Marc Fagel's Blog: Jittery White Guy Music: The Blog, page 19

My Top 1000 Songs #950: Fatal Flaw Of The New

[I've been writing up my Top 1000 songs on a daily basis--you can see them all in descending order by hitting the All My Favorite Songs tag.]

Eccentric New Zealand indie rocker Chris Knox, both on his own and as part of the duo Tall Dwarfs, can be a challenging listen. Unrelentingly lo-fi, the Knox/Dwarfs catalog is full of strangeness, yet every now and then they almost inadvertently stumble into a hook so winning you'll never get it out of your head. "Fatal Flaw Of The New," off the Tall Dwarfs...

My Top 1000 Songs #949: Ventura Highway

[I've been writing up my Top 1000 songs on a daily basis--you can see them all in descending order by hitting the All My Favorite Songs tag.]

Reaching deep into the Guilty Pleasures bin, and once again surprising myself with a helping of America. The opening track from 1972's Homecoming--but, c'mon, we're not fooling ourselves, we all know this song from 1975's America's Greatest Hits, the album every household seemed to own back in the 70s--is another song unabashedly indebted to CSNY. But the j...

My Top 1000 Songs #948: Oh Bondage Up Yours!

[I've been writing up my Top 1000 songs on a daily basis--you can see them all in descending order by hitting the All My Favorite Songs tag.]

Sure, X-Ray Spex's 1977 punk classic isn't something I play on a regular basis, but it hasn't lost a drop of its visceral power nearly a half-century later. Poly Styrene, barely out of her teens, belting out a cry for anti-consumerism independence with lung-busting fury... nothing like it before or since. Throw in some unexpected sax work (from a then-16-ye...

My Top 1000 Songs #947: Going To Hell

[I've been writing up my Top 1000 songs on a daily basis--you can see them all in descending order by hitting the All My Favorite Songs tag.]

The Brian Jonestown Massacre--twisted genius Anton Newcombe and his revolving cast--are one of those acts with a large and varied catalog of material, ranging from boisterous psychedelic shoegaze to stripped-down garage rock, who have thus far evaded this list. Which doesn't reflect how much I enjoy a lot of their work; I just tend to listen to their albums...

My Top 1000 Songs #946: Avant Gardener

[I've been writing up my Top 1000 songs on a daily basis--you can see them all in descending order by hitting the All My Favorite Songs tag.]

This 2013 EP track was my introduction to the observational narratives and strikingly deadpan delivery of Australian singer-songwriter Courtney Barnett. It's a slow-motion asthma attack accompanied by interwoven references to gardening and Pulp Fiction and medical conditions, a notebook full of jotted-down musings, enlivened by musical backing that's surpri...

My Top 1000 Songs #945: My Sharona

[I've been writing up my Top 1000 songs on a daily basis--you can see them all in descending order by hitting the All My Favorite Songs tag.]

It's summer 1979. I've just turned 13, had a pretty sweet Bar Mitzvah celebration, life's ok--or at least as ok as it gets for an introverted, awkward boy is as he enters his proper teen years.

And then my parents ship me off for 4 weeks of overnight camp in upper Michigan, a miserable summer that was just a whole whirlwind of suck. (I won't revisit it here;...

My Top 1000 Songs #944: St. Catherine

[I've been writing up my Top 1000 songs on a daily basis--you can see them all in descending order by hitting the All My Favorite Songs tag.]

The 1985 LP Susan Sleepwalking, by Illinois duo The Arms of Someone New, was an obscure little off-label thing that showed up at the radio station back in my college DJ days and has haunted me ever since. Spooky, lo-fi, almost amateurish ambient/goth dream pop, seemingly easy to cast aside, yet I still find myself cueing it up from time to time. Probably be...

My Top 1000 Songs #943: Have You Ever Seen The Rain

[I've been writing up my Top 1000 songs on a daily basis--you can see them all in descending order by hitting the All My Favorite Songs tag.]

Notwithstanding that truly epic run of 1968-1970 hit singles, I've never been a huge Creedence fan. Probably a combination of classic radio omnipresence during my formative years, and my ambivalence about John Fogerty's voice, but they tend to be a band whose hits I'll throw onto playlists when I'm entertaining, but whose albums I have pretty much zero inte...

New Release: Exploding Flowers

I shared my love of Exploding Flowers' 2020 album Stumbling Blocks a few years back. They've returned with their latest slab of indie jangle, and it's another fine, varied collection of tunes. Lots of gentle jangle here, songs pulling from the R.E.M. and Feelies and Go-Betweens and Lilac Time songbooks, cross-fertilized with some more jarring post-punk indebted to the 80s/90s Flying Nun scene of bands like the Clean and the Bats, the treble-happy guitars broken up by some garage band keyboards.

O...

My Top 1000 Songs #942: My Boyfriend

[I've been writing up my Top 1000 songs on a daily basis--you can see them all in descending order by hitting the All My Favorite Songs tag.]

One of those songs that immediately transports me back to college. "My Boyfriend," a 1983 single from Hoboken band The Cucumbers, probably didn't get quite as much enthusiastic play outside of New Jersey college radio, but we did our part to promote the band to anyone who would listen. It's a silly little new wave-tinged jangly pop song, a basic 3-chord rif...