Marc Fagel's Blog: Jittery White Guy Music: The Blog, page 148

The B-52's: S/T (1979)

There are the albums in your collection that you love to death and that will always have a guaranteed slot on your playlist. And then there are those that you'll only rarely (if ever) take out for a spin, but so perfectly encapsulate a time in your life that you'll never part with them. This is the latter.

I had just turned 14, about to start high school, when "Rock Lobster" started getting radio airplay. It was quirky, silly, and unlike anything any of us had heard. I was pretty much knee-deep i...

Chapter Excerpt: How I Learned To Love The Dead

I don't plug my book too often, but figured I was due. If you haven't checked out Jittery White Guy Music, you can find it on Amazon; makes a great holiday gift for the obsessive music nerd in your family! You can find some excerpts over on my home page, but here's another preview, a few pages from Chapter 8 (How My Pleasure Tends: A Brief Tangent In Which I Try To Rationalize My Late-Blooming Love Of The Grateful Dead Without Sounding Overly Defensive). Enjoy!

    I hated the Dead right up to t...

The High Water Marks: Ecstasy Rhymes (2020)

Hey, kids--do you like fizzy, perky, sunshiny, bubblegum pop songs? You do? Well, here's a new release that's gonna bring on a big ol' smile.

Ecstasy Rhymes sees the High Water Marks reemerging after a long break (their last proper full-length came out in 2007). The band is fronted by Hilarie Sidney, longtime drummer for the Apples in Stereo, and her husband, Norwegian guitarist Per Ole Bratset. While in the Apples (led by her then-husband Robert Schneider), Sidney would contribute one or two son...

Lilys: Better Can't Make Your Life Better (1996)

Washington, DC-based Lilys have been kicking around on-and-off since the early 90s, trying out a few genres along the way. Their earliest work was pure shoegaze, 1992 debut In The Presence of Nothing sounding like a My Bloody Valentine cover band (albeit a really great one). But by 1996's Better Can't Make Your Life Better, they'd made a dramatic switch, with an album full of light, whimsical, retro-60s pop-psyche, a kindred soul of Elephant 6 mainstays like Olivia Tremor Control and Apples in S...

Various Artists: Freedom of Choice (1992)

The mad outpouring of tribute albums in the early 90s was a mixed bag. Occasionally you'd get relatively decent artists giving a new twist to your favorite songs or, even better, songs you might not care for in their original form. (As noted previously, the Carpenters tribute is a personal favorite.) But more often you'd get some minor artists offering rather bland treatments that didn't add much to the originals.

This is one of the better ones. The album features a litany of 90s alt.rock superst...

Pussy: Pussy Plays (1969)

The downside of having a passion for unearthing obscure, forgotten gems from the psychedelic 60s is that you have to wade through a lot of mediocre, badly-dated music to find them.

This, alas, is not one of the gems. Still, I do take a certain pleasure in even mediocre, badly-dated music from that era. And, by mediocre, I don't mean bad -- though I have plenty of truly bad psychedelic albums. I just mean the multitude of unmemorable records best served by being represented with a lone track on a ...

Captain Beyond: Sufficiently Breathless (1973)

After yesterday's blurb on Captain Sensible, I figured I'd just keep plowing ahead with the Captain motif. (I've already hit Captain Beefheart, so maybe that leaves the Captain & Tennille?).

As for Captain Beyond: Nope, not a band I care for. Can't say I've ever even listened to this album all the way through.

So why post it here? Because the title song kicks all kinds of ass. It's that rare album you buy for one song alone, and that song is worth the price of admission.

The band were sort of a pro...

Captain Sensible: Mad Cows & Englishmen (1996)

Captain Sensible (stage name of one Raymond Burns) is best known as the co-founder and bassist (later guitarist) for UK punk pioneers the Damned, with whom he still plays today. But he's also released a number of surprisingly colorful solo albums that sound nothing like his regular band, ranging from new wave to power pop, which I'm far more likely to grab than any of the Damned's full-length releases.

Mad Cows & Englishmen was his last solo album (after which he returned to a newly-reformed Dam...

The Bats: Couchmaster (1995)

New Zealand's enduring indie rock act The Bats, a longtime favorite, have a brand new album out, Foothills. It's a fine album, another batch of consistently winning, often understated tunes (though frontman Robert Scott's voice continues to move into a more grizzled, bluesy terrain, a bit rawer, kinda reminding me of a similar shift for Glenn Mercer, singer for the like-minded Feelies). You can check it out and grab a copy over at Bandcamp.

But I thought I'd dig deeper in the vault today. While m...

Flamin' Groovies: Shake Some Action (1976)

The San Francisco-based Flamin' Groovies started out in the late 60s as an eclectic band blending early Stones-styled rock with 50s oldies and garage-band proto-punk, perhaps best encapsulated in legendary early single "Teenage Head." When founder and frontman Roy Loney left in the early 70s, guitarist Cyril Jordan replaced him with a young singer-guitarist named Chris Wilson, who took the band in a much more pop-oriented direction. After a few years and a couple singles, the new iteration of th...