Marc Fagel's Blog: Jittery White Guy Music: The Blog, page 162

DM3: One Time, Two Times, Three Red Light (1993)

When you're cooking up the shortlist of truly essential purveyors of quality power pop, you're gonna have your Matthew Sweet, your Tommy Keene... and your Dom Mariani. And the fact that Australia's Mariani remains well below the radar is a freakin' crime.

Mariani's first band, The Stems, released a few solid albums in the 80s, pure 60s garage band revivalism with killer pop hooks. In the 90s, after a one-off with the wonderful jangle-pop band The Someloves, he reappeared leading the DM Three (lat...

You Say It's My Birthday...

No album pick today... taking the day off for my birthday. But here's an old playlist, freshly updated, with one song per year I've been alive. (And damn, that's a lot of years.)

Blossom Toes: We Are Ever So Clean (1967)

When ticking through the list of great albums from the heyday of late 60s British psychedelia-- Sgt. Pepper , Piper at the Gates, SF Sorrow , Ogdens' Nut , etc.--the debut album from Blossom Toes is, shall we say, typically omitted. At most, a stray track will make it onto the standard anthology of the era. Which is a shame, because it's a pretty damn cool record. Very British and eccentric, mixing the quainter side of UK psyche with a Zappa-like strain of weirdness, yet loads of fun for fans of the...

Wire Train: In A Chamber (1983)

I know, I know... you're probably thinking that at some point I'm gonna run out of jangly mid-80s college radio bands. But not today, folks, not today.

Wire Train were based here in my (current) home town of San Francisco, sporting that familiar jangly guitar sound -- shades of R.E.M., Miracle Legion, Let's Active -- augmented by a darker, bass-driven new wave edge calling to mind the early work of the Cure or maybe the Psychedelic Furs (the haircuts in the videos below confirming the band's new ...

The Stray Trolleys: Barricades And Angels (1980)

Martin Newell is the UK equivalent of Robert Pollard and Guided by Voices. Nearly as prolific, Newell has been releasing DIY records for decades, primarily as the Cleaners from Venus, but also as a solo artist and with various other configurations. And like GbV, his vast discography can be daunting and frustrating (but ultimately enthralling), plenty of half-finished lo-fi sketches surrounding a few delightfully catchy pop tunes per album.

One of Newell's most consistent records is his 1980 recor...

Another New Release Round-Up: June 2020

Been checking out a lot of new music lately; here are a few quick takes.

Jetstream Pony are a UK band that's released a few terrific singles over the past couple years (they lured me in with a fizzy little cover of "Don't Fear The Reaper"). Their self-titled debut reaches back to late 80s/early 90s shoegaze, buzzing guitars and sweet vocals, though with a little more jangle and a little less feedback. Think Lush and the Darling Buds crossed with the Sundays, women-helmed noise-pop with hooks aple...

Brewer & Shipley: Tarkio (1970)

An early example of rootsy Americana that seems to be overlooked these days, Brewer & Shipley offered a nice blend of country, rock, and folk, with some lovely harmonies and acoustic guitar work, that holds up well alongside better-known albums like the Byrds' Sweetheart of the Rodeo and the Dead's Workingman's Dead and American Beauty . (Indeed, Jerry Garcia lends his pedal steel to one track here, and long-time members of the Jerry Garcia Band appear as well.)

Tarkio (originally called Tarkio Ro...

The Libertines: Up The Bracket (2002)

Back in the early '00s, the London-based Libertines were part of that whole post-punk guitar rock thing, with various bands out of New York and the UK like the Strokes, the Killers, Interpol, White Stripes, Franz Ferdinand, and others getting a load of media hype and alt.rock radio airplay. The bands didn't necessarily have a lot in common -- sure, you'd hear strains of the Velvet Underground and Joy Division and Television and whatever, but they seemed to get lumped together simply by favoring ...

Pink Floyd: Obscured By Clouds (1972)

Heading back into classic rock land, here's one that sometimes seems to get overlooked. Pink Floyd are of course best known for their run of mega-selling concept albums from 1973's Dark Side of the Moon through 1979's The Wall (or maybe through 1983's The Final Cut if you're being generous); and their 1967 debut album Piper at the Gates of Dawn and contemporaneous singles with acid casualty Syd Barrett at the helm are legendary in their own right. But in between these two very different bands wa...

2nd Grade: Hit To Hit (2020)

Hit To Hit is the second outing from Philadelphia-based indie rockers 2nd Grade, and on first listen it's a solid contender for one of my favorite albums of 2020. Think Guided by Voices, but less lo-fi and more deliberately poppy. 24 songs in about 42 minutes, most about 90 seconds long -- verse, chorus, and move on to the next one. It's a delightfully sprawling mess (in the best way), some kids set loose in the recording studio and going a little crazy, like an indie version of Lindsey Buckingh...