Marc Fagel's Blog: Jittery White Guy Music: The Blog, page 97

My Top 1000 Songs #234: Deeper Into Movies

Yo La Tengo's 1997 career-defining statement I Can Hear The Heart Beating As One is riddled with band peaks across the sonic spectrum, from the noise-pop nugget "Sugarcube" to the electronica-tinged "Autumn Sweater" to the quietly soothing "Damage." But it's the relentlessly noisy and cathartic "Deeper Into Movies" that really captured my imagination. It borders on abrasive, with its feedback-drenched guitars and frenetic percussion, a layered cacophony that totally envelops you (if played at ap...

My Top 1000 Songs #233: 24

What goes on your list of definitive jangle pop songs? Obviously some Byrds and early R.E.M.; maybe some Big Star and Connells and Feelies. But Game Theory's wonderful "24," off their 1985 career peak LP Real Nighttime , has gotta be way up there at the top of the list. Just listen to that chiming guitar! That hum-along melody! Those sweet vocals and subtle ooh-ooh harmonies! In what kind of messed up universe is this not a song on the lips of every single living music fan? (Ok, in the sort of me...

The Breeders + Belly: Last Star (The Imaginary 1993 Record)

Time for another imaginary album. The last time I combined two artists' contemporaneous releases into a unified piece (Flaming Lips & Mercury Rev), it came out pretty damn great, so I thought I'd try another.

I recently wrote up some songs from Kim Deal and Tanya Donelly on my Top 1000, and it got me thinking--prompted by a comment from a Twitter friend--about what would have happened if Donelly had stuck around in the Breeders for another album, and they'd decided to split songwriting/singing du...

My Top 1000 Songs #232: Here Comes The Flood

[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 Comes The Flood," from Peter Gabriel's 1977 solo debut, makes for a perfect album closer--it's an unabashedly bombastic epic, poetic vagaries ultimately tethered to portentous, biblical apocalypse. The song retains the majesty and artfulness of his work with Genesis, but grounded in a firmer classic rock tradition. "Lord, here comes the flood. We'll s...

My Top 1000 Songs #231: Feed The Tree

We were talking Kim Deal here just the other day, and her post-Pixies act the Breeders was a hugely successful crossover from indie rock into more radio/MTV-friendly 90s alt.rock. Charting a similar course at the same time was Tanya Donelly. Like Deal, Donelly started out in one of the bright lights of Boston indie rock (Throwing Muses); after co-founding the Breeders with Deal and playing on the band's initial releases, Donelly then started her own band, Belly, which similarly brought a bit mor...

My Top 1000 Songs #230: Interzone

Amidst the darkness and intensity of Joy Division's timeless Unknown Pleasures , the frenzied "Interzone" feels like a brief respite. A throwback to their initial Pistols-inspired punk days, it's a glimpse of what might have been but for Martin Hannett's dense, spooky production and Ian Curtis' encroaching sadness--a crunchy guitar riff at rapid-fire pace, augmented by those freaky brr-rrr-rrr lip-rolls. Sure, the lyrics are as wedded to eerie urban decay and apocalyptic dread as the rest of the ...

My Top 1000 Songs #229: The Big Ship

This is the first instrumental track to make the list; and while it won't be the last (probably?), I've largely steered clear of instrumentals. Which isn't to say there aren't a lot of instrumental tracks I truly love to death. (Yeah, there's a playlist for that...) But for me, a big part of what makes a song truly great is the lyrics--or, even where it's just gibberish or silliness, the role the vocals play in the overall production. So it's tough for even the most distinctive or musically bril...

My Top 1000 Songs #228: Gigantic

A ferocious introduction to Kim Deal, who, both with the Pixies and later with the Breeders and the Amps, has loomed so large a figure for us indie rock boys. It's a killer hook, establishing the band's loud-soft-loud dynamic (later perfectly deployed in "Debaser"), the insistent distortion cutting loose into a sludgy monster riff; but the song really comes down to the vague yet undeniably taboo lyrics and Deal's breathy delivery, a merger of the sexual and chaste that makes it riveting.Live in ...

My Top 1000 Songs #227: Action

Did 70s UK pop/glam/hard rock act Sweet produce some of the greatest songs in the history of rock & roll?

Of course not. Don't be absurd.

But as the band that played one of the largest roles in sucking me in to a lifetime of musical obsession, they're gonna find their way into this list for purely personal reasons.

As I've described at length (both here and in my book--hey, have you checked out my book yet??), the band's 1975 single "Fox On The Run" was one of the first songs I got really into when...

My Top 1000 Songs #226: Supper's Ready

Gettin' my prog on here... and if it's kind of a cheat to treat a multi-song medley as a single track on this list, what to make of an LP-side-long suite that's essentially 7 separate songs joined by some sort of vague semi-biblical history-of-all-mankind thematic thread?

Personally, while some Genesis fans (or at least fans of the band's Peter Gabriel era) view "Supper's Ready" (from 1972's Foxtrot) as the band's artistic pinnacle, I'm a little more lukewarm. I love the first three parts of the ...