Marc Fagel's Blog: Jittery White Guy Music: The Blog, page 8

My Top 2000 Songs #1044: President Reagan's Birthday Present

The Jazz Butcher at their most playful, supported by a relentlessly rollicking percussion shuffle and the sort of bassline that gums up in your head for 40 years. "President Reagan's Birthday Present," off 1985's Sex And Travel, takes us back to the waning days of the Cold War, Reagan's fever dream that "red Russians shot my rocket down!" But no deep politics here, just musical glee.

My Top 2000 Songs #1043: Under Heavy Manners

I've long been a sucker for Robert Fripp's "Frippertronics," his 70s experimental recordings creating analog tape loops of his guitar noodlings and turning them into surprisingly evocative musical pieces. Still, while these sonic tapestries could work well on their own as ambient music, or backing songs by artists like Peter Gabriel (or even The Roches), his pivot into "Discotronics"--pairing these loops with bass & drum dance beats--seemed to be pushing his luck. Nonetheless, 1980's God Save Th...

My Top 2000 Songs #1042: No Good Trying

Given Syd Barrett's precarious mental state, it's not a big surprise that his first post-Pink Floyd solo album, 1970's The Madcap Laughs , is a disjointed and often disturbing affair. While occasionally finding the whimsy of the the first Floyd LP, it visits some dark places. But that doesn't mean there aren't moments of musical greatness, enjoyable as key components of the Floyd canon without having to consider them in the context of Syd's sad trajectory. "No Good Trying" is a personal favorite-...

My Top 2000 Songs #1041: Away

One of the key components of The Feelies' sound from their humble 70s beginnings was the patient slow-build. What sounded like extra dead air between album tracks was just the band taking their sweet time getting going, some stray jangles eventually coalescing into a song, building up to frenetic overdrive. By the time of their third album, 1988's underrated  Only Life , they had this honed to an art form, but "Away" still felt dynamic and novel. A little over a minute of gentle, pastoral chiming ...

My Top 2000 Songs #1040: The Width Of A Circle

"The Width Of A Circle," the lengthy opener for 1970's The Man Who Sold The World , is David Bowie at his proggiest. Sort of picking up on tracks like "Unwashed and Somewhat Slightly Dazed" and "Cygnet Committee" from the prior year's Space Oddity , it's a look at a direction he might have headed had he not pulled back on sprawling epics and moved in a more pop/glam direction (and then a million other directions, but that's another story).
As with most of Man, the song also has Bowie rocking harder...

New Releases: Highspire

For some reason I keep indulging in contemporary shoegaze records. And while I like a lot of them, they often blend together--take some halfway decent songs and slather them in reverb and distortion and voila, there you go. So they end up sitting largely un-revisited in my digital library, the stray song periodically popping up when I cue up the "shoegaze" genre and hit shuffle play.

Which makes it nice when you snag one that stands out. The latest from Pennsylvania band Highspire, at least on th...

My Top 2000 Songs #1039: 1952 Vincent Black Lightning

Richard Thompson has always been comparable to Bob Dylan for me. Meaning I view them as incredible songwriters... but I tend to like their songs as covered/interpreted by others. (Which isn't to say seeing Thompson perform live wasn't pretty great.)

In this case, I came to Thompson's "1952 Vincent Black Lightning" through Mary Lou Lord, who covered the track on a b-side (backing the 1998 single "Lights Are Changing"). Lord's sweet, sometimes-straining-to-hit-the-notes vocals matched with Thompson...

My Top 2000 Songs #1038: Baby I Don't Care

Guilty Pleasure file? Honestly, I don't think so. Sure, take your basic "Wild Thing" riff and blow it up with endless walls of reverb (which, to be fair, X had already done with their remake of the actual "Wild Thing")... then have Wendy James totally sex it up. Should be cheesy as hell.

But when Transvision Vamp's Velveteen this came out in 1989, when I was knee-deep in law school, I needed something relatively mindless I could crank up when nobody was around, and this track hit the spot. It slo...

My Top 2000 Songs #1037: Laughing

God bless the late David Crosby, warts and all--but I'll be the first to admit I usually found his contributions to CSN/CSNY (and, before that, to the Byrds) to be among the respective bands' least approachable tracks. Yes, he could do more with a harmony arrangement than pretty much anyone in rock music besides maybe Brian Wilson--and, hey, one could credibly argue Croz was even better--but his melodies weren't exactly full of catchy hooks.

Which is what makes his solo debut so astounding. 1971'...

My Top 2000 Songs #1036: Don't Come Around Here No More

An admittedly unlikely Tom Petty pick. Of all the artists who should decide, hey, let's give psychedelia a shot!, Petty would be near the bottom. And then throw that lone psychedelic-flavored song onto what was supposed to be a concept album about the South and... yeah, it's got tragic misfire written all over it.
But turns out to be a pretty decent song. Trippy percussion and sitar and Petty at his most menacing.
Of course, it's all about the video, which was on MTV seemingly every 5 minutes back...