I received a note yesterday from Pnuma Recordings; the face of Post-Punk and post-Post-Punk musician [?] Ken Lockie, alerting me to the fact that the classic four Cowboys International singles with full A/B sides were being released by UMG on Friday, May 6 2021. Of course, we have half of these in their original 7″ form, as well as the US “Original Sin” LP and the CD issued by Lockie’s Pnuma Recordings in 2003.

It’s been a long time since I listened to the latter with headphones, but I seem to recall hearing anomalies pointing to possible vinyl sourcing back in the day on the only CD of that period of music. At least according to my comments on the thread. One bright factoid that Lockie let slip in his press release was that these songs were all retrieved from the Virgin vault at Abbey Road so they are all expected to be immaculately mastered from the best possible source.

The catch is that we are not certain if these will be available for purchase as downloads or not. Yet. All we can say with certainty is that come Friday, you will be able to stream on those various platforms that don’t connect with Ye Olde Monk.

While we enthusiastically own the “International Sin” album as well as Ken Lockie’s “The Impossible” [in fact, two copies of the later as we are awaiting the “Today” single’s arrival in the Record Cell to make a REVO disc of that album with all of the requisite bonus tracks] and the 2004 “Backwards Life of Romeo” album. They are all of a piece, but Lockie has not been sitting idle. I was aware that he was releasing new material of a vastly different stripe.

Over the last few years I had seen the occasional House single from Lockie but last year, unbeknownst to me, he issued a full album of Tech House material. So he’s definitely committed to this sound moving forward. Wow! Lockie looks like Hugh Cornwell with a lockdown beard® in that cover image, but the material that I sampled falls just to this side of the “faceless house music” line that vexed me so in the 90s. It’s too minimal and repetitive to do much for me. Long buildups on the cuts I sampled before actual vocals happened managed to lose me. At least there were vocal performances and not just samples thereof. Perhaps in concise 7″ edits instead of six to eight minute track lengths I’d have a better chance with this material. Your mileage may vary.

It’s apparent that Lockie has moved on from the Art Pop he was making 40 years ago. But isn’t even Tech House considered a retro style now? As long as we are going to listen to retro music then I vote for Post-Punk [obviously].

-30-