Garbage Days Revisited #71: Electric Angels - "Electric Angels" (1990)

 

"My head's still spinning/My insides aching/For a while you were so intoxicating" - Electric Angels - The Drinking Song

Another one of those bands who got obliterated by the grunge wildfire that killed off hair metal despite being a million miles away sound-wise from the likes of Poison and Warrant, the Electric Angels are a group who really deserve a bit of a re-evaluation some three decades on. I've often mentioned in both Garbage Days Revisited and Sounds From The Junkshop columns past that I'm a bit of a sucker for bright sunshiny songs that actually disguise some pretty dark lyrics and the Electric Angels were definitely masters of this. The group started out in the early days of the Sunset Strip as Candy who were pretty much doing the glam-pop-rock thing a good five years or so before Poison et al and had Kim Fowley (yup, him again) managing them at one point.

Candy managed one album, 1985's Whatever Happened To Fun? and it wasn't a bad effort really with the title track being the obvious single (although it missed the charts) and the rest varying from the anthemic American Kix ("I know that paradise is far away and I'm stranded in LA..." - I've got fond memories of listening to that one stood on a bridge looking over Las Vegas Boulevard watching the traffic going up and down the Strip the first time I went out there) to the gentle epic The Last Radio Show even if there's a bit of filler mixed in there. The group are mostly best known though for what their members would go on to - guitarist Gilby Clarke would go on to join G'n'R in the early '90s and play on their Spaghetti Incident covers album, fellow six-stringer Ryan Roxie would join Slash's Snakepit and now plays guitar for Alice Cooper and singer Kyle Vincent would go on to an MOR solo career which would bring him success in the States but less so over here.

Anyway, Candy would break up a year or so after that album came out with Vincent going solo and Clarke moving on to his more straight ahead rock outfit Kill For Thrills (one album, sadly a bit underwhelming tbh). The remaining three members - Roxie, bassist and main songwriter Jonathan Daniel and drummer John Schubert - would pack their bags and relocate away from the sunshine to New York where they'd bring in new singer Shane Mansfield, change their name to the Electric Angels and sign to Elektra.

The key weapon in the group's arsenal was Daniel's songwriting. Like Wiz from Mega City Four with Andy McCoy's dress sense, the guy was simply very very good at pairing some deceptively upbeat rhythms with some very dark lyrics. I mean, the group's sole self-titled album is a pretty downbeat affair despite the upbeat sounding likes of lead-off single Rattlesnake Kisses (another hit that should've been) and the raucous closer Drinking Song (aka I Never Really Loved You, I Just Drank Too Much - I think we've all been there right, guys and girls?). Certainly the likes of Home Sweet Homicide (not to be confused with the Wednesday 13 song of the same name), Cars Crash and the heartbreakingly stark True Love And Other Fairy Tales (the line "Our bed of roses has become a bed of nails" was later pinched by Bon Jovi for their Bed of Roses song) were genuinely dark songs about the flip side of love, when it's all gone wrong and the other person's left you sat alone drowning your tears in a pint of whatever your poison is.

Unfortunately even the presence of legendary Bowie producer Tony Visconti couldn't help Electric Angels' album become a hit and it passed into history as yet another great album that was unjustly ignored at the time - I seem to remember reading in Visconti's biography that the group were seriously angry at Elektra who they regarded as having not promoted it properly, unfortunately an all too common story with bands in this era (Rock City Angels being another good example) and they'd leave the label soon afterwards. Roxie would promptly up sticks back to LA to join up with Slash and would also contribute to his former bandmate Clarke's Pawn Shoppe Guitars album. The other three would recruit new guitarist Richard Tressan and change band name again, becoming the Loveless.

The group would have one last hurrah in the form of the sole Loveless album Another Tale Of Gin And Salvation. Similar to the Electric Angels album, this was another great album of sunny melodies and dark lyrics (Return of the Ex-Girlfriend especially) which deserved to do so much better than it did but by this time it was 1995, the glam rock era was long gone (yes I know that the Angels/Loveless were a very different proposition to yer standard glam metal band but unfortunately for better or worse they'd undeservedly been lumped in with that scene) and even grunge which had succeeded it was tanking by this point. The group would finally call it a day after this with Daniel becoming Butch Walker's manager. Schubert would go on to become a teacher according to Wikipedia, I've no idea about the others.

It's a real pity that the Electric Angels and the Loveless were essentially ignored at the time because they definitely presented something different to what was making up the majority of the hair metal scene by this time - a more gentle and thoughtful take on the formula which was much more morning after than the party the night before. It's a shame that Daniel's pretty much given up on songwriting in favour of management as the guy was definitely very gifted at writing those barbed lyrics hidden under sugar-sweet tunes and personally I'd love to see the guy making some sort of musical comeback, be that with a reformed Electric Angels/Candy/Loveless or someone else. But either way, for something to soothe your heart and your soul when love and life has gone wrong, these albums are definitely hard to beat.