Various – Blitz

This album is really good if you are looking to sample sounds. The B side has a lot of cool chants and different synth sounds. Also on the A side there is some cool open drums on track 2. Defiantly an interesting listen.

RCA has always had an awkward relationship with "alternative" and "art" rock in America, and this compilation is no exception. Apparently even the commercial editions were widely distributed as promos.

There's a mix of dodgy and reasonably good tracks here. The contributions from Bow Wow Wow and Shock are the least pretentious, capturing a bit of New Wave's strengths, juxtaposing lyrical angst (or flamenco & surf guitar) and danceability. Polyrock's contributions are humorless but good, evoking Velvet Underground and Arthur Russell but in a very modern (well, for the time) New Wave context.

The rest of the songs, though, are slices of the insufferably self-important side of the genre, the side championed by A&R men who really didn't know what to do with New Wave, the side that believed people in clubs were interested in the lead singer's opinions on modern society and relationships. Maybe the intended audience, college students and the like, did care—I wasn't there—but I get the impression that RCA was just desperately trying to find some New York and Los Angeles based acts to market alongside its arguably more-talented British signings, and the only options were trying way too hard to be quirky (Robert Ellis Orrall, Sparks).

Anyway, I bought this to get a good copy of Shock's "Angel Face", and was disappointed that they put it last on one side; as it's a secondhand copy, there's the inevitable inner-groove distortion.