Jeff's Staff Pick: March 17, 2025

What’s up Sorry Staters?

My energy feels a little low this week. I’m just gonna jump right into my staff pick and keep it brief:

I had no plan for what to write about for this week’s newsletter. These cassettes just arrived today. 3 volumes of mixtapes compiling French post-punk and new wave, each tape a different span of years. It’s funny with mixtapes like this, because as the listener, if you’re previously unfamiliar with the material, you’re kinda diving in blind. Each of these tapes has fairly minimal packaging, and while there’s a tracklisting with the various artists, there’s no album artwork or liner notes explaining where these recordings came from. I popped in the first tape, which spans 1980-1983. Within 10 seconds of the first song, I already knew I was going to enjoy it. The first song “Unisex” was really good. But then the following track “Electro-Menager” by Edith Nylon was even better. As I continued letting the songs wash over me track by track, there was a lot to take in. My general feeling, at least from this first compilation tape, is that a lot of these bands must have been on major record labels. The production on most of these songs sounds incredibly crisp and hi-fidelity. No lo-fi bedroom avant-garde noise punk, as far as I can tell. Not yet, anyway. Hyper melodic, often quirky, great lush synthesizer sounds, catchy hooky vocals… So yeah, I’m just loving it. Who knew? I love those Mexican Tecno Pop compilations on Dark Entries, and to me, these cassettes are of comparable quality and could use a vinyl treatment as well. Who knows if that will happen. Also, whoever made these tapes did an excellent job with sequencing of songs when compiling these bands. For me, the compilation flowed really well and kept me interested. I’ve only listened to the first cassette so far, but I’m curious what the following volumes spanning from 1984 all the way through to 1989 hold in store.

That’s all I’ve got. Check these out!

‘Til next week,

-Jeff