RhoDeo 1440 Aetix

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Today's band is an American rock band formed in Los Angeles in 1977, originally as a soundtrack company. Led by singer/songwriter Stan Ridgway and rounded out by guitarist Marc Moreland, bassist/keyboardist Bruce Moreland, keyboardist Chas Gray, and drummer Joe Nanini, the group issued its self-titled debut EP in 1980. With the additions of bassist Bruce Moreland and his brother Marc on guitar (replacing Noland), the band's sound crystallized on 1981's full-length Dark Continent, which couched Ridgway's highly stylized and cinematic narratives -- heavily influenced by Westerns and film noir, and sung in the vocalist's distinctively droll, narcoleptic manner -- in atonal, electronically based settings..  ....N'Joy

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Wall of Voodoo had its roots in Acme Soundtracks, a film score business started by Stan Ridgway, later the vocalist and harmonica player for Wall of Voodoo. Acme Soundtracks' office was across the street from the Hollywood punk club The Masque and Ridgway was soon drawn into the emerging punk/new wave scene. Marc Moreland, guitarist for The Skulls, began jamming with Ridgway at the Acme Soundtracks office and the soundtrack company morphed into a new wave band. In 1977, with the addition of Skulls members Bruce Moreland (Marc Moreland's brother) as bassist and Chas T. Gray as keyboardist, along with Joe Nanini, who had been the drummer for Black Randy and the Metrosquad, the first lineup of Wall of Voodoo was born.

The band was named Wall of Voodoo before their first gig in reference to a comment made by Joe Berardi, a friend of Ridgway's and member of The Fibonaccis. Berardi was listening to some of the Acme Soundtracks music Ridgway and Moreland had created in their studio. When Ridgway jokingly compared the multiple-drum-machine- and Farfisa-organ-laden recordings to Phil Spector's Wall of Sound, Berardi commented it sounded more like a "wall of voodoo" and the name stuck.

Wall of Voodoo released a self-titled EP in 1980 which featured a morbid, synthesizer-driven cover of "Ring of Fire." The second half of "Ring of Fire" features a dissonant guitar solo covering the theme to the 1966 film Our Man Flint. The band's first full-length album, Dark Continent, followed in 1981. Bruce Moreland left the band for the first time soon after this, and Chas Gray performed both bass and synthesizers during this time. The band recorded their biggest-selling album, Call of the West in 1982. The excerpted single, "Mexican Radio," became their only Top 100 hit in the USA, and the video for the song got a great deal of exposure on the newly formed MTV. Bill Noland was added as a keyboardist soon after the release of this album. That same year, Wall of Voodoo opened for The Residents on the cult band's inaugural tour, "the Mole Show," at Perkins Palace in Pasadena in early summer 1982.

Wall of Voodoo opened for Oingo Boingo on their Nothing to Fear tour at the Arlington Theater in Santa Barbara in March 1983. Stan Ridgway claims that the situation around the band was increasingly chaotic during this era, with a great deal of drug use and out-of-control behavior on the part of the band members, as well as shady behavior by the band's management and record label. Wall of Voodoo appeared at the second US Festival on May 28, 1983 (the largest concert the band had performed), immediately after which Ridgway, Nanini, and Noland all left the band. Stan Ridgway soon went on to a successful solo career, appearing as guest vocalist on a track on the Rumble Fish score and releasing his first solo album in 1986. Joe Nanini soon resurfaced in the country rock band Lonesome Strangers.

The remainder of the band, Marc Moreland, Chas T. Gray and a returning Bruce Moreland, carried on under the name Wall of Voodoo. Soon after, Andy Prieboy, formerly of the San Francisco new wave band Eye Protection, joined as singer and Ned Leukhardt was added as drummer. The band continued to record and perform under this lineup until 1988, though their sound was slightly different from the style of music they played in the earlier Stan Ridgway-fronted lineup. In 1985 they released Seven Days in Sammystown. The first single, "Far Side of Crazy", did well in Australia, reaching number 23 on the ARIA charts. The song is still heard today on the Austereo Triple M network. In 1987, the band released their fourth studio album and their second with Andy Prieboy, Happy Planet, which spawned another hit in Australia: a cover of The Beach Boys' "Do It Again," which charted at #40 there. The video for the song featured The Beach Boys' own Brian Wilson. In 1988, Wall of Voodoo split up and Andy Prieboy and Marc Moreland went on to solo careers.

In 1989, a posthumous live album entitled The Ugly Americans in Australia was issued, which documented their 1987 tour of Melbourne, Australia. (Additional performances from a date in Bullhead City, Arizona were also included.) Stan Ridgway, Andy Prieboy and Marc Moreland all embarked on solo careers throughout the 1990s and 2000s. Joe Nanini released an EP under the name Sienna Nanini-Bohica in 1996.

Two former members died within a few years of each other in the early 2000s; Joe Nanini died of a brain hemorrhage on December 4, 2000, and Marc Moreland died of kidney and liver failure on March 13, 2002.

On July 18, 2006 a Stan Ridgway-fronted Wall of Voodoo performed at the Pacific Amphitheatre in Orange County as an opening band for Cyndi Lauper. However, other than Ridgway, none of the surviving Wall of Voodoo members were included in this lineup. Ridgway's album Snakebite: Blacktop Ballads and Fugitive Songs (2005), features the narrative song, "Talkin' Wall Of Voodoo Blues Pt. 1," a history of the band in song.

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In some ways, Dark Continent is Wall of Voodoo's greatest album. Although it lacks the "Mexican Radio" of its follow-up, there is no filler and the arrangements and concepts are brilliantly executed. Proffering an utterly unique blend of drum machine beats, Marc Moreland's Western-influenced guitar leads, and Stan Ridgway's distinctive vocals and lyrics, Dark Continent has been compared to the music of Devo, but is not quite like anything -- or anyone -- else. The songs deal with natural and industrial perils, tense relationships, and reflect a cranky, working-class perspective that offers an interesting contrast to the new wave elements of prominent synthesizer and hyperactive rhythm box beats. If originality and artistic vision are any measure of a rock album's worth, Dark Continent delivers on both counts.

Wall Of Voodoo - Dark Continent  (flac 191mb)

01 Red Light 3:08
02 Two Minutes Till Lunch 2:55
03 Animal Day 3:12
04 Full Of Tension 2:14
05 Me And My Dad 3:19
06 Back In Flesh 3:44
07 Tse Tse Fly 4:45
08 Call Box (1-2-3) 2:32
09 This Way Out 3:56
10 Good Times 2:29
11 Crack The Bell 3:33

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Wall of Voodoo's second full-length album, Call of the West, was a noticeably more approachable work than their debut, Dark Continent, and it even scored a fluke hit single, "Mexican Radio," a loopy little number about puzzled American tourists that's easily the catchiest thing on the album. But while Wall of Voodoo's textures had gotten a bit less abrasive with time, the band's oddball minor-key approach was still a long way from synth pop, and frontman Stan Ridgway's songs were Americana at it's darkest and least forgiving, full of tales of ordinary folks with little in the way of hopes or dreams, getting by on illusions that seem more like a willful denial of the truth the closer you get to them. There's a quiet tragedy in the ruined suburbanites of "Lost Weekend" and the emotionally stranded working stiff of "Factory," and the title song, which follows some Middle American sad sack as he chases a vague and hopeless dream in California, is as close as pop music has gotten to capturing the bitter chaos of the final chapter of Nathaniel West's The Day of the Locust. In other words, anyone who bought Call of the West figuring it would feature another nine off-kilter pop tunes like "Mexican Radio" probably recoiled in horror by the time they got to the end of side two. But there's an intelligence and wounded compassion in the album's gallery of lost souls, and there's enough bite in the music that it remains satisfying two decades on. Call of the West is that rare example of a new wave band scoring a fluke success with what was also their most satisfying album.

Wall Of Voodoo - Call Of The West  (flac 261mb)

01 Tomorrow 3:03
02 Lost Weekend 4:58
03 Factory 5:33
04 Look At Their Way 3:18
05 Hands Of Love 3:52
06 Mexican Radio 4:09
07 Spy World 2:41
08 They Don't Want Me 4:31
09 On Interstate 15 2:44
10 Call Of The West 5:59

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Wall of Voodoo's Seven Days in Sammystown was the work of a radically different band than the one that gave the world "Mexican Radio" and its classic parent album Call of the West just a few years earlier. This was the first album by the post-Stan Ridgway lineup, and featured a new lead singer in Andy Prieboy, as well as a more conventional (but first-rate) drummer named Ned Leukhardt in place of drum-machines-and-pots-and-pans player Joe Nanini. Rounding out the new lineup were returning Call of the West-era members Marc Moreland (guitars) and Chas T. Gray (keyboards), along with Marc's brother Bruce Moreland (bass), who had played with the band in the early years. Unfortunately, by choosing to stick with the band name Wall of Voodoo, certain expectations were set up about how the record would sound -- Nanini and especially Ridgway were very distinctive performers -- and Seven Days in Sammystown often fails to deliver on these expectations. The album does get off to a memorable start with "Far Side of Crazy," a disturbing examination of an unrepentant serial killer (and a song that rather surprisingly became a minor hit in Australia). But after that, it's an uneven ride, as the band either tries too hard to deliver Ridgway-esque pulp-fiction inspired narratives that end up sounding somewhat self-conscious ("This Business of Love," "Big City"), or else Ian Broudie's production becomes a little too slick and ruins the intended dark mood. There are a few highlights, though, particularly Prieboy's frantic rant "Room With a View"; a reverent re-interpretation of the classic miners' lament "Dark as a Dungeon"; and the kitschy but touching "(Don't Spill My) Courage," the story of a paraplegic who refuses to use his religious faith as a crutch. Also, for longtime Wall of Voodoo fans, underappreciated guitarist Marc Moreland is allowed to step to the fore on several cuts and show off his skill at both old-style Western picking and modern electronic dissonance and distortion. If Wall of Voodoo had decided to change their name and reinvent themselves as a "new" band, Seven Days in Sammystown might have been considered their promising, if flawed, debut. Sadly, however, the band decided to stick with the Wall of Voodoo brand name -- meaning that Seven Days in Sammystown wound up as merely a minor artefact in the Wall of Voodoo catalog.

Wall Of Voodoo - Seven Days In Sammystown (flac 256mb)

01 Far Side Of Crazy 4:07
02 This Business Of Love 4:35
03 Faded Love 0:40
04 Mona 5:00
05 Room With A View 2:59
06 Blackboard Sky 4:58
07 Big City 4:30
08 Dark As A Dungeon 4:40
09 Museums 4:20
10 Tragic Vaudeville 3:38
11 Don't Spill My Courage 4:17

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