Only Life (1988)

The third album from the Feelies in eight years insinuates with a rich and warm sound that unfortunately strains for a gravitas they don't need and never needed, except simply by way of what had been acquired naturally across the years. I found this in the slush pile at an alternative newsweekly where I was freelancing. I think the editor considered repossessing it when he saw my excitement at finding it there. Instead, he made me take the copy of R.E.M.'s major label debut Green too and write about that. I wanted to write about this, not that, so I wrote about both, thrashing through with an incoherent batch of theories about the Byrds and the Velvet Underground. A friend of his from San Francisco called and told him I was full of shit. Hey, I was the one with the album. But as a result the editor wouldn't let me review Lou Reed's New York like he said he would. Fortunately for me, I'd already nicked the promo and he had to go out to a store and expense a copy at the last minute. That's life.

Crazy Rhythms (1980)

The bashful self-consciousness with which these artistes approach the business at hand strays now and then into painful realms. Crying out loud, they can't even manage to push vocals through the microphone with much of anything like confidence. But it doesn't matter. Once they get down to hitting the groove it's easy to forgive them anything. The impossibly fast chording drives the proceedings forward at breakneck pace, and speaking of rhythms, every member of the band gets at least one percussion credit. At the same time it remains under control all the way through, which says to me they know exactly what they're doing here. It operates at a fairly primal level, even though they are white, bashful, and arguably responsible for the genre now known as "indie rock." That's a stretch, but how can you call this "punk" or "new wave," let alone "rock"? But that doesn't matter either. So just turn it up and twitch along.