Marc Fagel's Blog: Jittery White Guy Music: The Blog, page 4

My Top 2000 Songs #1080: Pictures Of You

Robert Smith has always fronted two very different versions of The Cure: The spooky goth ideal for rainy day listening; and the infectious indie pop that's just catchy enough for radio without losing its dark edge. On 1989's Disintegration , arguably the band's best LP, Smith merged both styles successfully, somber pieces that still bring the hooks. "Pictures Of You" is that perfect hybrid, a gorgeous, haunting track that doesn't skimp on the moody atmospherics, with some spine-tingling keyboard ...

My Top 2000 Songs #1079: Suite Judy Blue Eyes

I went through the usual trajectory with Crosby, Stills & Nash's 1969 debut single. Avoided the band (and the song) as lumbering dinosaurs during my college indie hipster days, but eventually came around to appreciate the song as one that obviously belongs on that boring old list of FM dial classic rock masterpieces. "Suite: Judy Blue Eyes"--nice play on suite/sweet, as both a multi-part musical suite, and an ode to Stephen Stills' then-girlfriend Judy Collins written on the cusp of their break-...

My Top 2000 Songs #1078: Horror Head

I picked up Curve's 1992 debut Doppleganger when I was deep in my shoegaze phase. They were a little more hard-rocking alt.rock than some of their peers, hints of the Breeders and Garbage (still a few years away from their own debut), though filtered with that UK neo-psychedelic flashing-lights groove of bands like Ride. They best split that difference on the debut's "Horror Head," which had enough dreamy jangle to make it comparable to Lush, but with plenty of that darker edge to it.

I didn't ke...

My Top 2000 Songs #1077: The Bitterest Pill

The Jam's penultimate single--full title, "The Bitterest Pill (I Ever Had To Swallow)"--is also their most ironically titled. However much I love the song, I've always found it a bitter pill to swallow. Sounding little like The Jam I fell in love with, the 1982 single is the closest they came to straight blue-eyed soul, heralding the band's break-up that would soon follow, and introducing the blueprint for the sound Paul Weller would undertake with The Style Council.

Oddly enough, while I love th...

My Top 2000 Songs #1076: Neat Neat Neat

Given that UK punk got zero airplay in my desolate slab of midwestern suburbia, I was a few years late to discovering what the fuss was all about. A few of the biggest names penetrated first, so I was already pretty well embedded in the Pistols and the Clash and Buzzcocks before hearing the Damned. By that point, they didn't sound terribly innovative, and the critical consensus tended to place them well below many of their better-known peers, so I didn't pay them a lot of mind. (Though I'm a big...

My Top 2000 Songs #1075: Sample And Hold

With a massive, decades-long catalog of universally acclaimed masterpieces, it feels a little weird to turn to 1982's Trans , one of the strangest and most divisive records in Neil Young's storied history. Me, I've always been a fan of this weird electronica/rock hybrid, the silly computer themed songs with vocals run through a vocoder. Maybe not something I listen to with the same frequency as his 70s classics, but I admire his audacity, and some of the songs hold up even if the record is wholly...

My Top 2000 Songs #1074: My Lucky Day

Another one of those songs you reach for when trying to explain the meaning of "power pop" to someone. It's our second visit to Jason Falkner's great 1999 LP Can You Still Feel, this time the crunchy guitars abetted by bit of synth, giving it a vibe akin to Cheap Trick's "Surrender." Distinguished by some great production by Nigel Goodrich (of Radiohead and Pavement fame), there are some riveting dynamics here, making Falkner--who played essentially all the instruments--sound like a blazing-hot ...

New Releases: The Beths

At a certain age, it's hard to get too excited about new music. While I'm always welcoming new music into my life, and absolutely dread becoming one of those "they just don't make good music any more" wet rags, the fact is I've got a few decades of accumulated favorites and it's hard to make room for too much new stuff, at least in regular rotation on the stereo.

Still, The Beths, an indie punkish-pop band out of New Zealand, are among my absolute favorite bands of the past decade, so I've been l...

My Top 2000 Songs #1073: Backsliding Fearlessly

On their 1969 self-titled debut, Mott The Hoople were still trying to figure out what kind of sound they wanted, a few years off from settling into the eclectic glam-tinged rock they're best remembered for. On "Backsliding Fearlessly," Ian Hunter capitalized on his gravelly growl and went all-in on the Bob Dylan emulation. It's a slow, folk-flavored track, a bit of a dirge, but the chorus elevates the song into something else, a soulful anthem over a descending chord sequence that's been living ...

My Top 2000 Songs #1072: Lisa Smokes Pot

Every 1000 or so songs I think I'm entitled to post a song you've never heard by people I knew back in college. My page, my rules... 

And while friends in the Noise Petals were working a similar groove to R.E.M. and other jangly college radio bands of the era, this one from Volatile Molecules is... ok, a little rougher around the edges. Ben X (I haven't spoken to him since graduation and not sure his musical past has followed him into adulthood, so we'll leave it at that) was a year behind me in ...