+ + + HEAR IT: Every Little Thing Strontium 90 from "Police Academy" + + + RECENT REVIEWS: 9/09/97: Kattell Keineg Jet By Heather Havrilesky 9/08/97: Stevie Ray Vaughan Live at Carnegie Hall By Pete Golkin 9/05/97: Coolio My Soul By Natasha Stovall 9/04/97: Eric Matthews The Lateness of the Hour By Mark Athitakis 9/03/97: Phil Ochs Farewells and Fantasies By Dawn Eden + + + SEARCH MUSIC ARCHIVES BY: Artist Genre Title Reviewer Date + + + Return of the Mac By Michael Snyder Fleetwood Mac makes a comeback (08/29/97) + + + Sound Salvation By Sarah Vowell Comically Incorrect: Chris Rock riffs on unfunny old themes in "Roll With the New" (08/29/97) + + + MUSIC FEATURES ARCHIVE

s t r o n t i u m-- 9 0 police academy ___________ [ EARLY POLICE RECORDINGS ] ·PANGAEA/ARK 21· BY GAVIN McNETT | Let me just admit to it: I'm an unpleasant, sneering sort of person who blows his nose into his shirttails and laughs at car wrecks. I make rude noises for sport and call my cats by insulting names. I dislike wholesomeness and favor the use of sarcasm. I confess to all of these things and declare a full and immediate moratorium on bad and arbitrary behavior. I drape myself hereby with the mantle of sober reason. Folks, "Police Academy" is one of the 10 best albums of the year. No, no, hear me -- this CD is more than just a collection of pre-Police outtakes; it's an object lesson for our time. I have in my possession a list of 269 album releases, each recorded live onto a portable four-track recorder by a narcissistic 20-something barricaded in his bedroom with his diary and a cheap guitar. I have in addition a list of 7, 623 releases by bands sequestered in their basements with eight-track machines, piles of retro guitar effects and slightly more expensive guitars. Each suggests potential; none are in any way memorable. Now this -- and here I hold up the "Police Academy" CD, radiating as it does with virtue's cold, blue light -- this is what all these artists are missing. It's not a good record -- did I say it was? No, it sucks dogs. Half its tracks are sausage-filler rock of the virulent jazzy-progressive strain, and half of the rest are bad in other ways. Highlights include an early "Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic" and a solid rocker, "Visions of the Night." But the virtue, the genius, of this package lies in its weaknesses. The familiar Police sound, you see, is present in even the slightest of these tracks -- nascent but complete in all its parts. These guys practiced a long time before they finally got it right. They worked their chops up over the years, singly and in combination, and made a lot of fool racket that nobody cares about anymore. Questionable bands like Dantalion's Chariot slouch grimacing in the far distance of their lineage. Sting made his rep in an orchestra pit. Andy Summers was 38 by the time "Outlandos d'Amour" came out and Stewart Copeland was known to flub the beat like an amateur until "Fall Out." "Strontium 90" was, by any sane standards, an unremarkable example of a bad sort of thing. But in the end -- and buried in every track is a hint of it -- glory would get her hooks into the boys. And why? I wish never to go on the record as advocating the benefits of hard effort, of refinement or discipline; so it's here that we break. I leave you with a second Top 10 album. Friends, I give you Sebadoh. Har! Har! Har! Sept. 10, 1997 Gavin McNett is a regular contributor to Salon. BOOKMARK: http://www.salonmagazine.com/sharps/sharps.html