Back when I was playing their debut album off of the new releases shelf, I wonder if I knew that the band the Ocean Blue was from Hershey, Pennsylvania. As I’ve mentioned before in my best aggrieved tone of walked-to-school-in-three-feet-of-snow-uphill-both-ways of self-satisfied lamentation, we didn’t have ready access to Wikipedia pages and other online resources for the bands we played. There were all sorts of routes we did have for accumulating information, from magazine articles to the finer print of an album’s liner notes, but enough of the bands we played were obscure enough that missing (or not taking notice of, more likely) the first write-up in CMJ meant that the background of the artist was a complete mystery.

Now, that singular dose of data probably wasn’t the case with the Ocean Blue. Their self-titled debut album was release on Sire Records in 1989, and that wasn’t a label that was shy about beating the drum for their artists, nor were they fiscally challenged in doing so. I suspect that The Ocean Blue was popping up all over the place. So I had no real excuse for thinking these guys were British. But even now, having known better for years, I put on one of their songs and hear the chiming tones, swirling rhythms and artfully delicate vocals, and I have an instinctual certainty that they first practiced in some some rundown U.K. factory town. This album was released at about the same time as the solo debut from Echo & the Bunnymen lead singer Ian McCulloch and playing a track from that album back-to-back with an Ocean Blue song could have reasonably convinced listeners that the DJ missed the segue and let a single record keep playing.

To give myself a little more credit, part of this confusion derived from my general focus on the sound in the grooves of the record over any sort of minutiae involving a band’s background. Details were nice to know, but an interesting backstory didn’t mean a thing if the music wasn’t very good. That wasn’t a problem with the Ocean Blue. There record was full of songs that were enticing and refreshing when they hit the airwaves. There was never necessarily a sense that they were come up with a great, epic full-length album someday, but they were clearly a great singles band, much like some of the best bands emerging from across the pond at the time.

The Ocean Blue, “Between Something and Nothing”

(Disclaimer: As far as I can tell, the debut album from the Ocean Blue is out of print. Maybe this track shows up elsewhere–Sire Records also wasn’t shy about muscling tracks from their emerging artists onto compilations and soundtracks, as I recall–as my research on this point is hardly exhaustive. I post the song here with the belief that it can’t be purchased in a manner that provides due compensation to both the artist and the proprietor of your favorite local, independently-owned record store. If someone with a claim on the song’s copyright takes umbrage with this and demands it’s removal, I will gladly and promptly comply.)