A lethally catchy song, I’ll be humming this for the next several days. I feel like The Else gets really kind of ignored in the TMBG catalog. By that point, they were really kind of becoming known as a kids’ band, and they just slipped in this really lushly produced thing right in the middle of three kids’ albums.
[looks at “kids’”] That looks wrong. I think it’s right? Ain’t gonna look it up!
[Read More]A big part of the ska scene in the late 80s and early 90s was an active trade in compilations. It allowed bands to get their music out and prime the audiences for touring, which is where bands built up a following. One series of comps was the Mashin’ Up The Nation series, which this was part of volume 2 of. It’s an unusually raw track for Bim Skala Bim, but a lot of the songs on these comps tended towards the raw, because many of them were low budget or live.
[Read More]It’s sometimes a little hard to reconcile the early Marvin Gaye with what he would eventually become. This is from 1963, and yeah, sure, it’s an excellent tune. But it’s just so far away from where he would end up. Popular music evolved so fast in this decade, it’s still hard to wrap my mind around it.
The first Fellows record, The Fabulous Sounds of the Pacific Northwest, was kind of tied together with these little spoken word travelogue snippets, as a theme. The Fellows are light hearted enough that the gimmick comes off as charming, and the music is all just kind of loose, happy rock. While there’s plenty to like, they also didn’t really totally have control of their songwriting yet, so the record is kind of just for fans.
[Read More]Repeat!
I really need to get to the point where my kid can have visitors again, because I really want to try and mortify them by singing along to the Smiths really loud.
It’s tracks like this one that really demonstrate that Belle and Sebastian were still very much learning how things worked with their first album, Tigermilk, which was literally a university project. Luckily, they didn’t convince themselves that this sort of thing was their future.
[Read More]Well, I just mentioned Amphetamine Reptile Records the other day! Here’s one of my favorite bands from that label, but in their post-AmRep days. They put out two albums and an EP on AmRep and then left to put out some tunes for Touch & Go, producing the same amount of music (two albums and an EP). This comes from the first thing they put on Touch & Go, Clincher, the aforementioned EP. The notable thing about it was that the production was less murky than their earlier stuff, which allowed some of the grooviness that got lost to come forward. While on balance, I prefer the AmRep stuff, their final record for Touch & Go (Over and Out) is brilliant stuff. Tar was good! More people than me should remember them! I still have a shirt I bought at a show of theirs in 1992!
[Read More]A companion piece to Noble Beast, Useless Creatures is an all-instrumental exploration which allows Bird to indulge his more exploratory impulses. As always, everything Bird does is interesting, but this is not one of his more loveable records.
Victoria Monét is primarily known for her work with Ariana Grande, which means I know zip about most of her music. I’m very out of touch! But I picked up this album (Jaguar) after it showed up on a bunch of year-end lists, and it’s very pleasant. I also enjoy the kind of electro-funk sounds on this track, I’ll take those any day.
[Read More]Wasted Shirt is Brian Chippendale (Lightning Bolt) and Ty Segall, playing the sort of demented noise duo rock that Chippendale in particular is known for. There’s only one album of it, called Fungus II, but it’s well-worth picking up if you’re a Lightning Bolt fan.
From Prefuse 73’s 2015 album, Rivington Não Rio, an album that strikes me as more tuneful and a little tamer than his earlier work. Still pretty good, though, although I generally prefer the more chaotic stuff.
[Read More]Eggs was one of the Teenbeat bands, making indie pop at a time when that was pretty uncommon, running straight against the current of grunge and heavy rock that was dominating taste at the time. A lot of these bands also valued being very clever in their tunes, sometimes a bit too much. At any rate, this comes from the singles comp, ‘How Do You Like Lobster?’ A Collection of Crustaceans and Flotsam, the title of which kind of makes the point. For all that, they could really write some solid tunes, and I actually like this comp the most out of their records.
[Read More]The first song from the first Gas Huffer full-length, it sets the tone for what they’re trying to do: straight-ahead garage rock with zero pretension. Although they were contemporaneous with grunge and from Seattle, they were doing something more parallel to that stuff, as there’s not really any metal at all in this sound.
More garage rock! This is from Hello Again, a comp that includes an album from Sweet Baby and an album from the successor band, Brent’s TV. It’s pretty good, but one of the virtues of this kind of music is that it gets to the point and gets out of the way. And, well, 40 tracks of it is not getting out of the way.
[Read More]Well, that’s very pretty.
A side project of Antibalas folks, Here Lies Man plays a meld of Afrobeat and psychedelic rock, often to pretty solid effect. This is from their latest, Ritual Divination, which pushes a little more towards the rock end of things, so depending on your preferences it’s either the place to start or the place to end up.
[Read More]