Marc Fagel's Blog: Jittery White Guy Music: The Blog, page 7

My Top 2000 Songs #1053: Enchanted Sky Machines

The late Judee Sill remains the quintessential insider artist, with a devoted but inexplicably undersized following. I'd kinda hoped the documentary they made about her last year, Lost Angel (as painfully tragic as anyone familiar with story would imagine), would expose her to a new audience, but it seems nothing short of a helpful placement on Stranger Things will make that happen. Ah well. If you know you know. 

"Enchanted Sky Machines," off Sills' 1971 self-titled debut, breaks a bit from the ...

New Releases: Tamar Berk

Tamar Berk has been one of my favorite accidental discoveries of recent years--I stumbled across her with last year's Good Times For A Change , already 4 releases into a prolific run--and as with contemporaries like Vanessa Peters, or forerunners like Amy Rigby, she crafts mature music that's not afraid to sound a little lived in. Her latest, OCD (out officially next month but available to preview and pre-purchase on Bandcamp), has the feel of a woman who's been through some shit, and is just tir...

My Top 2000 Songs #1052: Where The Night Goes

Singer-songwriter Josh Ritter has scattered some wonderful tracks across his discography. 2015's Sermon On The Rocks is kinda unfairly overweighted by the astounding "Getting Ready To Get Down," still one of my favorite songs of the past decade, but "Where The Night Goes" is no slouch. It's a catchy, perky little pop jaunt that unabashedly shows off its American classic rock traditions, from Bob Seger and Lindsey Buckingham up through Steve Forbert. 40 years earlier it would've immediately grabb...

My Top 2000 Songs #1051: Dear Deadly

If I had to pick a song to encapsulate the overall vibe of the late 90s indie rock I was listening to (that wasn't by, say, Yo La Tengo or Pavement or the Elephant 6 crew), Creeper Lagoon's "Dear Deadly" would pretty much do the trick. The San Francisco band's 1998 album I Become Small And Go  was a little flawed/inconsistent, but it's got a handful of tracks that instantly transport me to a specific point in time and immediately illustrate where my head was at back then. I covered "Empty Ships" ...

My Top 2000 Songs #1050: Never Enough

On 1990's non-album-track single "Never Enough," the Cure inject some raging Madchester electricity into the mix (beating U2 to the punch, who'd try the same on the following year's not-entirely-dissimilar "Mysterious Ways"). Coming on the heels of the dense, dark yet often gorgeous majesty of 1989's epic Disintegration , the single was an exciting change of pace, one of their first goes at a track that made you want to crank it up and dance. Skipping the synths in favor of Hendrixian wah-wah gui...

My Top 2000 Songs #1049: Leave You Behind

I generally turn to Sleater-Kinney when I need some blistering post-punk energy and just wanna make the walls (or the car) shake. Yet one of my favorite S-K tracks is the rare ballad, "Leave You Behind," off 2000's All Hands On The Bad One. (Rare as in--not many S-K ballads; and it's not something they seem to play live.) What can I say--I'm a sucker for intertwining guitar lines and intertwining vocals, and this song's got both! And as much as I love Corin Tucker and Carrie Brownstein in full-o...

My Top 2000 Songs #1048: Make Me Smile (Come Up And See Me)

I'd never really heard of Cockney Rebel until 20-something years after their early 70s beginnings. Maybe it was the glam-centric soundtrack to 1998's Velvet Goldmine , or just some general inclinations to explore glam rock beyond the obvious Bowie/T.Rex/Roxy/Mott entries around that time. I really liked the first couple albums, which slotted in nicely alongside those better-known artists. I didn't spend as much time with subsequent records, when frontman Steve Harley replaced the band and inserte...

My Top 2000 Songs #1047: Oliver's Army

While I'm fine with Elvis Costello's second album (his first with the Attractions), 1978's This Year's Model, I frankly don't play it that often. It's the follow-up, 1979's Armed Forces , that has long been among my 2 or 3 favorite EC releases--on any given day, my top pick will change--and the one that really shows the importance of the Attractions to that early run of masterpieces. "Oliver's Army" in particular has such a delightful, effervescent musical vibe, a huge leap from the more straight...

My Top 2000 Songs #1046: She Divines Water

Here's our second visit to Camper Van Beethoven's shoulda-made-them-stars major label debut, 1988's Our Beloved Revolutionary Sweetheart. And on "She Divines Water," you can practically feel the transition from their earlier, lo-fi, oddly-ethnic-sounding indie experiments into a more mainstream-ready Americana-tinged alternative rock. The fiddle gives the casual waltz a nice country vibe, still powered by a catchy jangle-pop melody. But what makes it an all-timer for me is the crazy breakdown ne...

My Top 2000 Songs #1045: Captain Jack

Just watched HBO's Billy Joel documentary. I'm not what you'd call a Billy Joel fan, but it was pretty well done. Maybe overlong and occasionally repetitive at 5 hours--can't say I was terribly interested in his post-pop classical music era--but they did a pretty good job moving among his personal experience (his family's Holocaust history and its impact was impressive to see covered), his musical trajectory (including early work with the Hassles and Attila), his divorces and personal failings, ...