Marc Fagel's Blog: Jittery White Guy Music: The Blog, page 164

Simon & Garfunkel: Bookends (1968)

I've always had mixed feelings about S&G. Obviously their vocals can't be denied; when it comes to incorporating harmonies into rock & roll, they are as essential as the Everly Brothers, the Beach Boys, and CSN. And Simon wrote a tremendous number of timeless standards. At the same time, each of their albums is flawed by the inclusion of some tracks that just don't hold up (if they weren't already dated at the time of their recording). Still, I do love to pull their records out, particularly Boo...

Young Marble Giants: Colossal Youth (1980)

This is one of those albums--a one-"hit" wonder from a Welsh band--that every music critic raves about, but nobody living in the real world seems to have heard. Yet its stripped-down bedroom-production experimental new wave intimacy, downright revolutionary in the immediate wake of the punk revolution when it first came out, makes it feel prescient in the current musical environment.

Backed by rudimentary beats that sound like they're coming off a Casio toy keyboard, the focus of the songs is Ali...

Golden Smog: Weird Tales (1998)

The concept of the "supergroup" can be a mixed bag. Sometimes you end up with bland (though potentially commercially huge) results that water down everything interesting about the members' individual roots (see, e.g., Asia, or don't, 'cuz yuck); but now and then you get a blend that somehow transcends the members as individual artists (i.e. the recent teaming of Neko Case, k.d. lang, and Laura Veirs on 2016's breathtaking case/lang/veirs . 

Golden Smog are much closer to the latter. Their three fu...

Mountain Bus: Sundance (1971)

While the Grateful Dead are obviously American icons, it's always been my impression that back in the early '70s, aside from the touring circuit, they were more of a fringe act. Which is why it's always so surprising, when digging through the vaults of minor gems unearthed by reissue labels or online music fanatics, how many bands back in the day were inspired by the Dead.

Here's one of my personal favorites, a one-off LP from Chicago-based Mountain Bus. Coming out in '71, Sundance bears the obvi...

Orange Peels: So Far (2000)

Summer's nearly here, and the Orange Peels are just about the perfect summer band -- jangly sunshine pop, sweet (but not too sticky), nostalgic (but with a contemporary feel), and eminently hummable.

San Francisco Bay Area-based Allen Clapp has been releasing records with various iterations of the band for nearly a quarter century, all of which (including a solo album which, unsurprisingly, sounds exactly like an Orange Peels record) have a handful of stellar stand-out tracks, with the balance ne...

Attila (feat. Billy Joel): S/T (1970)

It seems silly to waste space criticizing universally-panned, truly terrible music. Fun, sure, but I'd much rather spend my time trying to turn the 1-2 people who read this thing on to some great music they might have missed than slagging something nobody in their right mind would (or should) spend much time listening to.

Still, to be acknowledged as among the worst albums ever recorded is of some note. Personally, I place the one and only album from Attila alongside the Osmonds' Crazy Horses ...

Grateful Dead: Dave's Picks 34 (Miami 1974)

Each May, the chatter among the Dead cognoscenti turns to the legendary run of East Coast shows from May 1977, the tour that birthed not just the May 8 Cornell show that served as the entry point to live Dead back in the days of tape trading, but equally great (if not better) shows at Yale, in Buffalo, in Lakeland, FL, and so on.

This May, though, we were also treated to the vault release of on my favorite Dead shows, the June 23, 1974 performance at Miami's Jai-Alai Fronton. It's been...

Primitons: Happy All The Time (1987)

Yeah, I sure do love me some mid-80s college radio jangle pop. The Primitons fall on the more obscure side of the scale, but their brief run, including an excellent 1985 self-titled EP, a single, and this, their sole LP, is as good as anything else the genre produced. The entire recorded history is collected on a single CD (the out-of-print but worth chasing down Don't Go Away: Collected Works collection).
The Alabama-based band is cut from the same cloth as other Southern bands of the era,...

The Pretty Things: Parachute (1970)

Reading the sad news today that long-time Pretty Things singer Phil May has passed. May was the band's one constant member from their early days in the 60s up through various present-day reunions.

While it's the Pretties' foray into late 60s psychedelia, with the classic concept album S.F. Sorrow, that gets the most kudos (alongside their earlier Stonesy, blues-based contributions to the British Invasion), I find 1970's Parachute to be an oft-overlooked classic, an album that seems unfairly...

Matthew Sweet & Susanna Hoffs: Under The Covers Vol. 2 (2009)

Yeah, it's kind of a cheat to go with a covers album, especially one where the songs are more or less done straight, with few real twists. Where's the originality?

But the whole three-volume series is such a non-stop delight that I can't help but totally love it. When it comes to power pop bona fides, you can't get much better than this pairing. Both Sweet and former Bangle Susanna Hoffs have shown a penchant for well-chosen covers throughout their careers (the Bangles' take on Big Star's...