tones on tail Archives - Vinyl From The Vault

Poptone “Poptone”

sfilzen — Mon, 25 Jun 2018 19:24:09 +0000

Poptone “Poptone” 2018, limited edition double LP on white vinyl. Cleopatra Records. We visited Minneapolis last week, as did Poptone, so we got to see Daniel Ash and Kevin Haskins of Bauhaus/Tones on Tail/Love and Rockets who are, along with Haskins’ daughter Diva Dompe, performing as Poptone at First Avenue. (Though I’ve been to Minneapolis many, many times, this was my first show at First Avenue and all I could do was giddily picture Purple Rain era Prince and Morris Day and The Time videos.) I also picked up this album at the show.

In concert and on Poptone, Ash and Haskins focus on revamps of previous material – most even darker and heavier than their unique industrial goth, which was pretty heavy and dark to start with – with lots of Tones on Tail and Love and Rockets tracks. I was in heaven! Tones on Tail songs they played that appear on Poptone included “Movement of Fear,” “Lions” “Performance” and “Go!” The Love & Rockets selections were “Mirror People,” “No Big Deal,” “Ball of Confusion,” “Love Me” and “American Dream.” Not on Poptone, their First Avenue set had a ton of other Love & Rockets’ selections: “Motorcycle,” “Haunted (When the Minutes Drag),” “All In My Mind,” and “Yin and Yang The Flowerpot Man.” The last time I saw Love and Rockets was in 1989 when they were on tour for their 1989 album Love and Rockets. That fall, either right before or after that concert, a friend of mine and I took the Greyhound bus to Minneapolis from Madison, WI to visit her sister and see a guy I was dating who went to the University. Her sister’s boyfriend drove us around town at full speed while blasting Love and Rockets, so it just felt right to be hearing those songs again at First Avenue.

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Daniel Ash “This Love”

sfilzen — Fri, 29 Jul 2016 14:34:19 +0000

Daniel Ash “This Love” 1991. 12″ single from the album Coming Down, Beggars Banquet records. This upcoming Sunday July 31st is Daniel Ash’s birthday (b. 1957). Ash has released several solo albums since his first, Coming Down, but is probably better known for his work with Bauhaus, Tones on Tail and Love and Rockets.

The songs on the 12″ single are, not surprisingly given Ash’s style, sinister waves riding on dark romanticism. “This Love” has an industrial flavor that is punctuated with a locomotive rhythm and Ash’s “dry Bolanesque purr.” “Heaven is Waiting,” the second song on Side A, is a shoe-gazing swaying instrumental. Side B has just one track, “Coming Down (slow version)” which differs from the album version, “Coming Down Fast.” It is beautiful, sultry yet vampire-cold, using guitar effects that evoke flickering candles in a dark gothic cathedral.

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Tones on Tail “The Album Pop”

sfilzen — Tue, 01 Dec 2015 15:50:21 +0000

Tones on Tail “The Album Pop” 1984. Beggars Banquet/PVC Records, US release. The only full-length release from Tones on Tail, Daniel Ash’s and Kevin Haskins’ ‘side project’ nicely rounded out the space between Bauhaus and Love and Rockets by combining dark goth, industrial and doom-and-dance pop. It even gets jazzy at points, the walking bass line and brush snare in “Happiness” evoking a suited-stroll down dark club alleys in rainy London. “Go!” is industrial dance at its finest, a sound that remerged significantly on Love and Rocket’s later releases. “Christian Says” is begging for a darkly shrouded dance floor lit only with eery flashes of strobes giving glimpses of black-clad figures wildly flailing. And “Movement of Fear” could not be better titled: barren and sinister with the sad strains of a lone saxophone.

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