The television show – The Avengers – on January 17, 1968 – Season 6, Episode 6 aired a 51 minute show titled The Positive Negative Man. Forty-seven years later the band Positive Negative Man unleashes the ten song disc, Broken. Drummer Ian Wilson (a.k.a. “Mr. Zoom”) pounds away with wild abandon on this ambitious project which features very dark tones (just in time for Star Wars: The Force Awakens,).
The disk opens with the eerie “Gasoline,” the point where arson meets the heat of global warming. “Keep It Together” is a marching pop song, The Clash meets the Dave Clark Five for three minutes and nine seconds. “The Waste” hits you with short guitar bursts while “With No Machine” dips into German grunge with a Buzzcocks edge.
There’s a five minute and forty second video of Ice Queens of Space live from the Beachcomber (5:23 on the CD’s studio track) where guitarist/vocalist Mike Feeney conjures up memories of the film Queen of Outer Space where “cruel queen” Yllana played by Laurie Mitchell, is destined to be forever overshadowed by Zsa Zsa Gabor’s beauteous character Talleah.
Track 6, “Kings,” brings more Buzzcock-styled sounds into the mix. Balling the jack is a US slang term meaning to go fast or make haste, on track 7 it is now also the title of a three minute and five second song by Positive Negative Man. As with opening track, “Gasoline,” this also has that menacing Johnny Rotten vocal style and lyrical bent.
While singer Scott Damgaard is Leaving Hyannis…on his new cd, this contemporaneous release gives a folksy/percussive “Newport Beach” excursion which, though having everything else stylistically different from former Wayoutz Damgaard’s pure pop, “Newport Beach” would actually fit quite nicely on Leaving Hyannis…
If the classic film “Twister” ever had a sequel, this same-titled 4:06 timed track, #9, would fit perfectly. Jethro Tull gone total punk. Boston band Unnatural Axe also took at least one movie title and rode it to underground fame, they’d be a compatible match with Positive/Negative Man from what can be heard on the musical explorations made on this CD. “Just Don’t Think” ends the ten song buffet with a Real Kids feel, Boston rock and roll that makes its rounds on the circuit.
1.Gasoline 3:46
2)Keep It Together 3:09
3)The Waste 2:27
4)With No Machine 3:04
5)The Ice Queen of Space 5:32
6)Kings 4:04
7)Balling the Jack 3:05
8)Newport Beach 3:29
9)Twister 4:06
10)Just Don’t Think 3:19
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Joe Viglione is the Chief Film Critic at TMRZoo.com. He has written thousands of reviews and biographies for AllMovie.com, Allmusic.com, Gatehouse Media, Al Aronowitz’s The Blacklisted Journal, and a variety of other media outlets. Joe also produces and hosts Visual Radio, a seventeen year old variety show on cable TV which has interviewed Jodie Foster, director/screenwriter David Koepp, Michael Moore, John Cena, comics/actors Margaret Cho, Gilbert Gottfried, Gallagher, musicians Mark Farner and Don Brewer of Grand Funk Railroad, Ian Hunter of Mott The Hoople, Ray Manzarek, John Densmore, Felix Cavaliere of The Rascals, political commentator Bill Press and hundreds of other personalities.
