Tag: Tom Tom Club

It's an all-new rehash, with the fifth edition of Version Control!

I’ve done a couple dozen all-covers shows already, usually during fundraising, but for some reason have never come up with a name for them. It must have been because the painfully obvious Version Control hadn’t occurred to me yet, a real embarrassing confession given my day job in the realm of code. At any rate, it is here, and we are going to be versioning them semantically starting now.

The three-piece punchy pop formula should be familiar to everyone by now, but the sounds of Bad Bad Hats are an elegant proof of their own.

Hailing from the southwest of France, The Llamps build on a sound that's equal parts New York City grit, San Francisco psychedelia, and spaghetti Western twang, which makes for a pan-global main dish.

This is a reissue of a 20-year-old album, yet the pan-global disco stew that comes from this band could live anywhere in their decades-long career continuum, past, present, or future. This is dance music for getting subtly amped up.

Some bands are obscure, others are sporadic, but The Mabuses are downright enigmatic. Their music is hard to describe, and while the word "psychedelic" has become a commonplace and devalued label to put on something these days, in this case it would apply as a feeling of existing in a disjointed but entirely fascinating musical reality rather than a genre.

Uwe Schmidt has had an extensive career, recording under many names as electronic musicians do, but it's his work as Señor Coconut (and now as Atom™), where he deconstructs familiar songs into something Kraftwerk would play if hired to play a quinceañera, that brings me this very particular weird glee.

The original “Crimson and Clover” was Tommy James and the Shondells' biggest hit, but it was also one of the first songs to be recorded on 16 track equipment, and is a textbook example on the use (or overuse) of rhythmic tremolo. Pom Pom Squad does a good job of channeling the song's sweet yet feral vibe.

There is something familiar yet quite subversive in the way Sneaks assembles their synthetic layers and stream-of-consciousness vocalizations into a collage of desperate modern living.

The Texas trio returns with their very specific blend of surf, psychedelia, and exotic spice, but this time around they’ve dropped the “instrumental” part by adding gloriously subdued vocalizations to some of the tracks.