Yesterday's New Quintet

Jesus Jones, “The Devil You Know”

After the enormous success of “Right Here, Right Now” carried Doubt everywhere, Jesus Jones was faced with the prospect of following up a massive hit, a task which has broken many bands. The followup came a couple years later, and Perverse achieved nowhere the same level of success. Partly, those two years hurt. Partly, it was due to the pop music world having moved on to other shiny objects. It certainly didn’t help when one of the biggest bands associated with the scene, the Stone Roses, remained adamantly MIA. But for the last part, it was due to Perverse being not a terribly likable album. The shiny, crowd-pleasing stuff just wasn’t there. It’s very electronics focused, an emphasis on only one half of the Madchester formula, but it winds up feeling imbalanced. It’s really almost trending towards industrial dance, but kind of falls into an uncanny valley.

New verison of Ghost! So far, I don’t like it. Whatever. Still basically works. I have music for you!

Lungfish, “Reveal Me”

I have a very distinct memory of listening to this album while wandering around Wean Hall at my college, and paying a lot of attention to it, and deciding that I just didn’t really like it very much. I’m not sure what set me off about it, but I very much decided that Lungfish weren’t for me. This is from their debut album, and apparently they lasted for a long time, and I stuck to my guns. I haven’t heard anything else from them. Maybe they were good! I don’t know!

Here’s today.

Temprees, “Dedicated To The One I Love”

Old Stax track here, from the mid-point of their Atlantic years.

Atmosphere, “She Don’t Know Why She Love It”

This is a bonus track from the deluxe version of Southsiders, which is probably my second favorite Atmosphere album (after Seven’s Travels). There are some missteps in Atmosphere’s discography, with the records between those two being pretty uneven, but those are excellent.