In the eight months they were together in the mid-1980s, the three Milwaukee musicians in the progressive-pop-punk-jazz-WTF band Locate Your Lips recorded a live set for a local rock radio station and 10 songs for a studio album that went unreleased. Then the band mysteriously disappeared, never to be heard from again.
Until now, that is.
LYL guitarist Jim Eannelli writes in the liner notes to this two-CD anthology that “sometimes all it takes is stumbling upon a couple of old music tapes from 1984-5 to bring light to the darkness.” After his long-lost discovery, Eannelli spruced up the studio tracks and live performances with renowned Milwaukee producer Gary Tanin and issued them in a single package titled For Kenny -- named after LYL drummer Kenny Baldwin, who owned a punk-rock club in Milwaukee in the early Eighties called Starship. Baldwin, whose photo graces the album cover, passed away from cancer in 2015.
Eannelli and Baldwin previously played together in Colour Radio, a synth pop-rock band that had a brief stint on an A&M Records subsidiary. But with bassist and lead vocalist Andy Cavaluzzi in the fold, the LYL trio ventured into British Invasion-inspired New Wave territory. Think The Clash meets The Knack.
On the live disc, LYL takes the stage at “an arty alternative club" called Café Voltaire, according to the liner notes, to virtually no applause. But by the end of the raw, high-energy 13-song performance, the band had won over that tough crowd.
The studio tracks, while more polished, reveal a knack for quirky melodies, and three more live cuts from another club gig round out the second disc. With very little overlap of songs in this 27-track collection, neat period photographs and brief yet informative liner notes, For Kenny is a shining example of why we still need the CD format. In fact, it’s archival collections like this one that make the continuous search for new discoveries worth all the effort. Kudos to all involved with this project, and may Kenny Baldwin rest in peace.
Track Listing:
Disc One: (Recorded Live)
1. DJ QFM Jock Introduction
2. Stethoscope
3. Alive
4. It Seems Like
5. Get Away
6. I Can Take It
7. No Reason
8. I Can’t Take Another Taste of This
9. Got a Lot of Nice Things
10. No Refuge
11. This World
12. Waiting for You to Run
13. Dance or Die
14. Cosmopolite
Disc Two: (In Studio)
1. Got a Lot of Time
2. Cosmopolite
3. De Lon Jon
4. I Can’t Take Another Taste of This
5. Take Off your Clothes
6. Indecision
7. It’s a Beautiful Day
8. I Don’t
9. Alive
10. If you Could Have Anything
11. Staring Slowly (Bonus Track: Live at The Boardwalk Club, Milwaukee)
12. This Conversation (Bonus Track: Live at The Boardwalk Club, Milwaukee)
13. You Got No Taste (Bonus Track: Live at The Boardwalk Club, Milwaukee)
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