#117
May 23 1984
The Bangles
All Over the Place
5 out of 5
Highlights:
Hero
Live
All About You
Dover Beach
Tell Me
Going Down to Liverpool
Silent Treatment
Did it have to be The Bangles vs. The Go-Go’s? It felt like that in the early 80s.
I have no idea how this cassette came into my possession but, once it did, I played it in the video store where I worked so many times and so loudly that I was asked to never play it again after a while.
“Hero Takes a Fall” is the opener and it belies the truth about the rest of the record. While this is an excellent, acerbic, killer track, And is echeoed later in the record with “Silent Treatment”) what comes next is what the band is really all about.
The 1967 cover, “Live”, comes next and you know what? It’s a really really good Monkees song (as is the side one closer “Tell Me” and the other cover, Katrina and the Waves’s “Going Down to Liverpool”). This would follow my issue with The Bangles: Their stuff is always better than the covers they release as singles. “Live” is fine but “Hero” is SO much better. “Manic Monday” is garbage when “Dover Beach” is more paisley than anything Prince was tipping his hat at in 84 and why would they open an album with Elvis Costello’s “Tear Off Your Own Head (It's a Doll Revolution)”???
These tunes are all catchy, sparkly, but, whereas the Go-Go’s were the 80s day-Glo punk outgrowth, there’s no punk in The Bangles. Don Kirschner and Bob Rafelson would have made a fortune with The Bangles TV Show. Tell me you wouldn’t have tuned in for Susanna Hoffs & the gang’s misadventures in a Venice beach house. There. I did it again. Comparing these two. And that’s not fair. The Bangles are the future. All that Grrl Rawk and Lisa Loeb and stuff, I bet they all had this record in their collection.
Hearing this with more mature (debatable) ears I wondered it it was as good as I thought it was back then. The sheer volume of great tracks in such a short 31 minutes proved it was. I wish it had less covers and I would take points off for that, but those are so good that the album overcame their inclusion.
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