Reviews: The Necessaries, Cordovas, Cast, Beck
Plus Kula Shaker, Tinsley Ellis, The Monkees, Tony Hadley, Eric Bibb
It’s been a week that’s felt like a month, so the new review roundup was delayed by a day.
ALBUM OF THE WEEK
The Necessaries—Completely Necessary (Anthology 1978-1982) [2026; 1978-1982]
★★★★
The Necessaries are one of those bands that fell through the cracks, never quite amassing the cult following they seemed destined to have. Formed during the first flush of punk, they finally released their Sire debut right around the time New Wave transformed into the synthesized sound of the early days of MTV. They had an interesting pedigree. Drummer Jesse Chamberlain played with Mayo Thompson of the Red Crayola in Art & Language, while guitarist Ed Tomney ran in similar circles as John Cale; the former Velvet Underground member suggested the band’s name to Tomney. Shortly afterward, Modern Lover bassist Ernie Brooks joined the band, as did Arthur Russell, whose status rose after his premature death in 1992.
The quartet had chemistry even if their parts didn’t quite fit. Their lean execution—sometimes as sounding as jittery as Talking Heads or probing as Television—sometimes recalls the nervy energy of the hardest power-pop bands yet they never seem particularly interested in either melody or concision, preferring to wander toward a disappearing horizon. Their music feels simultaneously open-ended and spiky, a combination that suggests the harder-hitting R.E.M. disciples that cluttered college radio in the late 1980s without quite serving as a precursor. Omnivore’s Completely Necessary (Anthology 1978-1982), a double-disc collection that represents the first-ever reissue from the NYC-based group, compounds the band’s strange out-of-phase qualities
