Month: November 2014

Inxs-Welcome_To_Wherever_You_Are-Frontal

Welcome to wherever you are

I never owned this album in cassette or vinyl, but thanks to a UK re-release, I’ll have this in my small vinyl collection in February. I remember the day I bought it on CD, I was totally wowed by the unique way the longbox (remember those?) folded and tucked into the cardboard jewel case for the CD. I never saw anything like that before, and thanks to the end of the longbox, this didn’t need to happen much longer at the retail level. I really dug it as a tip of the hat to the band’s interest in environmental causes.((See also, the Greenpeace Rainbow Warriors compilation… you have to figure these artists were legit green since they donated a track to this. INXS gave This Time, which was perfectly inserted into the first disc right before Thompson Twins’ Lay Your Hands On Me. An oddly perfect couplet.))

I think WTWYA has become the fans’ favorite album – sadly the band didn’t tour on it, and it didn’t get a ton of support in the States. Grunge displaced a lot of 80s acts, and people (including me) turned their attention to Nirvana for a few years. Although I never really got into Full Moon Dirty Hearts (INXS’s next album) I definitely dug Elegantly Wasted, the band’s final Hutchence album.((As I mentioned before, I’m leaning towards considering Switch as non-canonical. INXS was a lot more than Michael Hutchence (hi all you Farriss brothers, Andrew in particular), and I don’t mean it as a sign of disrespect for J.D. Fortune… but… it just wasn’t the same. )) I think the band was really turning the corner at that point… there was a lot of music to be made into the 2000s, but it wasn’t meant to be.