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I've been meaning to mention this here for a few years, but the effective death of this part of the board put me off. Prompted into it now by something that happened last night.
A few years ago, when I was indluged in an extended period of doing absolutely nothing at all, I tripped over WFMU.org. A few of their shows really grabbed my attention, but my absolute favourite was on a Sunday afternoon (UK time): Greasy Kid Stuff, a show constructed by and for big kids. Daft songs about dinosaurs, maths, bananas, etc.
One of the acts they played quite a bit of was Logan Whitehurst & the Junior Science Club. Whitehurst's songs encapsulated everything that was great about the show always provided the highlights. A song about two noodles, one happy, on sad, having a fight. A song about constucting a robot cat. A song about a lizard and a fish trying to escape from a pet shop.
So, eventually, I bought the album, Goodbye, My 4-Track. And fell in love with it. Opening with one of the greatest list songs ever (about great partnerships, linking them to the duo of Whitehurst and his chum Vanilla the Plastic Snowman), then moving through an explanation of volcanic activity, a demand for worship for saving somebody from drowning, a track called Your Brain Fell Out, the aforementioned noodles/robot/pets songs, an accordian-led waltz about werewolves... wigs, monkeys, ice cream men...
Musically, it's all over the place, but in a really, *really* good way. Every single track is immediately hummable, influences are thrown about left, right and centre, and it manages to keep this enormously appealing, childlike pick 'n' mix, attention-deficit perrsonality running for the whole album, without a single bum note.
I dug around a bit, but couldn't find anything else by Whitehurst. He's associated with other bands, but the Junior Sience Club stuff seemed to be limited to this one album and some impossible-to-source earlier releases. Nothing since.
And then I kind of forgot. Because I'd been keeping an eye out for a while, with nothing new appearing, I figured he'd simply stopped writing and recording. I still listened to Goodbye, My 4-Track an awful lot, but gave up hoping for anything new.
Last night, while transfering that album onto an MP3 player, I suddnly realised that I hadn't checked for a couple of years. So I Googled him up again.
He died two years ago.
That's awful. The guy was clearly ridiculously talented and a brilliant person - you couldn't be responsbile for songs like these without also being 100% nice/awesome, right down to the core.
He recorded one more album just before he died - when everybody thought he was getting better, he apparently asked fans online to give him some ideas for new songs, the end result of which was an album of 81 Very Tiny Songs. And then that was it.
The Whitehurst family have since put all of his recordings - bar Goodbye, My 4-Track and Very Tiny Songs - online, for free download. It's all here. I've only listened to the Earth is Big slbum so far, which is brilliant - almost on a par with ..4-Track.
This music is the kind of thing that almost makes me wish I had kids of my own, so that I could expose them to imaginative, fun, insane stuff from an early age. Again, it's childlike, but with all of the oddness and undercurrent of weird darkness that comes with that left intact. It's music that always manages to bring a smile to my face.
I don't know how many people here'll give a shit about this now. Download Earth is Big and find out.
grant, iamus - I think you'd both love this. Anybody else is a bonus. |
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