RECORD REVIEWS : Pop Adventure and Gothic Wit : Big Enjoyers Rediscover the Joy of Dabbling; Babylonian Tiles Put a New Bloom on Gloom

This crop of local album releases is highlighted by the often delightful studio inventions of Big Enjoyers and by Babylonian Tiles’ surprisingly fresh and varied take on gloomy old Gothic rock. Also reviewed are new CDs from Somebody’s Ex, Gameface and Warhorse. Ratings range from * (why bother) to **** (a reason to live). Three stars denote a solid recommendation.

*** Big Enjoyers “Gronkin’ Quiver”

Neabuzz Records

One of pure pop’s biggest sources of enjoyment is Todd Rundgren’s 1972 album “Something/Anything,” which materialized when one guy hauled a bunch of recording equipment into his living room and let a gifted ear for melody and a free-ranging imagination be his guides.

“Gronkin’ Quiver” is no “Something/Anything” but it preserves some of the spirit of home-cooked dabbling that made Rundgren’s do-it-yourself album such a treat. This time, it’s two guys and a bunch of recording equipment, and they seem to have enjoyed themselves hugely in putting together this wildly diverse (if uneven), often diverting CD.

J. L. Bostock sings lead and plays the guitar, bringing simultaneous shades of Tom Petty and Jerry Garcia to the vocals and displaying a knack for tasty fuzztone constructions. Partner Tom Neas pitches in on drums, backing vocals and some keyboards.

The album opens with the lush, shiny pop of “Aiming Fore the Green,” a song that sounds like low-budget Ambrosia as it aptly casts that most frustrating of human activities, the game of golf, as a metaphor for all life’s other frustrations.

A sharp turn into catchy psychedelic pop yields “Magic Voyage” which, had it come along 25 years ago, could have been one of the savory late-’60s AM radio morsels that gained such one-hit wonders as the Amboy Dukes, the Lemon Pipers and the Strawberry Alarm Clock their small but legitimate claims on posterity.

The sensibility is eccentric throughout as Big Enjoyers take excursions through folkish strumming (“Goode Song”) and airy, Youngbloods-like trippy pop (“I Wanted”). Things get downright weird during the spacey “She’s a Vampire,” which sounds like lounge music from another galaxy.

Most of the lyrics are mystical/philosophical musings about the inscrutable, disappointing or wondrous nature of being, which would make for pretty dippy going if Big Enjoyers didn’t make sure to include a strong measure of self-deprecating humor. The album ends with its tour de force, “The Cat That Came to Broadway,” as the duo draws primarily upon the sleek funk of Kool & the Gang and George Benson to concoct an inventive mini-symphony of pop. Playing the part of a fellow who finds himself sadly adrift in life, Bostock lends this odd piece emotional bite with an affectingly lonesome vocal.

“Gronkin’ Quiver” is well worth hearing for fans who think smart, imaginative pop is the nazz.

(Available from Neabuzz Records, 629 Terminal Way, Suite 1, Costa Mesa, CA 92627). ***

Babylonian Tiles

“Basking in the Sun at Midnight”

Nate Starkman & Son

Casual listeners who don’t favor black garb or cultivate a vampire-pale complexion might quickly dismiss the Tiles’ first CD release as so much death-obsessed, gloomy Gothic posing.

Yes, there are some insufferable bands like that out there, but this isn’t one of them.

Bryna Golden, the Tiles’ main singer and songwriter, doesn’t make the mistake of falling in love with the dark side. Instead, in this album’s more serious moments, she probes the gloom for flickers of hope. Not willing to submit and embrace grim fate during the eerie, sepulchral epic “Rain People,” she sings of responsibility and the need to seek something better:

So pick up the pieces and dance,

dance to the choices in life,

the strength we have in ourselves

and show the world I’m here.

The dark side does have its spooky allure, however, and Babylonian Tiles captures it in songs that, instead of taking evil and woe too seriously, go for the fun of a campfire horror tale well-told.

The band weaves its moods with strong all-around musicianship. Golden’s keyboards create an artsy/garagey psychedelic backdrop reminiscent of both the Doors and the Seeds. Babylonian Tiles’ tales can be slow to unfold, but the band works enough turns and shifts in texture into the longer songs to sustain interest. Double-tracked vocals help bolster Golden’s thin but evocative voice.

While dolorous sighs and exhalations may be primary for the Tiles, they make sure to mix things up. “Each Dying Breath” has a tumbling, tribal beat that recalls such British sources as Siouxsie and the Banshees and Ride; “No One Now” lightens its contemplation of death and isolation with a jaunty, waltzing tempo. “Never Growing Old,” written by drummer Brian Schreiber and sung by bassist Marcus Mindte, is like one of Syd Barrett’s strange ramblings, simultaneously eerie and jaunty in its contemplation of an early exit from life.

It’s all pretty melodramatic, but with a wit and a humane quality that keep it from sinking into the leaden crypt occupied by much of Gothic rock.

(Available from Babylonian Tiles, 7771 15th St., No. 3, Westminster, CA 92683). * Babylonian Tiles plays Feb. 26 at the Electric Circus, 314 N. Beach Blvd., Buena Park. $5. (714) 827-1210. ** Somebody’s Ex

“Defective”

(no label)

This all-female Orange County/Long Beach band takes pains not to get typecast as the new Go-Gos (although it can be effervescently garagey), the new Bangles (although it can be sleekly poppy) or the new L7 (although it can get momentarily grungy and sometimes likes to talk dirty).

Unfortunately, while avoiding stylistic labels, Somebody’s Ex neglects to bring much emotional depth or psychological insight to its work.

Most of “Defective” is well-played and sung. Jill Warren writes the songs and has a good ear for mainstream pop melody. She also dabs on some nice guitar touches, acoustic as well as electric. Lisa Wright, who shares the lead vocals with Warren, has a dusky, full-bodied voice that powers the album’s best songs: “It’s Just the Moon,” which echoes the chorus hook of the Rolling Stones’ “Sway,” and the lush “Through My Eyes,” which could well have been overblown but is handled with admirable restraint.

While one can appreciate the band’s skills, too many songs seem poorly thought-out and lacking in complexity. A funkified version of Leon Russell’s oft-covered “Superstar” is tossed off as bland dance-floor fodder. There is a coldly dismissive cast to “F. Defective,” which dumps on a woman whose habitual nonconformity has degenerated into self-destruction. And there is little sympathy or understanding at hand in “Juliet,” whose protagonist’s strait-laced upbringing leaves her sexually repressed. The songs are superficial sketches that set up cheap shots at easy targets.

The nadir comes with “(Sex) The Way It Goes,” which tears a page from Erica Jong as it trumpets the frank expression of female lust. This sort of bluntly carnal talk is being heralded as a sign of new expressive freedom for women rockers (Liz Phair being Exhibit A) but I’ll take a little indirection and artifice any day, regardless of the singer’s gender. The great blues singers, for example, always deal in clever euphemism, because it is sexier and more fun than the alternative.

Worst of all, the song blithely counsels unfaithfulness (“Forget your conscience, singe and burn it away”) while offering no more motive for the betrayal than a quick assuagement of raging hormones. Maybe Warren just wanted to churn out something that would heat up a bar crowd; a songwriter attuned to the way sex really goes, with its complexities and high emotional stakes, would have intimated the potentially devastating consequences of heeding such a blatant come-on.

Somebody’s Ex might partly have redeemed the song by bookending it immediately with “Pictures of You and Her,” which depicts a woman wrung out by her lover’s cheating ways. But five songs intervene between the two, so any chance for contrast and cross-current is lost.

(Available at Tower Records in El Toro and Hollywood, Sound Spectrum in Laguna Beach, or through Somebody’s Ex, 21214 E. Ocean Blvd., No. 1, Long Beach, CA 90803). ** Gameface “Good”

Network Sound

If the CD cover didn’t say otherwise, I would swear that this was a new Big Drill Car album.

The resemblances between that well-established Orange County punk-pop band and this relative newcomer are uncanny.

The guitar sound is clean and edgy, with riffs that move like rolling slabs. Singer Jeff Caudill has much the same range and timbre as BDC’s Frank Daly, and the melodies have a similar steady (and ultimately too predictable and unvaried) rise and fall. The subject matter and attitude are quite similar, too--both bands offer an earnest engagement of post-adolescent, coming-of-age issues, expressed in tersely declarative lyrics.

Gameface does improve on the Big Drill Car concept by adding some backing harmonies. And there are strokes of imagination here. “Soap” is a strange little pornographic tale of voyeurism narrated by an insect--part Kafka, part the Who’s “Boris the Spider,” part Penthouse Forum. But Gameface’s blitzing pace and monolithic delivery send it through the same blender as everything else on the album, and a quirky story fails to get the distinctive musical setting it requires.

In other signs of a healthy artistic imagination, “Friday Matinee” offers a skewed glimpse of a lovelorn soul’s daydreaming, while the pairing of “The Last Song” and the appealingly wistful “Retraction” sum up what it’s like to be utterly confused over where a relationship is heading.

Big Drill Car is a solid but severely limited band that always has seemed to skate back and forth over the same patch of ice when it needed to be turning figure-eights. It does little good for any other band to retrace the same well-worn grooves that don’t lead anywhere special. Gameface has potential, but it needs to break this pattern before it Drills again.

(Available from Network Sound, P.O. Box 5213, Huntington Beach, CA 92615).

Gameface plays tonight at 8 at the Ice House in Fullerton on a local rock bill with One Eye Open, Nuckle Brothers, Guttermouth and Sublime. The show is sold out.

* 1/2 Warhorse

“Articulous Symphonious”

Panacea Records

To paraphrase Chuck Berry, there’s too much Eddie business going on in rock these days. The vocal style of Pearl Jam’s Mr. Vedder is getting copied almost as often as the guitar style of the immortal Chuck--maybe even more.

Warhorse jumps on the sounds-like-Eddie bandwagon, and the result is a hard-rock record fraught with bleakly titanic musings intended to be delivered with cry-to-the-winds grandeur. Run-amok police, decaying urban landscapes and murderous youth are sketched in the songs, none of them rendered particularly vivid in routine, sometimes awkward lyrics.

Oh, and just in case the Eddie thing runs its course, there’s a Billy Idol imitation, a bluesy Jim Morrison knock-off and a token, utterly out-of-place pop-metal romantic anthem to show the band’s range, if not its individuality.

In short, “Articulous Symphonious” sounds like the work of a band too little concerned with finding its own voice and too eager to fit a mold that might qualify it for Contractus Majoricus Labelicus.

(Available from Dee Entertainment, P.O. Box 1152, Bellflower, CA 90707).

Warhorse plays Feb. 12 at JJ’s Lounge, 1815 E. Chapman, Orange. (714) 532-4920. * Times Link :808-8463

To hear excerpts from any of the albums reviewed here, call TimesLink press * and the artist’s four-digit code. Big Enjoyers: * 5580 Babylonian Tiles: * 5581 Somebody’s Ex: *5582 Gameface: * 5583 Warhorse: * 5584