Track listing
- A1 Going Hey Hey 3:09
- A2 Are You Ready for the Sex Girls? 4:02
- A3 While We Can 4:20
- A4 When Love Goes Under Glass 3:11
- A5 The End of All Good Things 3:29
- B1 Watch Your Blood Beat 4:50
- B2 How to Get Girls Thru Hypnotism 5:36
- B3 Talking in the Dark 3:14
- B4 Big Hotels 3:27
- Total length: 35:18
Rate/Catalog
Catalog
Set listening
Review
To rate, slide your finger across the stars from left to right.
5 Issues
- Release view [combined information for all issues]
-
Songs of the Spires [p] 33 rpm
-
-
Songs of The Spires Bonus Tracks, Digital file
-
Songs of The Spires 180 gram, Bonus Tracks, Colored Vinyl
-
Songs of the Spires Bonus Tracks, Digipak
1 Review
If you like the Sparks, you should consider checking out the Gleaming Spires. This Los Angeles duo – who later drafted additional members – concurrently played with the Maels in the early-to-mid 1980s, and they made for a very ideal match. "Are You Ready for the Sex Girls?" is a really obnoxious (but good) semi-hit that benefited from its Rodney on the ROQ connections, but the other material on Songs of the Spires is even better. It's a nice and eccentric synthesizer-heavy new wave LP with quality melodies. David Kendrick later became Devo's drummer, and you can see why after listening to this. A worthy find.
This was not reissued on CD until 2021, but Posh Boy gave this an expanded digital reissue in 2010; it included the entire Life Out on the Lawn EP, plus a 1982 B-Side ("Walk Right") and an unreleased song ("That's It, Forget It"). That should have been awesome, but the sound quality sucks on everything other than the new track because it was mastered from vinyl. It's also so damned tinny that I have to boost it up 13 dB just to get it to sound halfway normal, only to find that most of the closing fade-outs have been abruptly cut short. Posh Boy later separated out the Lawn EP as standalone digital reissue in 2014 and fixed up Songs of the Spires to be a much louder but still kinda scratchy 10-track digital master (with just "Walk Right" as a bonus); this was probably done so it could be licensed out to Futurismo for their 2014 reissue on LP, and even though it still doesn't sound great it's at least better than it was on the prior digital issue. The mastering for separated digital Lawn wasn't improved at all and still totally sucks. I hope Omnivore's 2021 CD rights all these wrongs.
The 1982 French Underdog LP pressing of Songs of the Spires is substantially different from the original 1981 American LP. Nothing on the B-Side was even released on the original Posh Boy LP, and "How to Get Girls Thru Hypnotism" was replaced with the single edit. You now get the two best tracks from the Life Out on the Lawn EP and two non-LP tracks that were later placed on the Funk for Children / Party E.P., as well as new cover artwork. It should have been given a different title since it only has a passing resemblance to the original album, but it's an entertaining sampler of the early Gleaming Spires.
This was not reissued on CD until 2021, but Posh Boy gave this an expanded digital reissue in 2010; it included the entire Life Out on the Lawn EP, plus a 1982 B-Side ("Walk Right") and an unreleased song ("That's It, Forget It"). That should have been awesome, but the sound quality sucks on everything other than the new track because it was mastered from vinyl. It's also so damned tinny that I have to boost it up 13 dB just to get it to sound halfway normal, only to find that most of the closing fade-outs have been abruptly cut short. Posh Boy later separated out the Lawn EP as standalone digital reissue in 2014 and fixed up Songs of the Spires to be a much louder but still kinda scratchy 10-track digital master (with just "Walk Right" as a bonus); this was probably done so it could be licensed out to Futurismo for their 2014 reissue on LP, and even though it still doesn't sound great it's at least better than it was on the prior digital issue. The mastering for separated digital Lawn wasn't improved at all and still totally sucks. I hope Omnivore's 2021 CD rights all these wrongs.
The 1982 French Underdog LP pressing of Songs of the Spires is substantially different from the original 1981 American LP. Nothing on the B-Side was even released on the original Posh Boy LP, and "How to Get Girls Thru Hypnotism" was replaced with the single edit. You now get the two best tracks from the Life Out on the Lawn EP and two non-LP tracks that were later placed on the Funk for Children / Party E.P., as well as new cover artwork. It should have been given a different title since it only has a passing resemblance to the original album, but it's an entertaining sampler of the early Gleaming Spires.
Published
n/a Digital File (2010)
ADVERTISEMENT
Votes are used to help determine the most interesting content on RYM.
Vote up content that is on-topic, within the rules/guidelines, and will likely stay relevant long-term.
Vote down content which breaks the rules.
Vote up content that is on-topic, within the rules/guidelines, and will likely stay relevant long-term.
Vote down content which breaks the rules.
Catalog
4 Nov 2023
27 Oct 2023
29 Aug 2023
11 Jul 2023
7 May 2023
2 Nov 2022
26 Jul 2022
21 Mar 2022
8 Feb 2022
24 Dec 2021
18 Nov 2021
5 Nov 2021
26 Oct 2021
20 Sep 2021
19 Sep 2021
Contributions
Log in to submit a correction or upload art for this release