Recently over in England, someone dug up some old tapes of a band called Rory Storm and the Hurricanes, a band who may have gone largely unheard of for the rest of time, were it not for the fact that their drummer was one Ringo Starr. Yes, two years before he started drumming for The Beatles, Ringo was in another, showier pop band that may have influenced the early glam-rock scene. Maybe not, but we'll at least be able to hear what they sounded like when their album is released later this month.
Aren't there other performers out there with tapes tucked away in a basement or closet somewhere? Perhaps of an earlier musical project they'd rather never saw the light of day? Oh, there simply must be!
Why, we can almost picture the surprisingly detailed descriptions, which we are certainly not making up...
5. The Tape: Cry the Lies of Night (2002) What It Is: Gotye's old screamo band
Come on, you knew he had to have been in one. Recovered from the attic of a girl the bassist once dated, Gotye's first music project sounds like what would happen if early My Chemical Romance listened to every Thursday album over and over one weekend, then got drunk and forgot all of it.
The guitars are tuned at least six steps down, and the drums sound like they're being recorded inside a Winnebago rolling down a cliff. All of the songs are about girls, possibly the same girl as is consistent with the genre. There are no pop hooks to be found as in Gotye's signature "Somebody That I Used to Know," as the songs themselves seem to have been cut up stanza by stanza, fed into a bingo-ball spinner, and then reassembled in random order.
Sample song titles: "It's Not Love But It's Not Hate (Okay It's Hate)," "Piercing the Cold Dead Dark In a Rusty Raft," "Pardon Me But Could You Very Quickly Just Acknowledge That You've Killed Me?"
4. The Tape: Ain't Afraid (2000) What It Is: Nicki Minaj's old girl group
How did Nicki Minaj get so weird? Perhaps the answer can be found on the dusty old CD purchased at the estate sale of a dead record producer. A 16-year-old Nicki, going by the stage name Taanyaa Craazy, made up one third of flash-in-the-pan R&B group Ain't Afraid, a blatant Destiny's Child ripoff.
The three members of Ain't Afraid routinely talk over one another, steal each others' verses, sing each others' harmonies, and flat-out bicker on what had to be the first takes of a wisely aborted recording session. "Why you chasin' me?/ You know I ain't gonna be/ No kind of rebound girl," Minaj nee Craazy sings on lead track "Rebound Girl," before stopping to shriek "Bitch, do not be reaching over here at my lyric sheet! This is my motherfuckin' verse!" at one of her bandmates, known only as "Cinna Red" and "Diva D" in the handwritten markings on the CD itself.
Indeed, the CD does not have a proper cover, but instead came in a blank jewel case adorned only by a Post-It note upon which is angrily scrawled "Fuck this shit!"
Sample song titles: "Divas 4 Destruction," "Smooth-Ass Renegade," "Independent Ho"