FORGOTTEN GEMS #1: Saigon Kick

It’s another brain-bustingly sunny Sunday afternoon in San Francisco, and I am listening to Exodus’ Bonded By Blood. Despite being fairly new to this “blog” thing (can’t you just feel the antipathy oozing from those quotation marks?), I realize that no one wants to hear about my personal life—as inspirational as it may be. That said, I’ve decided to keep updating this THING once a week. Or so. Since I lead a semi-somewhat-not-really busy lifestyle of Sex, Drugs and Rock And Roll, I’m not going to doom myself with a specific deadline. Let’s just say that I’ll post new material “sometime around the weekend.” Meaning Friday through Monday. No later than Monday. I pledge to adhere to that schedule, barring an unexpected contraction of the Bubonic Plague (I’ve already been vaccinated against H1N1, so no worries on that front). And I also promise to keep it about THE MUSIC, MAN. No big goals or anything, though every once in a while I may undertake another project on the scale of my Top 25 Albums Of The Decade. But I think I’ll mostly keep the topic on whatever musical bullshit happens to be on my mind that particular week. We’ll see how it goes.

This week I’m starting a fun new series that I’m very excited about: FORGOTTEN GEMS. I think it’s pretty self-explanatory—albums and bands that kick assloads of ass but never make it onto Top Whatever lists or get ironic mentions from the Pitchfork herd. A lot of these will be somewhat-familiar to those bigtime music aficionados who read this THING (you know who you are). But these posts will be geared toward those people who have lives and can’t afford to spend eight hours a day on the internet discovering mindblowing music. “Comus’ First Utterance ain’t obscure, motherfucker, everybody knows about that album!” No, they don’t. And they probably wouldn’t want to—especially if they are the Mac-toting, business-casual type who wants nothing more than to be integrated into civilized society. But you never know.

So my first foray deep into my library is a band that a lot of people have actually heard of, especially if they were paying attention to rock music in the early 90s. Specifically “Love Is On The Way,” a huge MTV hit and mainstay of just about every Monster Ballads type of compilation ever vomited upon the public. And it’s probably one of the most misleading representations of a band’s music since Faith No More’s “Epic,” which came out around the same time. Hair Metal is the term I’m thinking of here—LA Guns, White Lion, Winger, Poison, etc. Saigon Kick play catchy hard rock songs with guitar solos. That’s about where the similarities end.

BRIEF HISTORY: The band formed in the late 80s in Miami. They released four albums between 1991 and 1995 (a fifth, Bastards, was released in 1999; I don’t own it, but from what I’ve been told I’m not missing much). Their second album, The Lizard (1992), is the only one that ever really got any attention—it has been certified gold, and contains the aforementioned hit “Love Is On The Way.” After that it's the usual story: Nirvana put Cock Rock’s teeth on the curb and stomped it into oblivion. Lead singer Matt Kramer left the band and the vocal duties were passed along to guitarist/songwriter Jason Beiler, who was already handling most of the harmonies anyway and therefore the change wasn’t all that noticeable. Water came out in 1993, followed by 1995’s Devil In The Details—the latter of which only sold an abysmal 15,000 copies. The band was pretty much dead to the mainstream by that point and soon fell into disarray. The godawful Bastards album was followed in 2000 by Beiler’s equally godawful SuperTransatlantic project, and I have no clue what he’s been doing ever since. Wikipedia doesn’t even know.

It’s not hard to figure out why Saigon Kick disappeared so rapidly from the public consciousness. The grunge thing obviously had a lot to do with it, but I don’t think it’s as simple as that. They never cultivated the image that “other” hair bands did (truth be told, they aren’t all that good-looking—especially Beiler), nor a well-defined personality. Their albums are completely inconsistent both in terms of style and quality—moving from blistering punk/metal (“All Around,” “Hostile Youth,” “Body Bags,” “I.C.U.”) to Beatles whimsy (“Sgt. Steve,” “My Life,” “Down By The Ocean”) to exotic lounge music (“Victoria,” “Spanish Rain,” “Chanel,” “Sentimental Girl”) to excellent melodic hard rock (see below) to unadulterated sap (“Love Is On The Way,” “I Love You”) to the just plain weird (“Close To You,” “My Dog,” “What Do You Do”). And a fair amount of garbage in between. For these reasons, listening to a SK album from beginning to end isn’t really the way to go, though The Lizard and Devil In The Details are of a substantially higher quality than the other two (the former pair scoring at least an 8/10 I’d say). To help you out, I’ve come up with a playlist highlighting my favorite tracks from all four albums, along with a couple of YouTube links:

Saigon Kick:
“What You Say” (kinda poor sound quality)
“Love Of God”
“My Life”
“I.C.U.”

The Lizard:
“Hostile Youth”
“Feel The Same Way”
“God Of 42nd Street”
“All Alright”

Water:
“One Step Closer”
“Water”
“Torture”
“Sgt. Steve”

Devil In The Details:
“Eden” (decent quality)
“Flesh And Bone”
“So Painfully”
“Edgar”

Yeah, throw all these songs together and you easily have a 9.5/10 album. Easily. Don’t expect anything world-shattering or original. But when it comes to class songwriting and solid musicianship (check Beiler’s fleet-fingered guitar solo in “One Step Closer”), Saigon Kick rose high above their contemporaries. You’ll probably never sit at a Saigon Kick table at a Hard Rock Café. But they’re at least worth checking out—especially if you find their stuff used (I recently re-purchased Devil In The Details at Amoeba Records for a whopping $2.00). Oh, and they also have a damn fine cover of “Space Oddity” that I swear to god throws in the main riff from “Voodoo Child” at the end. Or maybe it’s just the hangover talking.