Marc Fagel's Blog: Jittery White Guy Music: The Blog, page 37

My Top 1000 Songs #794: You Hit The Nail On The Head

[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 got a thing for early Funkadelic, those first few years of the 70s when they were a true cosmic stew--sure, deeply steeped in funk and R&B, but also random bits of psychedelia and jazz and who knows what else. Pretty much all of that makes an appearance in "You Hit The Nail On The Head," the epic opener on 1972's America Eats Its Young . It's an elongat...

My Top 1000 Songs #793: Carolyn's Fingers

[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 the song that should have had all the old-school Cocteau Twins fans howling cries of "sell out!" Their haunting, goth-tinged early work had been gradually growing brighter, more shimmering, almost mainstream-friendly, but Elizabeth Fraser's imaginary lyrics & operatic vocals were still well outside the mainstream. Yet 1988's Blue Bell Knoll represen...

My Top 1000 Songs #792: Til I Hear It From You

[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.]

Another one from the Guilty Pleasures files? Probably. I mean, the Gin Blossoms felt like a guilty pleasure at the time, their jangly Americana-adjacent alt.rock getting the mainstream attention that seemed to unfairly evade Uncle Tupelo and the Jayhawks and Wilco etc.--yet, c'mon, New Miserable Experience was actually pretty good.
And then there's Empire Re...

My Top 1000 Songs #791: Around The Dial

[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.]

"Around The Dial" is probably nobody's idea of a top Kinks song--certainly not compared to the endless well of undeniable late 60s and early 70s classics--but it's long been a personal favorite. When I started going down the Kinks rabbit hole in high school, spurred on largely by 1980's One For The Road career-spanning double-live LP, I was hearing them lar...

My Top 1000 Songs #790: Sugar Kane

[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.]

By 1992's Dirty, Sonic Youth were a couple albums into their surprising major-label run, with no signs of making any commercial concessions. (In other words: damn, what a solid LP!) Still, "Sugar Kane" did an impressive job of adding just a bit of studio polish to their noisy experimentation without losing a drop of magic. It's a compelling riff-rocker, the...

My Top 1000 Songs #789: The True Wheel

[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.]

Yes, it's Brian Eno's more introspective, ambient pieces that have a truly life-enhancing hold on my soul. Yes, I'd be perfectly content loading up this list with excerpts from Another Green World and side two of Before & After Science . But hey, let's give another shout-out to his weird little rock & roll songs! Taking a second trip back to 1974's Taking Ti...

My Top 1000 Songs #788: The Thoughts Of Emerlist Davjack

[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.]

If The Nice are remembered at all these days, it's largely as the original stomping ground of Emerson Lake & Palmer's Keith Emerson, the band where he first performed bombastic 20-minute classical-music-based feats of keyboard wonkery before a couple of confederates gave him even freer reign to do so. Still, they had some interesting pre-prog psychedelic mo...

Another Buncha New Releases!

Approaching the end of 2024, already kinda locked in on a few favorites for the year-end list, but here's some great new music to complicate things.

2nd Grade, Scheduled Explosions

Playful Philly indie band with their 3rd LP, which, like the last two, is basically summed up as "Guided By Voices but more power-pop friendly." And, yeah, it feels like a lazy comparison that's gonna get lobbed at anyone who splays out 23 tracks in 40 minutes--some fully-realized, if brief, delightfully catchy pop trac...

My Top 1000 Songs #787: Start Again

[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.]

Despite this never-ending Top 1000 endeavor, I grew up an albums guy, not a singles guy. I like hearing music in context, ok?
But, still, there's always gonna be that one great song out there that gets you excited, even if you never listen to another note from the artist. And don't get me wrong, 2014's Lights Out , is a perfectly decent record, tasteful indie...

My Top 1000 Songs #786: 20th Century Boy

[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.]

Marc Bolan & T. Rex have so many phenomenal singles, so many of which have similar elements, that singling out one or two above the rest (ok, maybe "Metal Guru" aside) is a fool's game. 1973 single "20th Century Boy" (a non-album track, later found on re-issues of the same year's Tanx LP) checks all the boxes for a great T. Rex single--killer riff, the trad...