Marc Fagel's Blog: Jittery White Guy Music: The Blog, page 21

New Releases: Girlpuppy

Just randomly stumbled across Sweetness, the second release from Girlpuppy (the project of Atlanta singer/songwriter Becca Harvey). It's got the vibe of other low-key indie projects like Boygenius and Soccer Mommy, but Harvey brings on some studio heavies to give it some guitar muscle, occasionally veering out of comfortable bedroom indie pop into thrashy shoegaze. A pretty perfect balance is struck on songs like "I Just Do," a relaxed little home-brewed pop tune with an electronic beat that bui...

My Top 1000 Songs #933: Wrong In The Charts

[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.]

1987's Boo-Boo EP introduced the world--ok, maybe just the itty bitty corner of the world occupied by northeastern college radio--to Boston's Big Dipper, a supergroup of sorts comprised of members of semi-legendary college radio bands like Volcano Suns and Dumptruck and the Embarrassment. I played the crap out of "Wrong In The Charts" on my radio show, the ...

My Top 1000 Songs #932: Polyester Bride

[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 would be easy to keep picking more stand-outs from Liz Phair's universally revered 1993 debut Exile In Guyville. I could do the same from 1994's also excellent (if less appreciated) Whip-Smart. But I think her third album, 1998's Whitechocolatespaceegg, gets an unfairly bad rap. Sure, she made some moves in a more commercial direction, adding some studio...

My Top 1000 Songs #931: Add It Up

[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.]

I've talked ad nauseum about the impact the Violent Femmes' 1983 debut had on teenage me, an album that seemed to break every rule of rock music right around the time I was enmeshed in exploring music well beyond the classic rock tropes I'd been absorbing on my bedroom stereo for the past five years. But if album-opening "Blister In The Sun" (and its follow...

My Top 1000 Songs #930: Jugband Blues

[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.]

Is it possible to appreciate this song without understanding the context of Syd Barrett's mental illness and departure from Pink Floyd? I'm guessing not. I mean, it's a cool song, starting out as a pretty ballad with a skewed time signature, then shifting into a cacophonous marching band, then shifting once again into all-out deep-space chaos a la the debut...

My Top 1000 Songs #929: Sister Rose

[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.]

Look, it's a pretty good song. "Sister Rose," like the balance of Beachwood Sparks' 2000 self-titled debut LP, blends Gram Parsons-styled cosmic Americana with laid back what-if-the-Eagles-didn't-suck SoCal vibes and Beach Boys sunshine and just a smattering of psychedelia. But is it truly great? Hard for me to say. But for about a quarter century, there ha...

New Releases: My Morning Jacket

No artist this deep into their career should be releasing records this good. (Ok, don't tell that to Yo La Tengo.) But the pithily-titled Is continues My Morning Jacket's run of solid, occasionally transcendent records as they enter their second quarter-century. 
Opener "Out In The Open" is pretty much your trademark MMJ track--a slow, stripped down ballad, each instrument gradually joining, steadily building momentum until it breaks into a full-on fist-pumping anthem, melodic and sonically rich....

My Top 1000 Songs #928: Archie, Marry Me

[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.]

I don't have a ton of songs from the past decade on this list--I think a song needs enough time to germinate before you can really call it one of your all-time favorites--much less multiple songs from a single artist. But, hey, I really love Toronto indie rockers Alvvays. While I'm especially partial towards 2017's Antisocialites (that record's "Lollipop" m...

My Top 1000 Songs #927: Will The Wolf Survive?

This is a music blog, not a politics blog, and I try to keep things on target. But hey, my blog, my rules.

And fuck this fascist administration, and fuck every single person who supports them, whether deliberately or out of ignorance. We have become a nation that is deporting people to foreign prisons without due process, that is targeting universities and law firms and anyone else on Trump's enemies list in violation of the First Amendment and longstanding ethical rules and the democratic norms ...

My Top 1000 Songs #926: Eden

[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.]

Talk Talk's astounding/divisive 1988 LP Spirit Of Eden is one of those records that really only works as a cohesive whole rather than as a collection of songs. So its representation here is more a stand-in for the album, rather than a stand-alone track judged solely on its individual merits. Still, "Eden," for all its experimental strangeness, is probably t...