Marc Fagel's Blog: Jittery White Guy Music: The Blog, page 132

The Cure: Faith (1981)

As long as I'm in Depressing Album Mode (see yesterday's nod to Lou Reed's harrowing Berlin ), figured I'd spend a little time with one of my favorite Cure albums. Before developing the balance between sophisticated pop and atmospheric moodiness that would characterize most of the band's work (best captured on 1989's excellent Disintegration ), Robert Smith penned a trio of intense, downbeat albums--1980's Seventeen Seconds, 1981's Faith, and 1982's Pornography. All are great, if a little hard to ...

Lou Reed: Berlin (1973)

I always knew one day I'd have to take on Berlin. It's no easy task, as it's easily the most divisive album in Reed's long history (yes, more than Metal Machine Music, where I'm convinced anyone who claims to love it is just trolling). Not to mention that it's an incredibly difficult listen. But I dusted it off this morning for the first time in a few years and, yes, I'm still firmly in the camp that loves this record (even if I still only want to dust it off once every few years).

Berlin was Lou...

Big Dipper: Supercluster (2008)

Big Dipper are a Boston-based indie band that blends 80s jangly guitar pop with edgier post-punk, arriving at a sound that's pretty much the definitive vibe of mid/late-80s college radio sound. They've also got some wickedly fun lyrics and killer hooks that should've taken them out of that narrow niche into broader alt.rock acceptance, but them's the breaks, I guess. A supergroup of sorts, the band was formed by a few refugees from the Volcano Suns (itself an offshoot of sorts from indie legends...

Fire Marshals Of Bethlehem: Songs For Housework (2005)

Here's an obscure little treat for my fellow jangle-pop lovers. I've talked before about my love for 1980s/1990s Austin jangle pop act The Reivers (whose work, though long out of print, is now available on Spotify, and who will be the next band I cover on Toppermost). After that band's final LP, 1991's excellent Pop Beloved, frontman John Croslin put together a new band, drawn from other players in the Austin scene. Like the Reivers, the Fire Marshals of Bethlehem offered Americana-tinged jangle...

Pink Floyd: San Diego 1971 (Bootleg)

Ok, I'm back after a brief vacation. And I thought I'd mark my return by noting a recent data-dump of early '70s Pink Floyd bootlegs to streaming media, which is kind of a cool development for us music nerds. Obviously, if you're not a fan of early Floyd, or boots, move along and I'll drop something wholly different tomorrow. But for the rest of us... damn.

This happened without any official fanfare, so nobody's quite sure what's going on, but a couple weeks back about a dozen Pink Floyd bootlegs...

2020 In Review (Yeah, A Little Late)

For some years now, my year-end mixes have followed a two-step process. At or around the end of the year, I'll burn myself a single-CD mix of my favorites songs from the past 12 months. (I posted an initial 2020 mix last December, and just shared my initial 2021 mix a few days ago.) And early the next year, I'll burn myself a "Deluxe Edition" 2-CD mix. This will pick up some tracks that missed the initial cut, or that I belatedly discovered (through music critics' and friends' year-end best-of l...

2021: The Year In Review (A Mix)

Yes, I got an itchy trigger finger and burned my annual year-end mix a few weeks early. Hopefully there won't be any great new releases in the last few weeks of the year. That said, I always circle back after year-end with a personal 2-CD mix that picks up the stuff that didn't make the cut, some last-minute entries, and music I only discover through others' year-end mixes. (You can see all my annual mixes from 1966 to the present on my home page.)

A few observations: There are a couple entries o...

The Umbrellas: S/T (2021)

With 2022 rapidly approaching, here's another one of the 2021 releases that got the most play for me over the past year. The San Francisco band's self-titled debut long-player is a lovely batch of jangle pop, a twee (in a good way), unpretentious ray of sunlight that is totally disarming. The shared male/female vox can't help but draw comparisons to the legendary Beat Happening, not to mention their fellow San Franciscans the Aislers Set, though the Umbrellas are more user-friendly, sanding off ...

David Bowie: Toy (2001/2021)

Gah! That cover art! Make it stoppp!!!!!!

Ahem. Anyway, while this is not exactly a Great Lost Classic, it's still nice to see a Bowie album recorded back in 2001 finally get a belated (official) release twenty years later. His record company at the time, not entirely without some justification, opted to shelve the album, though it leaked out online, and a few tracks showed up as b-sides; it's now officially available as part of his latest box set retrospective, Brilliant Adventure (1992-2001). I...

Blue Cartoon: S/T (1997)

Blue Cartoon are one of those decent, occasionally great, power pop bands that have some fans in the power pop world but rarely get the attention they deserve in the broader indie rock universe. Their 1997 self-titled debut is much more on the "pop" than the "power" side of the equation, mid-tempo balladry that avoids the easy 3-chord hooks in favor of gentle but infectious melodies. More jangle than crunch, it's uniformly pleasant (not at all a bad thing), with some earworm choruses and embraci...