Album: Blow Your Cool!
Year: 1987
1987 was probably my favorite year of music in the 1980s, and one of the reasons for that was the third straight winner by the Hoodoo Gurus, Blow Your Cool!, which at the time I felt was their most consistent album, even if it admittedly didn’t quite hit the highs of their previous two records.
That said, I’m also now horrified by the terrible terrible 1980’s production, which makes Mark Kingsmill’s snare drum sound like it was miked at the bottom of a metal trash can that was then set on fire.
You can hear those drums at the outset of the the opening track, “Out That Door,” which starts off with a big Phil Spector beat, and then builds and builds throughout the first verse into a huge, stirring chorus.
And I’m out that door
(Out that door)
I’m out that door
(If you call)
But I’m not sure
When we decided not to care for each other anymore.
This, of course, was the result of Elektra pairing them up with a big-name producer, so the whole record was bathed in swaths of reverb, making it much more massive sounding then the previous records.
But I didn’t mind: the massiveness seemed to suit a song like “Out That Door,” and the standard Gurus templates of Dave Faulkner’s sense of melody and Brad Shephard’s guitar hooks were still all right there. Yeah, in retrospect, it might seem like a bit too much, but I still love it.
“Out That Door”
Every Certain Song Ever
A filterable, searchable & sortable database with links to every “Certain Song” post I’ve ever written.
Certain Songs Spotify playlist
(It’s recommended that you listen to this on Spotify as their embed only has 200 songs.)
Support “Certain Songs” with a donation on Patreon
Go to my Patreon page