Blaze of Glory

Game Theory's 1982 debut is about as D.I.Y. as it gets. Blaze of Glory was recorded in leader Scott Miller's old bedroom at his parents' house in Sacramento, CA, and you can just barely hear his mom running the vacuum cleaner downstairs at one point. Not able to afford printing costs for jackets once the records were pressed, the group simply slipped the discs into white plastic garbage bags with a Xeroxed sheet of paper. Despite the funky homemade feel of the album, Blaze of Glory is a clear signpost towards the hyperactively literate art pop of Game Theory's later albums. The songwriting is extremely inconsistent, with a couple of songs, "Stupid Heart" and "Tin Scarecrow," that are just plain terrible, and the overall feel is along the lines of the manic synth pop of early Devo, or, perhaps more overtly, Sacramento new wave legends the Twinkeyz. Yet although Blaze of Glory sounds far more dated than any of Game Theory's other records, it has a handful of early gems. The giddy and galloping "Date With an Angel" is one of Miller's sunniest sounding songs, and the jangly guitar-led arrangement predates the Paisley Underground-influenced sound of 1985's Real Nighttime. Even better, the wry collegiate angst of "Bad Year at UCLA" and the stark "It Gives Me Chills" are two of Miller's best early songs, and the jubilant "Sleeping Through Heaven" has remained a fan favorite. All 12 songs from Blaze of Glory ended up on the 1994 compilation Distortion of Glory. Re-recorded versions of "Bad Year at UCLA" (with the grammatical mistake in the first verse corrected) and "Sleeping Through Heaven" were released on 1990's Tinker to Evers to Chance. ~ Stewart Mason|

Game Theory were only a few months old when they began recording their debut album, 1982's Blaze of Glory, in a makeshift studio in the home of singer, guitarist, songwriter, and all-around idea man Scott Miller. Blaze of Glory is in many respects the work of a band taking baby steps, but it's also a very ambitious work that represents Miller's desire to move on from his juvenilia with his previous band, Alternate Learning, and this LP sounds like a rough draft for what Miller would achieve on albums like Real Nighttime and The Big Shot Chronicles. Considering it was recorded in a semi-pro home studio, the production on Blaze of Glory is assertive, and the first flashes of Miller's infatuation with audio montage and fragmented songwriting can be found here, though they're used very sparingly, and while it's clear the group was trying to emulate certain specific studio techniques of the day, the low-budget processing on the drums and the very dated synth patches doubtless have a lot to do with why Miller became reluctant to let fans hear this material in its original form (he re-recorded "Bad Year at UCLA" and "Sleeping Through Heaven" for the 1990 Game Theory collection Tinker to Evers to Chance, and most tracks from this album were remixed and/or given fresh overdubs for the 1993 collection Distortion of Glory). The grander attempts at a big sound on "The Girls are Ready to Go" and "Stupid Heart" work only so well (and are a reminder of how much producer Mitch Easter brought to the later Game Theory albums), but more modest performances like "Mary Magdalene" and "It Gives Me Chills" are very effective indeed, and tunes like "Sleeping Through Heaven," "Something to Show," and "All I Want Is Everything" make it obvious that Miller was already a superb songwriter with a unique take on smart pop. Game Theory would grow by leaps and bounds by the time they released their next full-length album, 1985's Real Nighttime, but Blaze of Glory shows that Miller's creative vision was very much in place in 1982, even if he was still working out the mechanics of putting it on tape. ~ Mark Deming