Since I’m not prone to writing actual reviews, I’m renaming the “Reviews” category to simply “Media.” That way I can talk about movies, games, music and what-not and have somewhere to put such specific (yet still pointless) ramblings.

What? This is the sort of thing I lose sleep over, folks.

Anyway. I just thought I’d mention that Peter Schilling’s “Major Tom” is one of my all-time favorite songs. I like David Bowie’s “Space Oddity” too, of course, but that song isn’t on my portable music player. There’s just something perfectly 80’s-pop-music about “Major Tom” (aka “Major Tom’s Return”) that suits me right down to the ground.

As it were.

This is the album that my old buddy Steve and I bought solely because of a tiny article in Tower Records’ “Pulse” magazine. It told of a new band whose writers’ chief influences covered the gamut of everything Steve and I liked.

Oddly enough, we weren’t disappointed. “Toy Matinee” is a great pop record. It’s got some of the snappiest lyrics anywhere, it’s chock full of catchy beats and nifty hooks, and it tugs at your emotions. “Last Plane Out” and “Turn It On Salvador” are brilliantly smirking pieces. “The Toy Matinee” is a gorgeously sad song, and one of my all time favorites all on its own. “Queen of Misery” and “There Was A Little Boy” are a bit dark, while “We Always Come Home” is gentle and homey in a non-tacky way.

I love this album, and I always intended to save the best for last. (Sure, nobody’s awake to see it. It’s the principle of the thing, donchaknow?) The promo contains parts of “Last Plane Out,” “Queen of Misery,” “The Toy Matinee” and “We Always Come Home.” Enjoy, please, won’t you?

Toy Matinee promo

What do you get when you take a prolific composer and producer and have her rework some of her most familiar music, add some original material and release the album Stateside? You get Yuki Kajiura’s “Fiction.”

Kajiura has a fairly distinctive style even apart from the fact that a lot of her songs’ lyrics are written in languages other than Japanese. And no, not all of the songs on the album are English either, as a couple of the tracks from the anime series Noir are represented here, namely “Salva Nos” and “Canta per Me,” albeit in renditions far more grandiose than the originals. The versions of “Key of the Twilight” and “Fake Wings” (from .hack) are fairly straightforward but no less enjoyable for that fact.

It’s the lesser-known tracks that really make the album, though. “Cynical World” is pretty, peppy and dark all at once. “Fiction” and “Vanity” are a hauntingly beautiful pair of songs. “Zodiacal Sign” is a collection of what could be considered “action sequence” background music from another anime title, and “Open Your Heart” is sweetly uplifting, almost too sweetly perhaps, but by that point on the album one tends not to mind too much.

Don’t let the fact that half of this album started life as music for anime series turn you away. Try the promo, which features “Key of the Twilight,” “Open Your Heart,” “Cynical World” and “Fiction.” Unless what you hear really turns you off, I wholeheartedly recommend this album to you.

YK – Fiction promo

I’d say that this is known as the post-Phil Collins album by Genesis, except for the fact that it’s barely known at all. This is the album that landed with a resounding, if curiously muffled, thud on Amercia’s shores.

Poor Ray Wilson. He didn’t deserve to only get signed on for one shaky, uncertain, occasionally brilliant album and then have the band dissolve out from underneath of him. How does a guy follow in the footsteps of not one but two household-name frontmen?

“Calling All Stations” is, like most post-Abacab Genesis albums, something of a progressive/pop hybrid. There are smart hooks and power chords interspersed with delicate keyboard work and occasionally clunky lyrics, just like we’d come to expect from the band’s last half-dozen releases. The only radio-friendly track, “Congo,” is a decent piece of pop-rock in its own right, as is the title track, “Calling All Stations.” “Alien Afternoon” is whimsical Genesis in the mid-70’s mode with modern technology behind it. Romantic ballads, a Genesis staple thanks in large part to the departed Mr. Collins, are here aplenty in the form of “If That’s What You Need,” “Shipwrecked” and especially “Not About Us.” The album is capped with the social-consciousness epic, “One Man’s Fool,” which isn’t nearly as clunky as you’d expect from a song just this side of being something U2 might have produced if they went for baroque prog-rock stylings.

All in all, it’s not the best album they made but it shows considerable promise for what might have been. Ray’s singing and the songs he contributed to in other ways were certainly getting my hopes up for the next album… which, of course, we’ll never hear. Ah well.

Today’s promo consists of “The Dividing Line,” “Congo,” “Not About Us” and a brief bit of “One Man’s Fool.” I had the damnedest time fitting four clips into this one, folks… though maybe I could’ve used less of the “Dividing” bass riff. Hmm.

Genesis – CAS Promo