Marc Fagel's Blog: Jittery White Guy Music: The Blog

Here's a second cut from the late Epic Soundtracks' wonderful and endlessly surprising 1992 LP Rise Above . "Farmer's Daughter"--no relation to the Beach Boys track of the same name--perhaps best encapsulates the magic of the record, the former drummer of experimental post-punk rockers Swell Maps unexpectedly embracing gorgeous piano balladry and full-on Burt Bacharach-styled orchestral pop. It starts off quiet and melancholy, augmented by some bold brass, before flipping into a boisterous, doubl...

One of those random radio semi-hits from the past 20 years that somehow caught my attention--not sure how, maybe one of my kids was playing it, or it popped up on some tv show. But Metric's "Help I'm Alive," from 2009's Fantasies, was cool enough to make me check out some of their records, which I liked, but mostly I particularly love that one song. Know what I mean? That "beating like a hammer" bit is over-the-top catchy, kinda like The Breeders or later Darling Buds with a dollop more commerci...

I'll never understand why Chicago singer-songwriter Kevin Tihista's run of 2000s records didn't get a little more love. I mean, ok, maybe crediting the records to Kevin Tihista's Red Terror was ill-advised, suggesting content a little at odds with the laid-back, semi-acoustic folk-pop within. His 2001 full-length debut, Don't Breathe A Word , is particularly solid, an ample helping of tracks that owe some debt to Elliott Smith with some Bacharach-esque pop touches, not far afield from the Pernice...

Smokey Robinson & The Miracles arrive to mark the rare appearance of a Motown single on the list. Which isn't to suggest I don't love a million of those songs to death, because I'm only human and they're part of our cultural fabric. But by the time I started hearing the Motown classics on the radio, it already felt like oldies music from before my time. And while I spent a big chunk of my young life discovery music that preceded my musical awakening, much of which (particularly the British Invas...

The Shins' 2001 semi-debut (depends on whether you count the 1997 Flake Music record as a Shins album), Oh, Inverted World , was obviously the sort of thing that a lot of us got very into at the time. And while "New Slang" is the tune that seemed to get the most traction over time (aided, or maybe hindered, by that whole Garden State thing), it was "Know Your Onion!" which first lured me in to the record. It's more upbeat, a more immediate pop song, and while James Mercer's vocals could be as ind...

Queen were one of the bands from my 70s childhood where I wasn't a huge fan, didn't have much interest in the LPs, but I was down with the singles--kinda like Kiss and Sweet and the Bay City Rollers. "Keep Yourself Alive," their 1973 debut single, pre-dated my AM radio adventures by a couple years. But when "Bohemian Rhapsody" tore up the charts in late 1975 just as I was discovering Top 40 radio--the first single I ever bought!--the local stations threw a few of their earlier hits back into cir...

It's the most recent release to make the list to date, and our first entry from the halcyon pre-Trump47 days of 2024, before the downfall of America and democracy. Ooh, chills!
The Paranoid Style are another one of my favorite bands of the past decade, Elizabeth Nelson's hyper-literate lyrics overflowing with sly pop culture references and surprisingly informative historical studies, sending me running for Wikipedia (or a thesaurus). I generally prefer the more rocking songs, where the adept and ...

Trump is all over the Epstein Files.

And speaking of the age of consent...

New Order's emergence from the ashes of Joy Division saw them moving in two potential directions: They could continue with the original band's somber ambience, filling out the post-punk guitar sound with some keyboards, as on 1981's Movement... or pivot into a more synth-based electronic dance-pop, as on early singles like "Temptation" and "Blue Monday." 1983's Power, Corruption & Lies--arguably the first proper New Order a...

The 80s college radio DJ cabal was largely divided between post-punk hardcore and jangly guitar pop; and anyone who's spent more than 30 seconds checking out these pages knows where I came down. Still, Suicidal Tendencies' "Institutionalized," off their eponymous 1983 debut, was one of those tracks we all got a kick out of. And I suppose it's because it feels more like a goofy novelty song than true thrash, the spoken-word narration capturing some poor kid whose parents mistake his normal suburb...

Tegan And Sara's "Hop A Plane," off 2007's The Con, is a perfect little noise-pop track. You've got a three-chord riff-rocker straight out of the Who/Kinks playbook amped up with just a hint of fuzz, updated with some contemporary angst and the twins' interwoven vocals, plus some clever loud-soft-loud dynamics--all in well under two minutes. One of those songs ideally suited for a workout playlist or for cranking up in the car with the windows down on a hot day, the whole neighborhood giving you...