The Complete AEON AEON, which evolved out of a couple of Montreal's best-loved `60s groups, is the city's great lost band. --Formed in 1973 by Al Birmingham and Bob Burgess (both from garage-rock legends The Haunted) and Rick Metcalfe (who had been in the equally-beloved Rabble), AEON adopted a more ambitious and musically demanding approach. But while the sound was progressive, it remained commercial enough to seem tailor-made for the golden era of Montreal FM radio (Just take a listen to Once a Lifetime, for example). -- Listening to the music now, you can imagine these songs on the airwaves when there were virtually no format restrictions and plenty of room for interesting ideas. But the moment was missed. At the time, record labels were all important - and for reasons that remain quite unfathomable, AEON did not sign a contract. -- The first eight songs on this disc, recorded during the 1974 to 1978 period, should have been FM staples. Forty years later, they are the only professionally-recorded tracks that remain of AEON. -- As a bonus, six homemade tracks from 1975, and two from 1976 - dubbed The Basement Tapes by Birmingham, are featured here. Leaning less progward than the studio recordings, they show us a rocking band in joyous abandon. A French adaptation of Once a Lifetime (Une fois dans la vie suffit) is also included as the final missing piece.Lucky for us, this collection provides a fascinating glimpse of what might have been. -------- Bernard Perusse. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------THE BLUDGEONAIRES–The Works---- Ah, the `80s---For die-hard rockers, it was mostly the worst of times - dominated by drum machines, synths and bad haircuts. -- But Al Birmingham, Bob Burgess, Nick Saraceno and John Monk, all formerly of Montreal garage-band legends the Haunted, had what now seems like a radical idea: ignore this week's MTV-obsessed rule sheet and keep playing actual guitar-and-keyboard-based rock. And so they came together in 1987, eventually calling themselves the Bludgeonaires. -- The band, not surprisingly, were too defiantly roots-based for their songs to have an official release in their time. Nor did they ever play a gig during the three years they were together. But they did leave behind a batch of basement tapes (literally, from Saraceno's basement) - which is what we have here, with music by Birmingham and lyrics by Burgess. -- What's striking when you listen to the 23 tracks on The Works is that, while blues-flavoured rock is never far out of the mix (I Got a Hold On Your Heart, Diamond Shuffle), the material is still of its time - but in a good way: it sounds like a delightful trip back to an era when pop not only had better hooks, but some mystery as well. It's easy, for example, to imagine tuneful pop-rockers like Could've Been Better, Crazy and Taking Me Up On Love blaring and providing much delight on your car radio in the late `80s. And if instant classics like the haunting (pun intended) gem Your World and the brilliant Graham-Parker-meets-the-Rolling-Stones scorcher Double Feature of Love had been heard outside of Saraceno's basement, that decade might have been a better place. ------ Bernard Perusse. Links http://www.garagegold.net https://www.facebook.com/TheOriginalAEON https://www.facebook.com/Bludgeonaires/