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Record #957: The Goo Goo Dolls – Dizzy Up the Girl (1998)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

As a college freshman who thought he was way more knowledgeable about music than he was, I repeated often and loudly that there was one band that everyone loved, no matter what kind of music they usually listen to.

That band was the got dang Goo Goo Dolls. And as far as my horizons have been expanded since then, I still stand by it.

While on the surface, there might not seem to be anything all that exceptional about their brand of uber-radio-friendly pop rock, there are several reasons this record went 5x Platinum—and absolute megahit “Iris” is only one of them.

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Record #436 (Revisited): The Cure – Disintegration (1989)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald / 1 Comment

“I never quite said what I wanted to say to you,” mumbles Robert Smith in the closing moments of Disintegration, and those words might as well be about my original post about this record.

Because I’ve been listening to a lot of the Cure lately. Actually, that’s probably an understatement. In the last two weeks, I’ve listened to almost nothing else. I’ve listened to each record in their discography at least once, purchased many, and revisited the ones already in my collection multiple times.

Part of this is because my wife is on vacation with our baby and there’s no better soundtrack for an empty house, but the much larger part is that there’s maybe no other band that has had such a far-reaching influence or massive impact without ever compromising or contradicting themselves.

And while I’ve reviewed the several new Cure records in my collection over the last week, I need to come back to their perennial classic, Disintegration. I wrote a post on this record when I got it six years ago, but I’m compelled to make another, because friends, I have a lot to say about this record. 

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Record #808: Can – Tago Mago (1971)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

Few musical movements are as weird, wonderful, and influential as Krautrock, a collection of West German bands in the 1970s that pushed the boundaries of what music could actually do to its extremes. The movement had an incredible influence on post punk, progressive rock, new age, shoegaze, and the birth of post rock. The shape of modern, electronic leaning pop music can be traced back to Krautrock, specifically the synthpop pioneers Kraftwerk.

But perhaps no band in Krautrock was more influential than Cologne’s Can, whose sprawling jazz-and-funk jams, improvised vocals, psychedelic exploration, tape editing techniques, and ambient experimentation went on to define Krautrock and influence everyone from David Bowie to Radiohead to Joy Division to the Flaming Lips to Kanye West.

Among their monstrous catalog (they recorded ten albums between 1969 and 1979), most fans and critics agree that the pinnacle of their career was the trilogy of records featuring vocalist Damo Suzuki, which includes the criminally underrated Future Days, the seminal Ege Bamyasi, and this, the eldritch, immense Tago Mago.

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Record #704: Dashboard Confessional – The Places You Have Come to Fear the Most (2001)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald / 1 Comment

Now this is more like it.

No more weird live versions or late-career tracks from a compilation that is clearly a cash grab.

This here is the real deal: the long-awaiting vinyl pressing of the seminal emo classic The Places You Have Come to Fear the Most, an album that has been equally revered and reviled—usually by the same people at different periods in their life.

But having long since past the point of shame, I can now embrace this album as wholly as I did when I was a shaggy haired, ripped-jean, cardigan-clad, square-frame-bespectacled emo kid.

Wait…I guess things haven’t changed that much…

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Record #574: Miles Davis – Kind of Blue (1959)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

Miles Davis once said that you could sum up all of jazz history in four words: “Louis Armstrong, Charlie Parker.” And as elegantly concise as that history may be, it ignores the “Prince of Darkness” himself.

No individual left a larger footprint on jazz—or perhaps music history overall—than Miles Davis. And Kind of Blue, his most popular record—and most popular jazz record ever—demonstrates his mastery as a composer and a bandleader.

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Record #560: mewithoutYou – [Untitled] (2018)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

After the release of the doomgazy single “Julia” and the subdued [untitled] e.p.,  speculation was high as to what the forthcoming [Untitled] full-length would bring.

But the similarity of covers between the releases seemed to promise an explosion.

Across social media, that theory seemed to be confirmed. When drummer Rickie Mazzotta was asked if the full-length would be as quiet as the e.p., he said, “that’s porch-sittin’ music. The album is cliff-diving music.”

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