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Music

Perlich’s Picks

Rating: NNNNN


Thai-ed tight

Anyone familiar with the folkloric music of Thailand will immediately realize that the lost vinyl artifacts from the 60s collected for the first volume of Thai Beat A Go-Go (Subliminal Sounds) have little relationship to traditional Thai jams. What we have here are nutty approximations of Western-style rock ‘n’ roll in which the popular songs of Little Richard, Booker T & the MGs, Hank Williams, John Berry and Ray Charles are used as a jumping-off point for weird and wonderful rumba-surf romps and twangy watusi shakedowns by the likes of the Viking Band , Son of P.M. , Johnny’s Guitar and Der Dong Dang . Paiboon ‘s weirdly cackling Yom Pha Barn Norn Pahwaa (Satan’s Nightmare) sounds like a Halloween classic, while Jiraphand Ong-Ard ‘s trippy ode to Siamese kick boxing, Muay Thai, is just plain scary. www.subliminalsounds.se

Sacred Him

Ever since I heard the Lyres cover She’s Got Eyes That Tell Lies back in 86, I’ve been curious about the original version cut by the mysterious Him & the Others that Jeff Connolly copped – but not quite interested enough to blow a few hundred bucks on the original Parlophone single. So I’m happy to report that whoever has been reissuing obscenely rare Brit freakbeat singles by Tintern Abbey , the Factory and others has also repressed the highly prized Him & the Others joint. Of course it’s a stormer from start to finish, and better still, I Mean It on the flip is almost as great. There aren’t many pressed so grab it on sight.

Saxophone shake-up

Quick, somebody over at the BGP label check Dean Rudland ‘s temperature – there must be something terribly wrong that would account for the shocking lack of lightweight northern soul filler on his latest funk compilation, Instrumental Explosion (BGP/Ace). He still manages to sneak in an extended version of the Hank Jacobs fave Elijah Rockin’ With Soul – which oddly doesn’t have the same punch of my Call Me label single – but the rest of the disc is mostly heavy honking saxophone-led R&B groovers, with a couple of joints teetering on the brink of jazz. The less adventurous funk-heads will be relieved to know that familiar classics by the Untouchable Machine Shop and Bernard Purdie have been included, along with Miles Grayson ‘s recently discovered Stuck In The Mud – a dirty delight.

Boffo Brazil

Considering all the Brazilian jazz collections released by labels in Japan, England and Germany, it’s about time that some Brazilian labels got with the program, and finally, the Dubas Musica subsidiary of Universal has come up with the winning Jazzsamba set compiling classic early-60s club cookers. There’s nothing outrageously obscure uncovered here, but the thoughtfully sequenced small-combo swingers by Dom Um Romão , Paulo Moura , Moacir Santos , Sergio Mendes , Victor Asis Brasil , Rio 65 Trio , Edison Machado and others make for a swank introduction to the flipside of Brazil’s bossa nova craze.

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