No Milk Today –

East West –

This week’s Monday LP is…HEY! Today’s Tuesday!! >:O

So my record player has been slowly dying over the past few weeks. If you have a sharp ear, you might have noticed that some of the songs have been a little slower than they are supposed to be and occasionally slow down even more during certain segments of the track. Well now my record player just straight up plays everything slow, noticeably slow. At first my reaction was to put the Monday LPs on the back-burner till I get a new record player, but I came up with an alternative. Since I have GarageBand on my Mac, I thought I could learn a few skills with it to do some minor edits on the songs. All I really needed to do was speed up the songs, so that wasn’t a major project anyways. The result may not be perfect, but I feel that it’s at least satisfactory. NOTE: I have rerecorded these songs on a new record player.

Now on the music!

There’s A Kind Of Hush All Over The World (1967), The Herman’s Hermits. And now we’re back to British invasion bands 😀

The Herman’s Hermits were another one of those (fairly short-lived) British Invasion bands. The band had a very clean-cut image, which was much different than say The Kinks or The Rolling Stones. They had an interesting band career with little success in the UK in the mid-60s, but a solid fan base in the US. Come late 60s though and the popularity flipped; not selling well in the US, but doing well in the UK. While they didn’t really record any new material after the 70s, most of the band still tours to this day doing small shows all over.

The songs listed here include “No Milk Today” which is a clever little “love-lost” song. The title and main hook refer to a sign that the main singer leaves to the milkman for less milk after his lover has moved and left him. There’s this cool relation between the somber verses in a minor key and the more hopeful, upbeat chorus wrote in the complementing major key. Also cool fact that this is one of the songs produced by John Paul Jones before he joined Led Zeppelin. The other song is “East West” (sometimes written “East-West”). This is a song quite simply about a young boy band that’s found success and is touring the world, but can’t help thinking and longing for home.

I was really torn about what songs to choose off this record because there are so many good ones. The song that came in a solid third place though was their cover of The Kinks song “Dandy” which I might enjoy just a little more than the original. Both songs I did choose though are written by the same songwriter, Graham Gouldman. Gouldman would write several songs for the Herman’s Hermits and other British bands of the British Invasion era before joining the art pop band 10cc in the 70s (there’s another unique band I would highly recommend and hope to feature sometime).