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

Let's be honest: Most of us, despite being total music nerds, would have never heard of The Clique's 1969 single "Superman" if R.E.M. hadn't given it a charming (yet faithful) cover treatment on 1986's Life's Rich Pageant. And while R.E.M.'s reclamation of an all-but-unknown obscurity may have been a bit of a lark--not even listed on Pageant's original LP cover--it's probably the song's definitive version, thanks to the buoyant, boyish vocal interplay between Michael Stipe & Mike Mills and some ...

The predominantly instrumental electronica of Jean-Michel Jarre isn't really the proper dominion of this list, as I adhere largely to more rock-oriented vocal fare (my admitted obsession with Brian Eno aside). But his 1984 album Zoolook took Jarre in a more rock-oriented direction, adding some funk, new wave, and world music touches to the mix. (To be fair, jazz musician Herbie Hancock had made a similar swivel a year earlier, and the flavor of his MTV hit "Rockit" can be heard here.) "Zoolookol...

Every time I feel we're due for another Guided By Voices inclusion on the list--this appears to be our 9th, more or less--there's the thorny question of Ok, but which one? Because while today I feel like it should be "Glad Girls," tomorrow I'll undoubtedly regret this decision and wish I'd gone in one of a dozen other ways. Oh, well. Just gotta commit.
And "Glad Girls" (off 2001's Isolation Drills) is undeniably a super-fun GbV song, a jubilantly meaningless burst of giddy glee. It's certainly on...

Sure, Green Day is totally ripping off The Kinks here. But I'm guessing there are a fistful of other tracks on this list that do the same; that's just what happens when The Kinks have delivered so many classic rock & roll riffs. And at least "Warning"--the album-opening title track from their 2000 record--avoids the more predictable "All Day & All Of The Night" and instead borrows from "Picture Book," a deep cut off 1968's seminal (but not exactly familiar to the Green Day generation)  Village Gr...

We've already had a couple album-side-long prog suites--courtesy of Genesis' "Supper's Ready" and Jethro Tull's album-length "Thick As A Brick." This time the culprit is Canterbury scene act Caravan, whose 1971 album In The Land Of Grey And Pink was dominated by the epic "Nine Feet Underground."

The track is on the jazzier side of the prog spectrum, large chunks taken up by keyboard-dominated jams. But there are some nice vocal segments as well. As with other Canterbury acts (Soft Machine/Robert ...

I go back and forth on which Fall album is my favorite, but 1984's breakthrough The Wonderful And Frightening World Of The Fall is always a strong contender, the record where Mark E. Smith's then-wife Brix started to assert herself and give an almost pop-like sheen to some of Mark's more chaotic ruminations. For some reason, the song on the record that's stuck with me most over the years is "Stephen Song," even though it's pretty far from pop. Instead, it's an insistent, repetitive riff rocker, ...

R.E.M. were the center of the musical universe in the mid-80s (or at least the center of my musical universe). Their growing success helped shine a light on other indie bands from Athens, Georgia, as highlighted on a 1986 music documentary (and accompanying soundtrack) called Athens, GA: Inside/Out. Besides featuring R.E.M. and forerunners of the Athens scene like the B-52s and Pylon, the doc covered newer, lesser-known bands in the region.

Among those was The Squalls. The soundtrack featured the...

Maybe dragged down just a bit by decades of classic rock radio saturation, the killer single off 1970's John Barleycorn Must Die nonetheless emerges as one of the handful of Traffic songs I still really dig. They get surprisingly funky here, the song buoyed by the percussion shuffle and an attention-grabbing bassline, though of course it's Steve Winwood's soulful pipes that make it one of the enduring epics of the FM age. It feels like it oughtta go on far longer than its mere 4-and-a-half-minut...

Of all the most annoying things you can find on record--right up there with the 90s trend of closing a CD with a few minutes of silence followed by a hidden track--one of the most irksome is the dreaded Greatest Hits Album which throws in a new or rare track. Besides undercutting the whole purpose of the compilation--how can this be a greatest hit when nobody's heard it before?--it's a slap in the face to fans who already own the hits and feel compelled to buy the record for the otherwise unavai...

Given the often startling intimacy of Elliott Smith's music, it was an open question how his songs would work once he was signed to Dreamworks and given a bit of a production budget. But I love the intricate, Beatlesque arrangements on 1998's XO . I mean, it doesn't hurt that he turned in a batch of incredible songs, which would likely have thrived equally well as the stripped-down acoustic songs of his prior work, but the denser production doesn't hold them back.

He gets the most baroque on "Bled...