German “Munga”:
 photo DKW_Candango_1960_zpsxjbiqvnn.jpg

If anyone wants to replace this speculative biography of the mystery man known as Candango do Ypê, feel free to leave a comment.  Also feel free to click the links button!

 

Incidentally, as you will hear, this record wasn’t in the best of shape and neither was the cover.  I did a little “restoration” on the glorious cover art, you can see the original state it was in here below.  I left a little of the wear and tear to keep the “authenticity” in tact….

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