Word: teardrops
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...doodled. The lower eyelid of a headlamp. A fender. A door window. A trunk. And wheels. Sometimes a teardrop, a spacecraft. Cars. Even hiding out behind the back desk of the third row wasn't enough to keep the Flint, Michigan, fourth-grader out of trouble, until an art teacher stopped by and became Tom Gale's first serious customer...
...awful. It's a perfectly amiable, perfectly inconsequential cartoon show that seems better suited to Saturday mornings. The concept is appealing: life in a suburban household as seen through the eyes of the ignored and abused family pet. And the pooch itself is amusingly drawn: a woebegone, teardrop-snouted creature, rendered in the spare lines of 1950s UPA animation (Mr. Magoo...
Julian Cope has nobody to blame but himself. With his psychedelic horn-driven post-punk group The Teardrop Explodes, and on his seven subsequent solo releases, Cope has proven his ability to combine high intellectual weirdness with a razor-sharp pop sensibility. So how come the best singer/songwriter to come out of Liverpool since, say, 1962 has nothing but a half-handful of U.K. hits to show for his 13-year career? Simple: Cope seems to have no idea when he's being a genius and when he's recording pretentious dreck. Well, thank God for anthologists. Floored Genius...
...first four tracks are drawn from The Teardrop Explodes' debut LP, Kilimanjaro (1980). Standouts include the dementedly jazzy hit single "Reward" (which rhymes "queues" with "Howard Hughes") and the shiny creepy "Sleeping Gas." Dissonant guitar and horn solos over driving, repetitive rhythm sections are the norm here, but this stuff is too much fun to feel avant-garde...
...Teardrop Explodes broke up in 1983 (although not before recording enough new material for the posthumous and unlistenable Everybody Wants to Shag The Teardrop Explodes, thankfully unrepresented here), and Cope was free to pursue his solo career. "I regard what I want to do next as an opportunity for gross self-indulgence," Cope said at the time, and spent the next four years fulfilling that promise. The songs here, happily, avoid the worst of the excess; the pleasantly catchy "An Elegant Chaos" captures the flavor of the period, and "Sunspots," Iyrically a doodle, is worth listening to if only...