Echo & the Bunnymen are an English rock band formed in Liverpool in 1978. Their 1980 debut album, Crocodiles, went into the top 20 of the UK Albums Chart. After releasing their second album, Heaven Up Here, in 1981, the band’s cult status was followed by mainstream success in 1983, when they scored a UK Top 10 hit with “The Cutter”; and the album which the song came from, Porcupine, hit number 2 in the UK. Ocean Rain (1984), continued the band’s UK chart success, and has since been regarded as one of the landmark releases of the post-punk movement, with the single “The Killing Moon”. (More from Wikipedia)
More generous praise can be found in the Wikipedia article. Reviewing a 1984 Certain General show at New York’s Pyramid club, the UK-based New Musical Express called the band “New York’s answer to [Echo and] the Bunnymen with a few [Jim] Morrison tendencies thrown in” [but with] “plenty of individuality and a lead singer full of passionate presence — agonized lyrics torn from twitching limbs.” The review concluded by observing that Certain General was “almost psychedelic in their unfettered spirit.” Bomp! Records – whose affiliated label Alive Records reissued November’s Heat in America in 1999 – has called them “NYC’s 80’s cult favorite”, while Rock & Folk identified Certain General as “the bridge between Television and Radiohead.”
(March 2015
