Marc Fagel's Blog: Jittery White Guy Music: The Blog, page 157

Goose Creek Symphony: Est. 1970 (1970)

Goose Creek Symphony are a long-running country-rock outfit hailing from Phoenix. I'm only familiar with their first 3 albums, from 1970-1972, which were straight out of the Gram Parsons cosmic Americana songbook, shades of Workingman's Dead and the Band, only with a lot more old-school bluegrass in the mix. And while I'm not really a country-bluegrass kinda guy, the albums have an eccentric charm to them that keeps them interesting, even for more traditional rock fans (at least those who don't ...

Mikal Cronin: MCIII (2015)

Mikal Cronin is an indie rocker out of California, playing on all manner of projects. His second solo LP (MCII, natch) was a wonderful bit of mid-fi indie pop, shades of Teenage Fanclub; his third album is similar, but ups the production a bit, adding in some more orchestration while retaining the hook-heavy songcraft.

Opener "Turn Around" is a terrific bit of baroque pop, calling to mind the New Pornographers and the Shins, dynamic and full of killer earworms that will haunt you all day long. Pl...

Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers: Into The Great Wide Open (1991)

Tom Petty is one of those guys I always took for granted until it was too late. His music was just always there, wherever you went, so the thought of actually pulling out a Tom Petty album and playing it through never really occurred to me. Pretty much since I started my pre-teen indoctrination into rock & roll, Petty's music was always being played on the radio, or in the restaurant, or at camp, or wherever I happened to be at any given moment. 1979's Damn The Torpedoes, which arrived when I wa...

Book Of Love: S/T (1986)

Here's another one that got a ton of airplay back in my college radio days. Can't say I pull it out very often these days, the 80s production a bit too of its era, but it has a few songs that are still essential parts of any party mixtape, and as a whole does a nice job of capturing that synth-heavy post-disco nightclub sound.

As someone who doesn't listen to a lot of electronic dance music -- New Order is probably the closest I get, and because of that band's Joy Division post-punk roots, it nev...

The Moon: Without Earth (1968)

Another dose of long-lost psychedelia, this one is long out of print and doesn't stream, but if you're a fan of faux-Beatles psyche-pop from the era -- see, e.g., the Aerovons or Lazy Smoke -- it's worth hunting down. Their claim to fame at the time was guitarist David Marks, who had played with the Beach Boys early on; though the album largely belongs to singer/songwriter Matthew Moore.

The songs are largely post- Sgt. Pepper -inspired eclectic pop with enough trippy signifiers (flanged vocals, ba...

The Roches: S/T (1979)

To call this folk rock is a stretch; it's pretty much straight folk music, almost entirely a lone acoustic guitar and the joyously unpolished voices of sisters Maggie, Terre, and Suzzy Roche. But, wow, those voices. Eschewing the niceties of easy-listening pop, the sisters bring a decidedly distinctive timbre, more conversational than lulling, like the acoustic side of Jonathan Richman. And when they lock in on a harmony, it's pure heaven -- not in a clean, pretty take on Beach Boys-styled a cap...

The Best Live Albums (Part 3)

A few months back, when it became clear that the pandemic lock-down was sticking around and all the shows I had planned for the summer were being "postponed," I posted some of my favorite live albums as a (weak) substitute for concerts -- see #1-5 and 6-10.

Figured I'd add a few more faves to the list (to take my mind off the fact that last week I was supposed to be in Tahoe for a couple nights of Phish shows, and no, not bitter much...).

The Velvet Underground: The Complete Matrix Tapes
The Velvet...

Jet Black Berries: Sundown On Venus (1984)

Inadvertently stumbled across this online over the weekend and now I'm just giddy!

This was one of those records I played to death back in my mid-80s college radio days. It had never been released on CD, and while I've got my old scratchy vinyl ripped to my hard drive, I was delighted to learn this weekend that it (finally!) received a digital release last year (as did the band's vinyl-only follow-up).

The Jet Black Berries (who lost the "the" after the first album, just like Facebook) were an ups...

Connections: Year One (2014)

Just about one of my favorite albums from the past few years... and if you like insanely catchy lo-fi indie pop, and have any affinity at all for Guided by Voices, I'm pretty confident it will be one of yours as well.

And yeah, these guys must get tired of the Guided by Voices name-check, but between the Ohio roots, and the predilection for brief, no-frills indie noise pop songs checking in at a minute or two, delivering a wildly infectious hook, and moving on to the next one (not to mention the ...

Imaginary Soundtracks (Vol. 2)

Back in my days of relentless mix-making... back before streaming audio playlists kinda took the fun out of trying to craft the perfect 90-minute mixtape or 80-minute CDR... I particularly enjoyed trying to come up with imaginary film soundtracks. Not just a mix of haphazardly selected tracks, but songs which, if you closed your eyes, felt like they were framing some sort of cinematic narrative. 

For whatever reason, most of these tended to come out sounding like the backdrop for an indie film no...