Marc Fagel's Blog: Jittery White Guy Music: The Blog, page 30

My Top 1000 Songs #859: Kidney Bingos

[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.]

Wire's unexpected 80s return after disbanding in the wake of one of the all-time-great three-record runs was a mixed bag. 1987's The Ideal Copy was pretty great, with some stand-out tracks that hold up today, but the records that followed saw some diminishing returns. 1988's A Bell Is A Cup Until It Is Struck was uniformly pleasant, an atypically light, ami...

My Top 1000 Songs #858: Take Me Out

[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.]

A guitar only has 6 strings; Western music is essentially limited to 12 notes. So it's not unreasonable to worry that, at some point, rock & roll is gonna run out of riffs. But then a song like "Take Me Out" comes along--off Scottish alt.rockers Franz Ferdinand's self-titled 2004 debut--and you're like, oh, ok, that's a new riff, thanks for sharing!

And what...

My Top 1000 Songs #857: Lying In State

[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 Verlaines were among the New Zealand indie bands on the Flying Nun label I got really into back in the mid-80s through early 90s. Their sorta arty, offbeat garage rock was a little more challenging than the more straightforward (yet still plenty skewed) rock/pop of the Clean, the Chills, and the Bats, my go-to faves, but their long career is still peppe...

My Top 1000 Songs #856: Big White Cloud

[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.]

Having checked in with Lou Reed a couple days back, we pivot to his Velvet Underground bandmate John Cale (ok, we just heard from him as well) for this gorgeous, epic ballad. It's off his fantastic 1970 solo debut, Vintage Violence, and more than anything on that album immediately established that Cale had a lot of interesting tricks up his sleeve, about as...

My Top 1000 Songs #855: Whatever

[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 is around the 1750th post I've made to this site over the past few years... and the very first appearance of Oasis. Seems weird. But I'm kinda Oasis-agnostic. I didn't listen to them much back in the day (or much of 90s Britpop, period). I eventually circled back to them a few years ago, and decided I didn't like their big records nearly as much as the...

My Top 1000 Songs #854: Virginia Reel Around The Fountain

[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 Halo Benders were an indie rock supergroup of sorts, a lo-fi side project from Built To Spill's Doug Martsch and Beat Happening's Calvin Johnson. Their records were a little difficult, appealing to those with an appreciation for both artists, who made an equal imprint on the music (IMHO, Johnson's raw baritone is an acquired taste). But their third and ...

My Top 1000 Songs #853: Charley's Girl

[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.]

Lou Reed's long solo career was a rollercoaster of delirious peaks (if never quite reaching the groundbreaking triumphs of the Velvet Underground) and frustrating valleys... underwhelming misfires followed by proclamations of a comeback (though fans and critics didn't always concur on which were which). But it's hard to dispute 1976's Coney Island Baby was ...

My Top 1000 Songs #852: Turnaround

[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.]

Southern Illinois' indie band Shoes quietly released wonderful new wave-ish power pop records throughout the late 70s and 80s, and intermittently beyond. They had a lot of really, really good songs, making it hard to land on particularly "great" ones for the list, but here's a second entry. "Turnaround," off 1984's Silhouette, is a mid-tempo break-up song, ...

My Top 1000 Songs #851: Kite

[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 think Nick Heyward ever got much attention here in the States. If he's known at all, it's probably as the frontman of short-lived new wave act Haircut One Hundred, whose "Love Plus One" seems to be on the shortlist of tunes that movies & tv shoes turn to when they want to convey a quick "hey, this is taking place in the eighties!" But I really enjoy...

My Top 1000 Songs #850: Hallelujah

[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.]

Probably goes against the intentions of this list to include a track I'd probably be perfectly content never hearing again. Indeed, few tracks these days are as difficult to assess objectively as musical works given their vast cultural baggage. A go-to for lending emotional heft to popular media dating back to Shrek and The West Wing and Watchmen and probab...