Dramarama
Cinéma Vérité... Plus (Rhino)
Box Office Bomb... Plus (Rhino)
by Marc Hirsh
Dramarama
Cinéma Vérité... Plus (Rhino)
Box Office Bomb... Plus (Rhino)
by Marc Hirsh
originally published in the Public News, February 7, 1996
Thank God for Rhino. With damn near every release, they prove themselves time and again to be serious (and intelligent) music lovers and assume their target audience to be the same. They do their albums up right.
Dramarama has now been blessed with the Rhino touch. The now-defunct band's entire catalog went out of print, but the first two albums have been cleaned up and expanded for new reissues. The results are sparkling.
Acknowledging punk without really taking anything from it (despite Patti Smith and New York Dolls covers), the Jersey-by-way-of-L.A. band played what they thought pop music should be: instant, catchy, disposable. Unafraid to let covers sit side-by-side with originals and drop names incessantly, they never pretended to exist in a vacuum.
Cinéma has the should-have-been and almost-was hit "Anything, Anything" but also offers the driving "Some Crazy Dame," and the beautiful "Emerald City," which would certainly have been the blueprint for "Wonderwall" if Oasis had ever heard these guys, which is doubtful. Bomb yields the chartworthy "It's Still Warm," the slow, nasty joke of "Worse Than Being By Myself" and "Whenever I'm With Her," which imagines that Big Star's "When My Baby's Beside Me" came from Radio City rather than #1 Record. The bonus tracks fill in the blanks with early singles and fan-club-only demo tapes.
Only the liner notes are confusing, offering up stream-of-consciousness impressions of the albums. Read them only after you've gotten a strong feel for the albums, otherwise you're left with rambling, pun-filled discourses filled with I-don't-get-it jokes and oblique references. The result is the suggestion that the band was no more than the sum of its influences, a depressing thought.
Despite this misstep, these are excellent introductions to a band that wasn't great but could still be pretty damn interesting. Here's hoping Rhino reinstates the entire catalogue.