Marc Fagel's Blog: Jittery White Guy Music: The Blog, page 99

My Top 1000 Songs #215: Better Things

My Kinks loyalties lie firmly with their late 60s/early 70s run of outstanding LPs. Still, their return to straightforward album-oriented rock in the late 70s, after a few years of sketchy, narrative concept albums, provided a number of stellar tunes. This is my favorite song from that era, off 1981's underrated Give The People What They Want (IMHO their most consistent album since maybe Muswell Hillbillies a decade earlier). 

It's a feel-good, unabashedly optimistic power pop tune, a sunny close...

My Top 1000 Songs #214: Girlfriend In A Coma

As noted previously, I'm not a huge Smiths fan. Back in college, there seemed to be two primary radio factions--the R.E.M. people and the Smiths people (though there was some pretty significant overlap)--and I was firmly in the R.E.M. camp. I always liked the sound of the Smiths--Johnny Marr's jangly guitars, the supple rhythm section--but I think I was just too generally well-adjusted to have much tolerance for Morrissey.

But there are a handful of Smiths songs I genuinely like, with "Girlfriend...

My Top 1000 Songs #213: Get Over You

Between my later high school years and my arrival at college (and particularly the college radio station), I spent much of my musical life looking back at the punk and indie bands that had escaped my tutelage under the Midwestern radio stations I'd grown up with. And few discoveries thrilled me more than stumbling across the first two Undertones albums. While bands like the Ramones and Buzzococks had established that pop hooks were an integral part of early punk rock, Ireland's Undertones upped ...

My Top 1000 Songs #212: I've Been Waiting

After a couple albums that saw Matthew Sweet trying to find his voice, 1991's Girlfriend hit like the work of someone who'd sold his soul to the devil, or at the very least spent a long, wasted weekend spinning Big Star and Who and Kinks and dB's records and finally had an epiphany. (Pulling together an insanely overqualified backing band, including guitarists Richard Lloyd and Robert Quine, didn't hurt.)

After the attention grabbing dual-guitar attack of album opener "Divine Intervention," Sweet...

My Top 1000 Songs #211: Naked Eye

Arguably Exhibit One for the proposition that The Who's leftovers were better than most bands' greatest hits. "Naked Eye" was recorded by the band in 1970 for an aborted LP (apparently with the planned title 6 Ft. Wide Garage, 7 Ft. Wide Car); the band then moved on to the Lifehouse concept album, itself ultimately aborted, with many of the tracks salvaged for 1971's Who's Next . A re-recorded "Naked Eye" (along with the other Garage recordings) finally saw official release on 1974's fantastic ou...

My Top 1000 Songs #210: Your Silent Face

I've never been much of a synth guy; for me, rock & roll is largely about, as the Young Fresh Fellows succinctly put it, Two Guitars Bass And Drums.

Oh, sure, some well-deployed synth in an otherwise traditional rock song like "Baba O'Riley" could keep things interesting, and of course there's my unhealthy enjoyment of prog. And I liked the synth-heavy new wave songs that populated my high school-era playlists, stuff like Yaz and Depeche Mode and Flock of Seagulls and OMD.

But it was New Order tha...

My Top 1000 Songs #209: Dear Boy

Given my deeply emotional connection with Paul & Linda McCartney's Ram--yes, I wrote all about it in my book; you can find an excerpt in my Ram write-up--I could probably put almost all of that album's wonderful, inauspicious pop music somewhere on this list. But I'm resisting this urge, so this is only the second one so far.

And "Dear Boy" was sort of a quiet contender. Beyond "Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey," whose exuberant silliness won me over as a five-year-old, the power-pop tunes that booken...

My Top 1000 Songs #208: Memories Can't Wait

When I first starting getting into Talking Heads early in high school (or maybe at the tail end of junior high), I checked out their '79 album Fear of Music from the public library. Frankly, I didn't care for it--a little too jarring and strange. (I've since come around, of course). I loved the newer one, Remain In Light , which sounded warmer to my ears and made for a terrific headphone-abetted experience, and the quirky debut; but something about the aptly-titled Fear kept me at arms' length. E...

My Top 1000 Songs #207: This Can't Be Today

I can't overstate just how much I was utterly blown away the first time I heard Rain Parade's 1983 debut album back in college, maybe a year or two after its release.

At the time, spurred on by my discovery of R.E.M., I was totally in the thrall of all those post-punk jangly guitar bands. But I also retained a deep love of 60s psychedelia from my high school explorations of classic rock history.

That Rain Parade record smushed those two loves together--contemporary college radio jangle-pop, but wi...

My Top 1000 Songs #206: Divide And Conquer

A Bob Mould track off Hüsker Dü's 1985 Flip Your Wig , "Divide And Conquer" is a thunderous, battering-ram guitar riff coupled with a bold proclamation about the splintering of society ("the police state is too busy; the neighborhood's getting out of haaaaaand!"). Mostly, though, it's a three-minute demand--absolute, undeniable demand, with which you must comply--that you test (and exceed) the capacity of your speakers while leaping willy-nilly around the room playing air drums.

Lyric video:Live i...