Reviewed by Paul J Zickler
Released: 1981 Keane Keane Genre: Rock Rating: 2.25 out of 5 Highlights: I Love My Life Last night I got a notice on Facebook that my 7th grade Social Studies teacher and basketball coach had passed away. He and I shared a first name, a silly sense of humor, and a love of basketball and Ancient Greece. This morning I looked at the 1981 remainders list again and noticed Keane. Distant, vague memories of a band with two good looking brothers, a band my sister might have liked, a band that got written up in Tiger Beat, a band that was somehow immensely popular in Japan. I decided there must be a connection between seeing their name and hearing about my 7th grade teacher, so I took this album to review. Tom and John Keane were 12 and 13 year old bubblegum pop stars and the youngest TV show hosts of all time. The Keane Brothers Show aired on CBS for four weeks in 1977 as a summer replacement for Wonder Woman. I probably would have watched it, or at least my sister would have. By 1981, they were teenage wannabe rock stars, and “Keane Brothers” sounded too juvenile, so they released their third album as Keane. I have no memory of this record’s existence. “I wonder who bought these albums,” my wife mused as I listened. It’s a good question. Apparently the answer is Japanese kids. I quote from the YouTube comment section: “I’m japanese. !! Around the first year of junior high school, more than TOTO, more than Tatsuro Yamashita, thank you for listening to the album, uploading. I feel nostalgic tears.” There was a famous Sony cassette commercial that featured the hunky teen idols from America, as well as a Japanese tour that must have made waves. They were big in Japan. The only song that actually caught my attention in a good way was the 7th track, I Love My Life, a hook-driven tune that wouldn’t feel out of place on a .38 Special album. The verses work better than the chorus (which is just the title repeated over and over), but the silly lyrics don’t diminish the appeal of the song, which is catchy and pleasant. It’s also a contrast to the disturbing trend of titles found earlier in the album: Tryin’ to Kill Saturday Night, You Got the Better of Me, Bad Little Baby Girl, Kill or Be Killed, Baby I’m Dead. I can’t decide whether Tom Keane and his co-writer and producer, Mike Himelstein, had an obsession with death or a misogyny issue. Maybe they just thought the pose was necessary in the world of “rock.” That’s ultimately the problem: two kids who made entertaining pop songs are trying to be taken seriously as rockers. It’s crazy that only four years have passed since they were beloved child TV stars, but so it goes. The production here is smooth and radio friendly, the session musicians hired to beef up the sound do their jobs, and the vocals are decent enough. It makes sense that a heavily promoted, glossy rock record with two attractive teen hunks on the cover made a splash in Japan in 1981. It also makes sense that Sony didn’t bother pushing this stuff on an American audience that simply wasn’t going to buy it. The Keane brothers had already experienced their 15 minutes here, and nothing on this album was going to recreate that spark. So in the end there’s not much to connect the late Mr. Paul Eide with Keane, but I’m glad I knocked this one out anyway. One less 1981 album for the Listening Post to review.
No comments:
Post a Comment