BOC & Challengers of the Unknown -Club Ninja Debate is

[Carl E. Anderson]

> My take on CN is that it would have been an impressive album by any
> band other than BOC, whose own lofty achievements in the past have
> rendered it one of their worst albums.

        This I cannot entirely agree with.  IMO, _CN_ would be a crap
album from most any band I listen to.  Perhaps it would be a great
album for a really crap band :)  Buck's guitar is great as usual, but
that doesn't excuse the rest of it for me.
        Mind you, I'm not singling out BOC for abuse--I think HW's
_IITBOTFTBD_ album was crap too.  I thought Motorhead's _March or
Die_ was awful.  I find little to like in Tull's _Under Wraps_.
Fairport's _Gottle O' Geer_ can have humour value with sufficiently
gritted teeth--I didn't like their _Rising for the Moon_ album either.
The Allman Bros. committed a variety of musical travesties towards
the tail end of the 70s and early 80s.

        I think most bands that have released a lot of albums and gone
through various line-up changes will turn out a few really dire albums.
BOC was just "paying their dues" with CN ;) :)

> If Al had still been around, I wonder
> if tunes like 'Make Rock...' and 'Beat 'em Up' would have been
> included.  Not to say that Al's taste is perfect, but even his odd
> songs have a certain quality that makes them acceptable:  a tongue in
> cheek humor that isn't the case in the two aforementioned songs.

        Possibly.  There are often a few songs on even Al-era BOC albums
that I can't abide :)  No doubt Al was a great force in the band, and
BOC has suffered severely without him, but I won't quite rank him as
infalible :)

Cheers,
Carl

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Carl Edlund Anderson                            * "Lever vi inte i ett
cea20 at cus.cam.ac.uk                             *  fritt land kanske?"
http://wjh-www.harvard.edu/~canders/hem.html    *
Dept. of Anglo-Saxon, Norse & Celtic, Cambridge *  -- Pippi Langstrump
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