Marc Fagel's Blog: Jittery White Guy Music: The Blog, page 39

My Top 1000 Songs #775: Diane Young

[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.]

Does this one absolutely need to be here? Dunno. Plenty of really good-to-great Vampire Weekend songs from the past decade and a half. Most still feel a little too recent to be declared all-timers; hell, given a year or two more time, I'd probably say I prefer "This Life," from 2021's Father Of The Bride, except it already seems to have been too co-opted by...

My Top 1000 Songs #774: The Cinema Show

[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.]

As 1973's Selling England By The Pound is not just my favorite Genesis album, but one of my favorite albums period, it's hard to limit myself to a song or two from the LP. Sure, "I Know What I Like" is the obvious choice, about as close as the Gabriel-era incarnation ever came to a radio-friendly pop song; but "The Cinema Show" does a better job of capturin...

My Top 1000 Songs #773: I've Waited Ages

[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 three-LP run from the late 70s incarnation of Wire--who later regrouped and released numerous underrated records over the ensuing decades--holds up as stunning, sturdy, self-contained musical universe. Each album from that '77-'79 triad was stylistically varied and distinct from its predecessor, quickly evolving from furious (yet arty) minimalist punk r...

My Top 1000 Songs #772: Couldn't I Just Tell 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.]

Here's a second wondrous tune off Todd Rundgren's 1972 opus Something/Anything?... and like the prior pick, it's a near-perfect progenitor of the entire power pop genre, as much as anything by Big Star or the Raspberries or Badfinger. It's got the expected crunchy guitars juxtaposed against clean jangle, topped by big melodic sing-along hooks. But it's also...

My Top 1000 Songs #771: No Love Lost

[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.]

Joy Division's one-two punch of 1979's Unknown Pleasures and 1980's Closer is such a remarkable (and sadly truncated) collection of distinctive, emotionally gripping music, that it's kinda crazy that barely a year earlier they had gotten their start as raw punk-rockers. Though even their earliest songs were no mere retreads of the Pistols music that had ins...

My Top 1000 Songs #770: Sweethearts

[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.]

Camper Van Beethoven's 1989 LP Key Lime Pie, their last before a lengthy break-up/sabbatical, was a letdown after the alt.rock triumph of 1988's Our Beloved Revolutionary Sweetheart--not bad, by any means, but maybe losing a little of their unique creative spark. Still, "Sweethearts" was among the band's finest moments, a political song buried beneath some ...

My Top 1000 Songs #769: Credit In The Straight World

[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 previously kvelled about the lone 1980 LP from Young Marble Giants, among the original punk-era bedroom-pop originators, who used cheap keyboards and simple music and Alison Stratton's amiable voice to create their own musical genre. "Credit In The Straight World" didn't necessarily jump out from the album as a favorite; it's relatively straightforward...

My Top 1000 Songs #768: St. Stephen

[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.]

Like a lot of Grateful Dead converts of my generation, I first got into the band (following years of visceral disdain) in the mid-80s after being turned on to a few live shows circulating on hissy cassettes. San Francisco '75 (officially released on 1991's One From The Vault ) helped turn me from a hater to a lifelong obsessive, but the legendary Cornell '77...

My Top 1000 Songs #767: Lose My Breath

[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 it's appearance here, "Lose My Breath" is NOT one of my favorite songs. I actually find it kinda hard to listen to. But it's also a song that has long haunted my dreams. As I wrote in the very first line of my book:

"My dreams have soundtracks."

And My Bloody Valentine's "Lose My Breath" has made countless late-night appearances over the years, its wa...

New Release: Wild Pink

Wild Pink--essentially the recording project of New York musician John Ross--have been quietly releasing dreamy indie pop records for nearly a decade. They've gotten some critical buzz, but for inexplicable reasons haven't scaled the same heights as, say, the War On Drugs, who inhabit a similar space: contemporary laid back grooves and stripped-down bedroom pop interwoven with more straightforward hooks unafraid to invoke the traditions of mellow 70s classic rock.

Their last album, 2022's ILYSM, ...