(Madder Rose - overlooked and under-appreciated)

I don't think any decade can lay claim to the one where the most music was the least appreciated. Sometimes it's just rotten timing. I could understand a lot of 60s bands being lost in the shuffle since, let's face it, every time The Beatles or The Rolling Stones released something it overshadowed just about anything else on the charts at the time. And I can sort of understand a lot of 90s bands getting lost in the shuffle - as I said last night, radio was falling down huge flights of stairs in their commitment to break acts, or even say who they were. But the 70s and 80s had their fair share of overlooked acts (we'll get into the 80s soon, I promise)as well. So it just makes for a lot of interesting discovery, since the world is crammed full of it.

So tonight I thought I would put up a track by the New York band Madder Rose, who released a string of albums from 1993 to their breakup in 1999. Most of their material has faded from view, for absolutely no good reason. They were a good band with some great music.

This track, Roland Navigator doesn't appear on any of their albums, or their singles. It was issued on a CD Magazine in the 90s called Volume in the UK, probably one of the more adventuresome and well written publications to come and go in the fickle world of publishing, and certainly one that turned a lot of people on to some great music they would never normally know about. It wasn't widely available in the U.S. - just showing up at Tower, Virgin Records and a couple of hardcore music stores.

At any rate - Roland Navigator appeared only on this compilation in 1994 and, apart from a few spotty downloads, isn't available anywhere else.

It's a nice tribute to a band who left before their time was up.