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• I Can't Stand it Here on Quiet Night (test Pressing - signed by Janine Rainforth)

  Record/Vinyl + Digital Album

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  This is one of 2 test pressings from Optimal of the seminal release I Can't Stand it Here On Quiet Night - released in 2017 on Silent Street Records. It will be dispatched with a hard copy of the front artwork and the sleeve notes and signed by Janine Rainforth. Each test pressing consists of 2 vinyl discs.
  
  Reviews:
  
  Janine Rainforth’s vocals never sounded better than on this beguiling ode to the quiet hours between the hurried pace of city life, floating out atop dubby bass, off-key piano stabs and straining brass. Elsewhere, Rainforth could be raucous on punk party-starter Stretch, and sweetly uplifting on In The Air. The emotional range of Maximum Joy was surely one of their greatest strengths, and this collection gives you every shade of their impeccable repertoire.
  Like many of their early ’80s UK peers, Maximum Joy mixed punk, funk, disco, and reggae. This new set captures a band carving its own place with two of music’s most powerful tools: muscle and joy.
  
  .... The group’s prime recording years spanned only from 1981 until 1983, in which time they recorded three singles, an Adrian Sherwood-produced LP, and a handful of compilation tracks. Since then, Maximum Joy have remained largely a footnote, despite the widespread reappraisal of funk-punk that began in the early 2000s, with the rise of DFA. They landed one track on Strut’s landmark 2008 compilation Disco Not Disco and another on last year’s Sherwood at the Controls Volume 1: 1979-1984; it has largely fallen to DJs like Andrew Weatherall and Optimo’s JD Twitch to keep their memory alive for the dancing public.
  
  This new collection overlaps with an out-of-print 2005 anthology on Germany’s Crippled Dick Hot Wax! label, though the compilers here have mostly opted for different mixes, like the 7” “Silent Dub” of “Silent Street” instead of the 12” version, or the 12” mix of “In the Air,” which runs nearly twice the length of the previous comp’s version. Focusing primarily on the group’s three singles, I Can’t Stand It Here on Quiet Nights captures a band carving out its own place using two of music’s most powerful tools: muscle and joy. The former is right there on the surface, in the group’s slashing and zig-zagging rhythm section and horn riffs. Bassist Dan Catsis, formerly of the Pop Group, is alternately nimble and brute in his attack: On “Silent Street (Silent Dub),” he traces a taut pattern so neatly you might not even notice that the song is in 9/4 time; on “White and Green Place (Extraterrestrial Mix),” he digs in hard, thumbing a riff that suggests kinship with Liquid Liquid’s “Cavern” bassline before sliding fat, greasy fifths down the neck of his instrument.
  
  Ex-Glaxo Babies drummer Charlie Llewellin is the perfect foil for Catsis’ blend of agility and force, with a fondness for crisp, skeletal grooves—nimble dub on “Silent Street,” neck-snapping disco on “Stretch (7 Inch Mix)” and “In the Air (12 Inch Mix)”—that make the most of the emptiness between hi-hats and snares. As for guitarist John Waddington, another Pop Group alumnus, he sides mainly with that gaping negative space, his presence felt mainly in glancing funk chords that fall across the music like the glow of a stained-glass window.
  
  Includes unlimited streaming of Test Pressing - I Can't Stand it Here on Quiet Night - signed by Janine Rainforth via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more. ... more

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