The Jesus and Mary Chain were not the first band to turn their guitars into an onslaught of feedback and sing surprisingly sweet pop songs without affect (see also: The Velvet Underground, The Ramones, Sonic Youth).
But something about JMC’s debut pricked a hole in the swelling bubble of likeminded artists that became the shoegaze scene. Continue reading
I should be forthcoming: Sunny Day Real Estate is one of my favorite bands ever. I mean ever. And it’s been that way eleven years. The first time I heard Radiohead (who now bears the same distinction) I thought “his voice sounds a bit like Jeremy.” When mewithoutYou (another all time favorite) released a song with Jeremy on guest vocals, I wept real tears. I spent more than is reasonable for vinyl copies of How it Feels to be Something On and The Rising Tide (which my dog ate the day I got it). I have been pushing hard for vinyl reissues of World Waits and The Fire Theft.
So why did it take me five years to listen to his third proper solo record? Well, I really don’t know.
Every once in a while I’ll hear a song by a band I know nothing about that will absolutely capture me. Earlier this year, that song was Murmurs by Hundred Waters, a long-burn, glistening, hypnotic piece of electronic atmospheres meticulously crafted by aural architects.
Fleetwood Mac’s most famous incarnation by far is the form it took in the mid seventies led by Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks. But the group put out NINE albums before those two joined. Bare Trees is one of them, and is notable for having a better album cover than the performances contained within.
My first brush with The Human League came from my old music-guru roommate who said, “I love the Human League, but that’s only because I have a soft spot for crappy 80s pop.” And sure, the Human League lived in the same sort of post-punk/new-wave synthpop that the 80s loved, and true, Don’t You Want Me (the anthem of creepy exes everywhere) is a favorite on my local “inoffensive hits of yesterday and today” station. But Dare! is far from a straightforward pop record. There’s enough synthesized dissonance to make the most avant-garde music fan (see: my former roommate) happy.
To the uninitiated (me), Chicago VII can seem like one of the group’s most impenetrable work. While Chicago has always seemed like two separate bands, one given to funky jazz fusion, the other firmly planted in radio-friendly soft rock, those two groups have always cooperated with eachother, trading off tracks. Here, the two camps are at odds.
Strange as it sounds, Chicago evades comprehension. Just when you think they’re a group that splits their time evenly between prog-tinged fusion and radio-friendly soft rock, they release Chicago XI, an album mostly entrenched in the middle of those two camps (and sadly, their last with guitarist Terry Kath before his death).
Like I mentioned in my last Chicago record, I’m a newbie to Chicago’s immense discography. It is my basic understanding that Chicago started out as an ambitious prog/fusion rock group and moved more towards the middle of the road as time went on, making millions on record sales at the expense of critical credibility. However, the more time I spend with the group, the more I realize that that dichotomy is not so neatly divided.
I’ve never really given Chicago too much of a chance. Maybe because I’ve always considered Electric Light Orchestra to be superior in terms of lushly orchestrated pop groups. Or maybe because I’ve always thought jazz-rock fusion was a lot better when it came from the jazz side. But, I’ve been trying to be a better poptimist, and seventies soft rock has been getting the better of me. And, I recently found four Chicago albums for a buck, so you can’t beat that.
The way the stories are told, it’s almost like there were two separate bands in the 1960s called the Beach Boys. One was a lush psychedelic chamber pop group that created some of the most ambitious and beautifully orchestrated pop music ever recorded led by a genius named Brian Wilson. The other was a chart-topping surf group that played easy pop tunes that almost guaranteed commercial success, and they were led by a master of showmanship named Mike Love.