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roland p. young - hearsay i-land - palto flats - vinyl

New Copy

Genre: Wave / Pop / Rock

1. Go Away
2. Don't Make Me Wait
3. Ballo-Balla
4. Edge Of Disaster
5. Don't Ever Take Your Love Away
6. Victim
7. So Very Easy
8. Different Package
9. It Hurts So Bad

Charted by

Luke Wyatt Aka Torn Hawk

"Mid-eighties, outsider synth-boogie" sounds about right. Still fresh and worth a check!

You may be familiar with the terrific spiritual jazz of this Alice Coltrane protege, as revived by EM in Osaka — classics like Isophonic Boogie Woogie — and maybe even his stints with avant-garde jazzbos Infinite Sound and NYC no-wavers The Offs (whose first record sported a Basquiat cover).
Quite different, utterly compelling chapters in the same story, Hearsay I-Land presents RY's forays into mid-eighties, outsider synth-boogie: the 1984 four-track twelve I-Land, besides most of his 1987 LP Hearsay Evidence.
Ballo-Balla is an insouciant dance-floor stealth-attack suited to The Paradise Garage, with Risa Young intoning like a fitness instructor — come Madam — over a spacey 808, criss eighties cowbell, bass sequencer, and weird effects; and Don't Ever Take Your Love Away is a kind of melancholic synth-wave Lovers Rock; whilst Roland himself sings in a high-pitched, soulful voice over ruff analogue programming, mesmerically entangling Jeff Phelps, Arthur Russell and Dam Funk.