Monday, May 4, 2009

The Hello People - Bricks (1975)

I'm back with another post from The Hello People, this one being their final release from 1975, "Bricks". By this point, the band had been pruned down to a quartet and streamlined their musical approach considerably. Under the direction of mentor Todd Rundgren, the band entered the studio in early 1975 and had "Bricks" on store shelves by the summer. Though Rundgren's golden touch had revived many sagging careers of the artists he worked with, The Hello People did not fare quite as well. By early 1977, the band had stopped touring and effectively fizzled by year's end. The post-breakup activities of former members are not known.

If you enjoyed the psychedelic sounds of the band's early albums, you will probably not find much to enjoy with "Bricks". Here we see a pastiche of mellow pop, hard rock and 50's doowop. Though there are highlights such as the perfectly crafted "Pass Me By", which incidentally appeared earlier in a different form on a previous album by the band, most of the material here is rather pedestrian. Despite this flaw, I honestly do enjoy this album from time to time. It's all about moderation folks and this is an album that does not hold up well under repeated listenings. Having said that, this is a relic worth checking out, especially if you are already familiar with the band. Check out this excellent rip from virgin vinyl. Enjoy!

11 comments:

Anonymous said...

Welcome back again. I'll check it out, thanks for adding another rare one.

brian

Vic said...

Please re-up Roadmaster!

Jeff King said...

Thanks for the re-up.

I got to see them play several times at an LA coffeehouse. Great band.

leesa said...

Thanx so much for this. I have the 1974 "Home Made With Teac" album and I really like it a lot. I had "Handsome Devils on Vinyl and loved it... so I'm pretty excited to get this.

Does anyone know where to get a hi-rez version of Handsome Devils?

JKR said...

I can prob help you out with Handsome Devils, Leesa. Any chance you've digitized the Teac LP? It's the only one missing from my Hello People collection.

leesa said...

Hey J:

I finally found Handsome Devils @320. So, no prob there.

Here's my copy of the Teac Demo LP. It's from my very old album... A good friend digitized it who is not all that tech-savy.

There are no separations between the songs and there are some annoying pops and burps and such. But it's very listenable.

I dig it and I especially like these versions of the songs a bit better than the Todd-Produced versions (I love Todd... but the raw natural sound of these versions is awesome!).

The little overview of Recording is pretty cool too.

I hope this works out for ya!

http://www.mediafire.com/?dn5u1l7qaffsqpz

leesa said...

Did everything work out?

I just started up a Hello People Wiki page. If any of you are Hello People or Wiki fans, please come over and help fill out this page!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hello_People

I had no idea they had so many albums. How about putting up all of the Hello People stuff here?

JKR said...

No such luck. The file is in sitx format. I downloaded the stuffit expander & it still won't open the file. Any chance you can zip it in a rar file when you have some time to kill?

leesa said...

Okeee... I hate Stuffit on a Mac and I can't find a decent Archiver to .rar for Snow Leopard. Sooo... Here's a zip version.

http://www.mediafire.com/?k19rf5ir02lsz8k

Finger's crossed ~:>

~leesa

JKR said...

Ah, worked just fine. Thanks again Leesa! I'll do my best to get some more HP upped here in the near future!

leesa said...

No prob.

If you separate the tracks here, let me know!