A few more records I’ve been pulling randomly from my big box o’ CDs and listening to on long drives:

♦Halfway There: A Central Pennsylvania compilation: For a couple of years in the mid 90s, Central PA had something of a renaissance of original music. Music that people noticed and appreciated. People like record company A&R guys, on the lookout for the next Seattle to sell to the masses. History shows us, of course, that such a scene never happened. The spark of originality and verve soon fizzled. All the cool music venues closed, and live music fell largely back into the traditional crappy cover bands playing to sparse crowds in fire halls. Still, for those few years, Central Pennsylvania was in interesting place to be (I still feel I was fortunate to be involved in a small way as a fan and amateur open-mic participant), and several very good bands got (usually fleeting) major label contracts and videos on MTV and VH1 (back when that meant something); groups like Live, Fuel, and the Badlees, largely considered the kings of that appalachian hill. This record was one of the several compilations of Central PA talent that got released during those years. The Badlees lead this one off with their “big” hit “Angeline is Coming Home,” and are followed by a relatively slapdash collection of other groups, including scene standouts The Martini Bros., The Syn D’Cats, and element (once known as “motherfunk”). re-listening to the disc now, it brings back a little bit of a wave of nostalgia for the college years. Even though I can honestly say I feel no compunction to ever move back to the land of my youth, I’ll always have a soft spot for the music of that time and place.

♦Brian May – Back to the Light: The biggest surprise about this, the second solo project by the Queen guitarist, is that the traditional “Brian May sound” is doled out so sparingly. For most of the record, I’m reasonably sure May’s playing a typical late 80s/early 90s superstrat. What this serves to do, mostly, is cause involuntary fist-pumping and headbanging whenever the red special comes out, in all it’s compressed and double-tracked glory, even though the rest of May’s guitar playing is appropriately first rate. It’s interesting to hear May separate from Freddie Mercury, though this record goes to show how much of a collaborative project Queen really was, because large swaths of the record sound exactly like Queen, which really is a very good thing. I suspect lots of the song ideas that made it onto this record were probably originally conceived for Queen records, especially “Too Much Love Will Kill You” (indeed, research tells me that there’s a version of this ballad with Freddie Mercury vocals out there that I need to track down). If you’re a fan of Queen, or of musicianship in general, this one’s worth the effort to track down, especially tracks like the aforementioned “Too Much Love Will Kill You” and “Driven By You.” It’s also almost certainly the best rock record ever recorded by an astrophysics PhD, at least in a universe where Buckaroo Banzai remains a fictional character.

♦Dog’s Eye View –Happy Nowhere: At first glance, I’d classify this band as one of the lesser Hootie-likes from the early to mid-nineties, stuck firmly in the largely generic, rootsy flotsam and jetsam upon which 90s superstardom floated, along with contemporaries like Tonic, Sun Volt, Edwin McCain and my personal 90s favorites,The Badlees. At second glance, I’d still put Dog’s Eye View in that category, though as the Badlees earned my home town affection, each of these bands managed to command enough devotion in their own niches to draw the attention of major labels and earn a shot at the big leagues. In short (to paraphrase Stan Lee), every one of these bands is somebody’s favorite, and probably with good reason; that’s the filter through which I re-listened to Happy Nowhere. The band’s one breakthrough single (and the only track I’d ever heard before purchasing this) was the peppy ode to entropy “Everything Falls Apart,” which was catchy enough, but doesn’t stick out today as particularly special. Thankfully there is some really excellent stuff on this record. Overall, the band makes excellent use of dynamic range; going from quiet to loud and back very effectively, and making use of some atypical instrumentation to hit all the right emotional notes. Skip the radio-friendly pop and spend some time with the cello drones on “Waterline” to get a better feel for the band and what they’re capable of. Definitely a record that works for me a lot more fifteen years on than it did when it was shiny and new.

♦White Lion – Mane Attraction: White Lion was always an interesting case; musically, they were the epitome of 80s hair metal: huge outsized riffs and extra noodly guitar virtuosity on the rockers, and always extra tender and melodic on the ballads, which, along with how pretty singer Mike Tramp was, really drew in the female fan base. Lyrically, however, they were different than many of their peers, as they tended more toward social issues rather than projecting their machismo and sexuality; tackling, sometimes artfully, sometimes ham-handedly, topics like child abuse and environmentalism. This record’s no exception. the lead-off track, “Lights and Thunder” is essentially a heavy metal groove take on Lennon’s “Imagine,” and the power ballad “‘Till Death Do Us Part” is about as sweetly, sickeningly saccharine a paean to the wedding-industrial complex as I can possibly imagine (though I loathe to admit that I thought it was pretty good and would totally mark me as a sensitive desirable prospect when I was a stupid, socially inept teenager with absolutely no idea how “love” or “marriage” really worked). That isn’t to say that the single that caught my attention from this record, “Love Don’t Come Easy,” isn’t a remarkably well-constructed and infectious pop tune for a band like this, though it’s still not as good as “Wait,” the breakthrough single off of Pride.