Although the London-based glam rock band Tremendous is on
hiatus, main man Mark Dudzinski isn’t wasting any time in releasing new music.
His 6 song EP, Transcendence On The Cheap (digital vendors and streaming
services), is, in his words, “a straight-up, stripped-down acoustic affair.”
The EP is made up of all new songs and, as special as they
are right now, it’s easy to imagine how terrific they will sound when his band
takes the stage to glam them up a bit more (can we look forward to a live Transcendence Part II?). “Innocent Soho,”
one of my favorite songs on the EP, is the seemingly lovely tune but turns out
to be about a scary evening in a rough part of the city.
One of the first songs I heard from Tremendous was 2018’s “Rock n’ Roll Satellite.” I liked the idea that they had merged power pop and glam
rock. But on Transcendence On The Cheap there’s less Raspberries and more T
Rex. In fact with Dudzinski on acoustic guitar the new EP sounds like a solo Marc Bolan trying out new
songs on a John Peel BBC session that never happened.
“Fingerprints,” the terrific new single from the UK’s Tremendous, is
more than another break-up song. It begins with a quiet, solo guitar but then bursts
into a full-band rock fest as lead singer Mark Dudzinski relates his feelings
about the split with some new ways to describe it: he’s left looking like “the
boy for the poster” for loneliness and he feels as if his now-gone love has
left “fingerprints all over my heart.”
The new song is the first release from the band since 2020’s Relentless
album and continues the trio’s dips into the music of ‘70s glam and pop like T.
Rex and Eric Carmen’s Raspberries with a bit of Cheap Trick thrown in for good
measure.
Except for drums, Phil Cooper plays nearly every instrument and writes and sings every song on his latest album These Revelation Games (Bandcamp) making him much more than a triple threat. Cooper hails from the UK and has let it be known that he’s influenced by, among others, bands like Crowded House and Squeeze and you can hear it throughout his new album.
And although his melodies -- and he certainly has a gift for a tune -- have echoes of the work of these groups, it’s Cooper’s vocals that really show how time spent listening to Neil Finn and Glenn Tilbrook has made him the singer he is. For example, the upbeat, rocking “A Thousand Tiny Differences” not only sounds like a full-band classic Squeeze song like “In Quintessence” from East Side Story, Cooper’s vocal is full-on Tilbrook. “Into The Void” begins with some wonderful Beach Boys-like harmonies and would have fit nicely on later Squeeze albums like Some Fantastic Place.
“Treading Water” and “Keep Your Hands Upon The Wheel” both have a Crowded-House-Alone-Together vibe with a touch of Finn on the vocals. On the latter song, Cooper plays a Macca-like bass riff . He’s also a mean lead guitarist and brings the crunch on “House Of Mirrors,” “Tell Me It’s All OK,” and “Changing Times.”
Tremendous
Relentless (digital release), the debut album from the Birmingham, UK, glam rock (emphasis on rock) band Tremendous, is full of three-minute exploding pop rock songs with influences that have been thrown into a giant blender.
I first heard the band (a tight-knit trio consisting of singer/guitarist/songwriter Mark Dudzinski, Ryan Jee on bass, and Dave Lee on drums) when they released their “Rock ‘n’ Roll Satellite” single back in 2019. I imagined an alternate musical past in which Eric Carmen, having left Raspberries, moves to London and joins a glam rock band. That’s what Tremendous, in its hook-laden time machine, brings to the present
“Rock ‘n’ Roll Satellite” is a super glam rock track (“You glitter my bones/You glamour my shoes”) and there’s even a reference to the Spiders From Mars. “Heartsinker” could have been written by Paul Westerberg for any of the first three Replacements albums and is played just as fiercely by Tremendous (another clever lyrical choice from Dudzinski:“You give love heart disease”). The ballad "Like Dreams Do" (not the Lennon-McCartney one) is a change of pace that mid-song becomes a metal guitar fest.
The Foreign Films
Another multi-instrumentalist, Bill Majoros, is the mastermind behind The Foreign Films. His latest, Ocean Moon (New Songs and Hidden Gems) (CD: Kool Kat Musik/digital: Bandcamp), is a concept album with new songs (and a couple of previously released ones) about love .
If you were listening to AM radio in the ‘70s, you’d be lucky to hear songs as good as those on Ocean Moon with its echoes of Eric Carmen, Elton John, and other melodic heavyweights from that era.
There’s a theme running through the album with characters in the songs listening to music and the effect it has on them. One of the many highlights is the beautiful “Dream With Me Tonight.” It’s a song about summer love and the atmosphere that makes such things possible: “Sail into the setting sun/Here comes the summer night/She wants to go steady with you/And dance in the jukebox light.”
In “Katie and the Crystal Hearts” a young woman walks along the beach alone thinking of a song she’s heard: "‘I'll forever love you’ said the song on the radio.” “Down On The Boulevard (Pinball Kid)” is a memory song about being young and begins with a wonderful yearning croon from Majoros. The song also mentions a radio: “All the crazy things we did/Stevie and the Pinball Kid/Dreaming to the radio aglow in the night” and borrows the piano riff from Elton John’s cover of “Pinball Wizard.” And “Stars In Her Eyes” is a terrific lost solo Lennon track.
