Nick Gilder began playing with Vancouver-based Sweeney Todd. The band split in 1977 after two albums (Sweeney Todd and If Wishes Were Horses) when he and bandmate Jimmy McCullouch moved to Los Angeles. That same year, Gilder began a solo career, signing to Chrysalis and releasing You Know Who You Are. His second album, City Nights, produced the platinum number one single "Hot Child in the City" in 1978. Though Gilder released several other albums (including 1979's Frequency and 1981's Body Talk Muzak), he never approached his earlier success.
Lookout for this high-energy, bubble-blast of true
emotion, simulated swagger and Johnny Zip's flying V. The only bad thing
about Nick Gilder's deep-blue debut pearl is that the shining You Know Who You Are
signals the beginning of the end. No one knew at the time, but the late
'70s would compress pop to the point of celestial explosion. Sure,
there have been some great variations on the theme since, but listening
to the luminous You Know Who You Are
nowadays is most sentimental, as it's a fleeting close encounter of the
kind that must come to a close. If you need to hear how amazing these
takes on Gilder's Sweeney Todd
leftovers "Roxy Roller" and "Tantalize" are, what are you waiting for?
Then there's "Genevieve" and "Amanda Greer," two haunting gazelles who
will never see the light of disc. Let this "Poor Boy" tuck you in at
night illuminating illicit images of X-queens between the seats, with
the radio playing familiar tin-can beats, before he sails away on a
gentle breeze. Glammaster Gilder nailed a number one on his sophomore effort, City Nights, and then polished off the '70s with a near-perfect supernova flourish, Frequency.
Like a true '70s star, he disappeared (for the most part) with the
delectable decade he helped define, running away in the night, bidding
fond farewell, and never going back to his old school, where he taught
an endless wave of inferior influences the finer points of back-street
noise and plastic metal.
For me personally a great album and i hope you like Gilder, too. I will post also two other albums later.
Have fun
Frank
320
City Nights,
of course, includes Gilder's chart-topping raison d'etre"Hot Child in
the City"; the Canadian actually strove to release the pedestrian "All
Because of Love" first, but Chrysalis wisely pushed for this
street-walking tale to break Gilder
in America. As for the rest of the record, the cognoscenti know the
surrounding disco-metal set off a global tremor still felt in the "21st
Century." From the crisp robot come-on of second single "Here Comes the
Night" to the trench-coated social worker flirting in "Got to Get Out," Gilder
calmly claims his crown as the king of an insular world of kinky hooks
and killer rhythms where any ace pop fan should strive to reside. All of
this jukebox Nabokov's '70s work is facile and frequently brilliant.
Rock away your frustration and fly high into the City Nights. (Doug Stone allmusic.com)
