The Cleaners From Venus - Blow Away Your Troubles
#76
1981 Housekeeping
Cleaners From Venus
Blow Away Your Troubles
Genre: Lo-Fi Paisley Garage
2.5 out of 5
Highlights:
Modern TV
The liner notes apparently say, "recorded on a hand-cranked, mud-cooled, reel-to-reel, sound-on-sound tape recorder”.
Yeah, it really sounds like it.
Like Daniel Johnston and Marine Girls, one this is becoming clear in the early 80s: Doing it yourself is becoming more and more popular as access to recording equipment becomes…easier.
Remember stories about, say, Queen? They would use the studio during off hours because they didn’t have money (and their managers were ripping them off). I heard stories like this so often that I figured it must be prohibitively expensive to record music that when I heard of someone doing on their own I just figured they were rich.
Mr. Newell does not sound rich. Not in the least. He sounds like me and my roommate a shitty little four track, losing quality with each overdub.
Side note: recording with my roommates on crappy materials, taking a train to the bowels of Queens to audition for sing in a rock band (I sang some Elvis Costello…for a metal band. It did not go well), obtaining a four track of my own and making shitty tapes of my songs in a one bedroom apartment in West Hollywood, all the way up to finally making my own band and traveling to Austin to play in an outskirts bar at South by Southwest…why did I ever become an actor? It’s so obvious what my preferred art outlet has always been.
There are songs here. Most of them sound like they are auditioning to be used in an offbeat meet cute montage in a Bertolucci film circa 1972.
He seems to get a little more adept at production toward the end.
But not much.
https://music.apple.com/us/album/blow-away-your-troubles/1479307679
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