Marc Fagel's Blog: Jittery White Guy Music: The Blog, page 127

Grateful Dead: Blues For Allah (1975)

It was June 1988. I'd just graduated college, and my girlfriend & I were spending a couple days in New York before heading out for a low-budget post-graduation vacation together in Spain. As was my custom back then, no visit to New York would be complete without a day spent trawling the city's used record stores, hitting the myriad shops in the West Village before crossing town and scouring the stores lining St. Mark's Place. I was excited to find two Dead CDs I'd been looking for, used and at a...

Letters To Cleo: Go! (1997)

Been in a bit of a '90s lookback mode of late. My recent trek through women-helmed alt.rock for my imaginary Yellowjackets soundtrack found me listening to some old Letters to Cleo records, and it turns out I still like 'em just fine. I've written previously about my guilty-pleasure love of frontwoman Kay Hanley's efforts on the super-fun Josie & The Pussycats soundtrack, but her original band still holds up for me as well.

I knew them mostly through 1994's debut Aurora Gory Alice and its hit sin...

Dodgy: Homegrown (1994)

When I sat down a few months back to make myself a '90s Britpop mix (you can check it out here), it was a way for me to explore a genre I'd largely ignored at the time. I figured I'd get some of the bands I generally knew together in the same place, maybe find a few ace singles I enjoyed. But it's been the gift that keeps on giving, as I've discovered a lot of really great bands who never made much of a splash in the States (or at least didn't penetrate the American indie bubble I was in through...

Yellowjackets: The Alternative Soundtrack

An imaginary soundtrack... or just a great playlist of '90s alt.rock helmed by women. Either way, this was fun to throw together (and to play).

Yellowjackets was one of my favorite new shows of the past year. If you haven't seen it (and why haven't you seen it?!?), it focuses on a girls' high school soccer team whose plane crashes in the Canadian woods circa 1996, tracing their descent from standard teen drama to wigged-out insanity and (maybe?) cannibalism, while simultaneously depicting the pre...

Pavement: The Re-Imagined Discography

As mentioned a few times in this space, one of my favorite time-wasting activities in recent years has been recreating my favorite albums (or creating new ones) to keep them fresh. Efforts by the music industry to prop up a dying CD marketplace by continually reissuing old albums with new bonus material has made it easy to reconstruct the records to make them more personally satisfying, or breathe new life into records I've spun way too many times, by replacing weaker tracks with preferred b-sid...

Famous Groupies: The Furry White Album (2020)

I'm new to this band, which, at least per their webpage, appears to be the work of a Scottish singer/songwriter named Kirkcaldy McKenzie and various friends & family members, performing songs ostensibly written decades ago by McKenzie's grandfather. Hard to say how much of the bio is just tongue-in-cheek, but regardless, the music is pretty damn delightful, and they've instantly become a favorite of mine.

The band name presumably derives from the Paul McCartney & Wings song, and it pretty much gi...

Pavement: Twilight Terror (1999/2022)

I've always felt some ambivalence towards Pavement's final record, Terror Twilight. As I've previously kvelled, their 1992 debut was truly life-changing for me, while the three that followed were pretty great. But this one was... well, a mixed bag. There were a few stellar tunes that warranted inclusion in the Pavement canon--obviously catchy singles "Spit on a Stranger" and "Carrot Rope," and enjoyable deeper cuts "Folk Jam" and "Major Leagues." But some of the balance made less of an impact on...

Living Colour: Vivid (1988)

You know those albums that will forever be fixed in time? Music you associate with a particular moment in your life, yet rarely (if ever) revisit down the road? For me, Living Colour's 1988 debut fits in that box--a record that seemed to loom larger than life at the time, yet I can't say I've played it more than a couple times in the ensuing three decades.

When the social director of my college eating club (yeah, the term sounds ridiculous, but that's what we called the clubs at my school where m...

England's Glory: Legendary Lost Album (1973)

Going with a pretty obscure one today, folks. I've previously posted on The Only Ones, a mostly-overlooked late 70s UK band that crossed power pop, new wave, punk, and glam (and netted one killer single in "Another Girl, Another Planet"). England's Glory were an earlier band featuring Only Ones frontman Peter Perrett; I don't think they released anything during their actual existence, but following the Only Ones' rise, a few collections of unreleased studio recordings and demos made their way in...

Pete Townshend: A Rough Draft History Of The Who

Another mixtape project, this is something I threw together for myself this weekend--a collection of Pete Townshend's Who demos from across the ages.

Townshend has long been one of the artists most willing to share his creative process with fans. Indeed, I think he was one of the first rock artists to introduce the concept of the "demo tape" to the masses, playing some of his early tapes at a rare early 70s solo concert (later captured on a bootleg LP). Though originally slipping out primarily on...