It's New to Me: Wild Love by Smog (1995)

Image from the Bird Floor Coverings - Styles for 1951 catalog by Bird & Son Inc., 1951

For a long time, I've only owned one Smog album - 1999's Knock Knock - and it's made a distinct impression on me, but I've never really been sure what to explore next. A couple months ago, I bought the first Smog album, Sewn to the Sky (at least in part because it's referenced by name in one of Knock Knock's songs) - big mistake. It's just terrible, an unlistenable, masturbatory mess of lonely noises. I happened upon a used copy of Wild Love, though, and I feel much better. This album fulfills my hopes about Billy Callahan's early work under the Smog name, combining lo-fi instincts with some more ambitious sounds and expanding the Smog mythology in the songwriting in a very pleasing way.

The most interesting thing to me about Wild Love is its very deliberate structure, with the bulk of its tracklist composed of a set of eight short song sketches. Some of these are very bare and handspun ("Sweet Smog Children", "The Candle") almost to the point of resembling the ugly little tunes on Sewn to the Sky, but they work in combination with more fleshed out songs like the cello-inflected "Bathroom Floor". Sitting in the middle of these brief tracks is a single pop-single-type song, "It's Rough", and the whole mess is sandwiched nicely between epic bookends, beginning with "Bathysphere" (one of Callahan's most celebrated songs) at the album's start, and ending with the one-two combo of the epic "Prince Alone in the Studio" and "Goldfish Bowl". That last track may be my favorite, an understated reversal of the "Bathysphere" theme (which I didn't catch at first) based on a pulsing bed of keyboards that calls to mind the Magnetic Fields' Charm of the Highway Strip.

"Goldfish Bowl" by Smog

In Stores Now: Hello Sadness by Los Campesinos!

Detail illustration from the cover of the North Carolina State Fair - Let the Good Times Grow! booklet, 1937

You can practically see Welsh indie-poppers Los Campesinos! growing up in their album titles, which form a dramatic arc of sorts: Hold on Now Youngster...,We Are Beautiful We Are Doomed, Romance Is Boring, and now Hello Sadness. Interestingly, though, the band's maturing outlook and lyrics (as presented by frontman Gareth Campesinos) are not matched exactly by the music composed by the band's instrumental maestro Tom Campesinos, who (fortunately) has not strayed too far from the band's infectious mix of bouncy guitar lines, glockenspiel, and shouty gang vocals, tweaking the formula in more subtle ways instead.

So what has changed with Hello Sadness? For one, you have the addition of Kim Campesinos, Gareth's sister, whose vocals are a nice complement to her sibling's. And then there's the album's singularly tragedian bent - the opening track "By Your Hand" is one of the Campesinos' best singles to date, but it's the moment of euphoria you get when you step off the ledge, and the rest of the album is the fall into the abyss. However, except for a couple songs that get too maudlin ("Life Is a Long Time", "Hate for the Island"), the album's dark drama is a pretty fun listen. The album's darkest track, "Every Defeat a Divorce (Three Lions)", is not about romance at all, funnily enough - it's about the unique pain of soccer fandom (which led me to briefly formulate a theory that the whole album is an extended metaphor about soccer). Gareth's eloquence in the language of heartbreak does a lot of the heavy lifting here, which is no surprise, particularly on tracks like the great title track, which evokes the disturbing image of an eternally bleeding heart fed constantly by vain hope.

"Hello Sadness" by Los Campesinos!

It's New to Me: The Black Album by INDEX (1967)

Illustration by Virgil Finlay from Worlds of Tomorrow magazine Vol. 1 No. 5, December 1963

The story of Michigan garage-rock band INDEX could easily be the premise of a movie. In early '67, Jim Valice, a teenaged drummer and electrician's son, found out through the grapevine that a guy was looking for a drummer for his band. When Valice's dad drove him to the address of the proposed band practice, he found himself in front of a gargantuan mansion, where he was greeted by guitar-prodigy/heir John Ford IV. After an unfortunate flip-through-the-book-to-find-a-bandname game left them with the name INDEX (a step up from their original name, Chicken Every Sunday), the trio, which also included Ford's friend Gary Francis, took to practicing in the cavernous ballroom at the Ford Estate. After hearing Are You Experienced?, INDEX was struck with inspiration and began writing and recording original songs with titles like "Fire Eyes", "Feedback", and "Shock Wave".

These recordings, made in the Ford ballroom with a single microphone and the players set up appropriate distances away to achieve the right balance of sound, became the first INDEX album, commonly known as The Black Album. The band had a sound as intriguing as their story, with dark waves of guitar and wild drumming composing most of the songs' sonic blast, with moaning vocals hidden somewhere low in the mix. The only thing that was missing was consistent and original songwriting - INDEX's originals are quite good when they're good, but The Black Album has a few too many moody instrumentals. To make up for this, INDEX included two very inspired covers on the album - their teeth-rattling version of the Byrds' "Eight Miles High" is probably their best-known recording, but my favorite is the droning cover of the Supremes' "You Keep Me Hanging On". The Black Album may be a little slim overall, but these days you can find it paired with INDEX's other album, the toned-down and almost-folky-at-times Red Album (1968) - together the two LPs give a good idea of what INDEX were all about.

"You Keep Me Hanging On" by INDEX

Probabilistic Jukebox: "The Wall Street Shuffle" by 10cc

Plates from the Sanitary Drinking Fountains catalog of the D.A. Ebinger Sanitary Mfg. Co., 1926

Here's what came up on the ol' Jukebox today. This is the kind of playlist that (I like to think) would impress the music-critic scum I worship so shamelessly. You've got some obscure tracks and cover versions, plus early Elvis and Prince for credibility. And what music critic doesn't love 10cc? Unfortunately, few people who aren't critics are into 10cc. However, I think that their more accessible songs like "The Wall Street Shuffle", while still somewhat bafflingly fragmented in structure, make a good argument that they deserve a broader audience.

1. "The Wall Street Shuffle" by 10cc
2. "Dirty, Dirty Feeling" by Elvis Presley
3. "Delirious" by Prince
4. "I Found the Magic" by Dwight Twilley
5. "Where Did My Summer Go?" by the Baskervilles
6. "Winsor Dam" by Big Dipper
7. "Whetherman" by the Essex Green
8. "Night Vision" by Super Furry Animals
9. "King of Carrot Flowers Pt. 3" by Apples (in Stereo)
10. "I'll Remember" by the Kinks

"The Wall Street Shuffle" by 10cc

"Sometimes I get so hungry - think about pie all day..."

Image from an advertisement titled "Skinny Girls Don't Have OOMPH!" by U.S. Nature Products Corp., 1953

Have a happy Thanksgiving, everybody. Have a nice big slice of pecan pie, and I'll catch up with you tomorrow!

"Pecan Pie" by Golden Smog

It's New to Me: Seizure by Chris Knox (1990)

Photo titled "Gov. Stubbes, Kansas" from the Bain News Service, c. 1910

I'll admit I didn't really pay much attention to New Zealand songwriter Chris Knox before his 2009 stroke - in the aftermath, the outpouring of affection and admiration for Knox from other musicians was impossible to ignore. They went so far as to compile a 2-CD tribute titled Stroke to pay his medical bills. Seizure is Knox's 1990 album that provided the inspiration for the title and design of the Stroke tribute.

A true solo album, with all instruments and vocals being provided by Knox, Seizure is composed largely of odd character sketches built on fuzzy, lo-fi guitar sounds and pots-and-pans percussion loops. The formula is a little abrasive and can get quite tiresome when it comes to the album's uptempo numbers like "My Dumb Luck", "Break!", and "Wanna!!" (the annoyingness of the song can be gauged by the number of exclamation marks, apparently.) Luckily, these tracks only make up about a third of the album, and the remaining songs range from touching love songs like "Not Given Lightly" to catchy but creepy "outsider" pop songs with titles like "The Woman Inside of Me" and (most charmingly) "Rapist". My favorite is probably "Voyeur", with its disturbing sexual lyric set to a catchy Vaudville-style melody and a very minimal arrangement featuring several multi-tracked Knoxes singing together in varying degrees of menace.

"Voyeur" by Chris Knox

In Stores Now: Breaks in the Armor by Crooked Fingers

Detail from H. Lawrence Hoffman's cover illustration for Erle Stanley Gardner's The Case of the Lame Canary, 1943

One of my 2011 music highlights was seeing the reunited Archers of Loaf, so I was pretty excited to see that Eric Bachmann's post-Archers project, Crooked Fingers, had a new LP coming out. Luckily, I wasn't expecting much of the Archers' sound to bleed through because, apart from some of that spiky guitar sound on "Bad Blood", Breaks in the Armor is not a very rocking album. However, it doesn't have that homespun, organic feel of my favorite Crooked Fingers records (the self-titled debut and Red Devil Dawn) either. I'd compare it to the oft-forgotten second Crooked Fingers album, Bring on the Snakes, with songs in a solitary, downcast mood built on pulsing loops and rhythm tracks.

Which is not to say that Breaks in the Armor is a monotonous or depressing record - there's an introspective feel to it for sure, but the album's real somber tracks are spaced out nicely to avoid causing wrist-slitting impulses. Some of these tracks work (like the gorgeous "Heavy Hours") and some of them don't (like the soporific "The Hatchet"). But there are plenty of uptempo tracks to balance things out ("Your Apocalypse", "Typhoon", "Went to the City") and Liz Durrett's backing vocals provide a nice counterpoint to Bachmann's contemplative leads. A couple tracks have odd melodic turns that derail the album's momentum - the otherwise-lovely "The Counterfeiter" has a weirdly out-of-place chorus melody, for example - but it's one of the most solid offerings from Crooked Fingers in recent years.

"Typhoon" by Crooked Fingers

Lee Pockriss (1924 - 2011)

Illustration from Walter Crane's Baby's Own Aesop, 1887

When I saw that Brill Building songwriter (and half of the Pockriss & Vance songwriting team) Lee Pockriss had passed away at the age of 87, the name initially didn't ring a bell. But, as is typical of those Brill Building guys, it only took a little research to find that he'd written some of really high-quality music. Of course, every obit cited "Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polka Dot Bikini", his one ubiquitous composition and one I've known since childhood, but, for a writer best known for composing novelties, he was responsible for a lot of other great songs too.

"My Little Corner of the World" is a top-notch song - I like the original Anita Bryant version, but my favorite is the one on Yo La Tengo's I Can Hear the Heart Beating as One. I'm a also big fan of "I Haven't Got Anything Better to Do", which was sung by many singers including Jackie DeShannon. He was responsible for the music from The Phantom Tollbooth, a movie that blew my mind as a child. And recently, I discovered "In My Room", originally performed by the Walker Brothers but also included on Nancy Sinatra's Boots. It's a thick slice of Walkers-style melodrama, but Pockriss's composition is versatile enough that Sinatra can pull it off pretty convincingly.

"In My Room" by Nancy Sinatra

We Love Handclaps: "Catherine Says" by Aislers Set

Illustration from an ad for Neolite Soles, 1951

Can a song ever have too much in the "handclap" department? Heresy, I know, but let's consider a song with some very prominent handclaps. "Catherine Says" was the opening track to indie-poppers Aislers Set's 2000 album How I Learned to Write Backwards. It's a song with a fairly spare reverb-heavy arrangement built around Amy Linton's lackadiasical vocal style, and, when you get to the chorus, some very loud and crisp-sounding handclaps that dominate the song to the point of being pretty distracting. But does it work? I'd say "yes", so maybe (in my case at least) more is always better when it comes to handclaps.

"Catherine Says" by Aislers Set

It's New to Me: Coney Island Baby by Lou Reed (1976)

Photograph titled "Woman Is Having Minor Adjustments Made to Her Auto's Carburetor" by Lyntha Eiler, 1975

I think Lou Reed's Coney Island Baby is "canonized" enough that I can get away with a bullet-point review:

1. I was super-excited to find a cheap copy of this album in the "used" bin (and it's the version with the Doug Yule bonus tracks), but I was still hesitant to buy it. Mostly because I knew that I would have to have an awkward exchange with the cashier about the "new Lou Reed album" Lulu, which was playing over the PA. "Uh, yeah - I'm not interested in that. But thanks."

2. This album is more or less what I expected, based on its reputation as Reed's somewhat stripped-down and lyrical return to pop after Metal Machine Music, but it has some interesting surprises, too. The version of "She's My Best Friend", for instance, is quite a bit different from the Velvet Underground version I'm used to. Also, "Kicks" has some literal surprises in it, namely where the ambient conversational background noise in the song suddenly becomes very loud a couple times, replicating the disorienting drug trip the song describes.

3. There aren't any real dud tracks on this album - I even took to the title track immediately, which I wasn't expecting. The straightforward pop tracks like "Ooohhh Baby" and "Charley's Girl" are favorites, although I also really like the breezy trifles like "A Gift" and "Crazy Feeling". It seems odd to me that it's considered a minor album compared to some of his other '70s releases - this might be end up being my favorite Lou Reed album from that period.

"A Gift" by Lou Reed

Why Does This Exist?: "Poor Boy" by Nick Drake

Illustration by Davis Meltzer from the cover of Andre Norton's Galactic Derelict, 1959

Nick Drake's "Poor Boy" is probably the best-known song whose existence I've chosen to question, and it has to do with a specific pet peeve of mine. I have a serious problem with fey, whispery male vocalists using overpowering female backing/guest vocalists - when this happens, the primary strength of such a such a singer (setting an intimate, confessional tone and mood) is totally undermined. Examples? Monica Queen utterly destroys Belle & Sebastian's "Lazy Line Painter Jane" with her intrusive singing, and Pauline Hynd blowsily derails a couple songs on the Orchids' Unholy Soul in a similar way.

But the queens of overpowering guest vocals are P.P. Arnold and Doris Troy on Nick Drake's "Poor Boy" (or, as I call it, the song that ruins Brighter Layter.) Every time the as-soulful-as-they-are-out-of-place backing vocals begin during "Poor Boy", I imagine a lonely-looking Nick Drake swiveling around on his little wooden chair and going, "What are you people doing in my song?!?" Richie Unterberger has argued that the backing vocals on "Poor Boy" are meant to be a "mocking counterpoint" to Drake's lead vocal, but this argument is totally undermined when Unterberger goes on to say that "Poor Boy" goes on for over six minutes "without getting boring". No sane person could say that. Oh, and there's some terrible saxophone soloing on "Poor Boy" as well, so I think I'm just not the target audience for this song (i.e. people who think that smooth jazz was what Nick Drake was born to play). The most mystifying thing to me is that this song turns up on most of Drake's "best of" compilations - I attribute this to some wrongheaded impulse to show the "diversity of styles" in Drake's slim oeuvre.

"Poor Boy" by Nick Drake

It's New to Me: This is Faron Young! by Faron Young (1958)

Illustration from the Standard Plumbing Fixtures for the Home catalog, 1927

So, how did I end up listening to '50s honky-tonk? The short answer is that I love the Prefab Sprout song named after Faron Young. The long answer is that I was really enjoying the Louvin Brothers record I picked up recently, and I wanted to check out some of the other stuff coming out of Nashville in the late '50s. I saw a Faron Young CD in the "used bin" - on the cover, Young was wearing a red polo shirt next to the title This Is Faron Young! It looked like a pop album, not a hardcore hillbilly-country record, so I decided to take a chance on it being accessible to someone with little experience with the classic Nashville sound.

As it turns out, This Is Faron Young! is basically a pop album. The arrangements are straight honky-tonk, and Young's singing style makes clear why he was called the "Hillbilly Heartthrob", but the songwriting is filled with hooks and references to partying, cars, and girls. And the interesting this is that the album is largely composed of Young's early singles, going back to 1952's "Tattletale Tears" and "Goin' Steady". In spite of this, the album is very cohesive and consistently high-quality, suggesting that Young formulated a very forward-looking style of country-pop and stuck with it. It's hard to point to a single track that lets the album down - the good songs on This Is Faron Young! are good, and the album has more than a couple great songs that provide standout moments. Among these are "Live Fast, Love Hard, Die Young", "If You Ain't Lovin' (You Ain't Livin')", and the unlikely party anthem "I've Got Five Dollars and It's Saturday Night".

"I've Got Five Dollars and It's Saturday Night" by Faron Young

In Stores Now: Capsized! by Circus Devils

Illustration from the Canadian Homes of Masonry catalog, 1952

As a Guided By Voices fan in the '90s, I don't ever remember thinking, "Robert Pollard's music could use a couple additional elements - I'd go with percussive samples from a Halloween sound-effects LP and cheap-sounding keyboards." But Pollard moves in mysterious ways, so we have Circus Devils, his "dark psychedelia" side project with multi-instrumentalist/producer Todd Tobias. It's the one Pollard project I don't follow obsessively, but I'll buy a Circus Devils LP if the early buzz indicates that it leans away from the freaky carnival vibe in favor of catchier fare. As a result, I own about half of the Circus Devils records, but I'm in no real rush to chase down the others.

I'm pleased to say, though, that Capsized! stands out among the Circus Devils releases. Not in that soft-rock-alter-ego way that 2009's Gringo did, but by sticking to the standard formula with superior results. It does help that the album boasts three strong ballads ("Legendary Breakfast Code", "Plate of Scales", "End of the Swell") as well as a couple straightforward rockers like "Cyclopean Runways" and "Gable's Ear Wax". The weirder numbers are almost as compelling this time around, too - the spooky spoken-word "Vampire Playing a Red Piano" and the ambient album opener "To England the Tigers" are standouts, but nothing on the record is as grating as some of the stuff on earlier records like Ringworm Interiors and Ataxia. It's not going to end up among my top three Pollard releases of 2011, but it may be the most surprisingly pleasing.

"Cyclopean Runways" by Circus Devils

Title Fight: "Who Knows"

Illustration by Robert Stanley from the cover of Brett Halliday's When Dorinda Dances, 1953

So here are two obscure and excellent songs called "Who Knows" - the first is by soul singer Marion Black, who released "Go On Fool"/"Who Knows" as his debut single in 1970. It's a great mopey R&B number with a skittering drumbeat and a very lonely sounding vocal by Black - although it was an obscure b-side on a Capsoul Records single, "Who Knows" got some recognition when RJD2 sampled it on one of his tracks in 2002. The song was also on the soundtrack of the show Weeds, which goes to show that a song can sometimes have a nice second life if it has an enduring charm that catches the ear.

The Replacements' "Who Knows" is a late-period rarity that was only released on the All For Nothing/Nothing For All collection in 1997 - I can't find my copy of that set (it's somewhere around here), so I don't have any information on this track. I'm always happy when it comes up on the "shuffle" play - it has a similar lonely vibe to the Marion Black track. However, right around the two-minute mark, a terrible saxophone line just about ruins the whole thing. It's too bad, really, because the rest of the song is pretty good. But it's enough to give Marion Black the win today.

Winner: MARION BLACK

"Who Knows" by Marion Black

"Who Knows" by the Replacements

We Love Handclaps: "Avalanche Aminos" by Guided By Voices

Detail of the cover illustration of If: Worlds of Science Fiction magazine, September 1954

I always find it odd when a group with a large body of work in the pop/rock milieu doesn't have at least a couple songs with prominent handclaps - it's almost like they're making a point of not using them. Guided By Voices has one very well-known "handclap song" - "My Valuable Hunting Knife" from Alien Lanes - but I wanted to come up with a second GBV song to post here to show that they weren't handclap snobs. It took me a while to think of "Avalanche Aminos" - a product of the Ric Ocasek sessions that produced the Do the Collapse album, the song didn't get released until the odds-and-ends Hold on Hope EP came out in 2000. Based on the songwriting credits, I'd guess that it's a Doug Gillard composition that Bob Pollard wrote lyrics for.

"Avalanche Aminos" starts with a great slide-guitar riff on one and then two guitars, but then it proceeds to pummel that riff into the ground through repetition. The key is that, right when the repeating riff is really starting to verge on "annoying", you get a great handclapping break at the end of the verse. The riff doesn't even change (it stays the same for most of the song), but that little handclap break switches things up enough to make it interesting (together with a pretty compelling melody from Pollard), and the song wraps up in just over two minutes to avoid the need for a third hook.

"Avalanche Aminos" by Guided By Voices

It's New to Me: Satan Is Real by the Louvin Brothers (1959)

Image from an advertisement for Conoco Oil Company, 1959

If you've ever seen the cover of Satan Is Real (and you have seen it if you've ever perused an online gallery of "weirdest album covers"), then you probably understand the impulse to own a copy of it. Seeing the Louvin Brothers standing in a fiery pit, dressed in white suits with their arms outstretched in pleading, while a giant, cross-eyed Lucifer looms over them, you know the album has to be interesting. And it really doesn't disappoint - the Louvin Brothers sweet country harmonies are (pardon the pun) heavenly, and their mixed set of gospel originals and traditional songs plays like a oddly-themed pop album. The album's best-known track is probably "The Christian Life" because it was covered by the Byrds, but there are plenty of equally weird and catchy songs on Satan Is Real, with titles like "Are You Afraid to Die", "There's a Higher Power", and (best of all) "Satan's Jeweled Crown".

The new reissue of Satan Is Real from Light in the Attic Records is quite nice - it comes with a detailed booklet and a bonus disc of choice Louvin Brothers tracks from their other albums. Titled Handpicked Songs 1955 - 1962, this collection was curated by a variety of musicians (plus Zooey Deschanel for some reason), and it makes a great argument for venturing further into the Louvins' discography. I'll admit that "The Great Atomic Power" makes me intensely curious about their album of "war songs", Weapon of Prayer, for instance. For now, though, I'm deeply enthralled with Satan Is Real, a decidedly odd album, but still a great potential entry point for people curious about the beautiful and fervent country-pop of the Louvin Brothers.

"Satan's Jeweled Crown" by the Louvin Brothers

It's New to Me: The Natural Riot by Shimmer Kids UnderPop Association (2002)

Image from an advertisement for the Free-o-Dust Super Surfacer, 1925

It might seem like a weird time to go back and check out the Shimmer Kids UnderPop Association, a Bay Area group that got dismissed at the time as '60s-retro also-rans in the early 2000s, when such sounds were highly en vogue. But the truth is that, even though classic pop influences are still "in" in the indie scene, none of the groups I listen to are really scratching that psych-pop itch just right. And the Shimmer Kids weren't just basking in the dubious reflected glory of the Elephant 6 Collective - they had the chops to cover a lot of '60s pop sounds and could use the various approaches to psychedelia peddled by the Olivia Tremor Control, Apples (in Stereo), and the Essex Green (sometimes going for all three within a single song.)

The Natural Riot is the only Shimmer Kids release in print, but it's got plenty of trippy goodness to keep me satisfied for now - as a self-appointed connoisseur of Beach Boys pastiches, I particularly admire their ability to capture the post-Pet-Sounds sound of the brothers Wilson on tracks like "Another Planet". Falsetto cooing? Check. Sleigh bells? Check. Clip clop percussion? Check. Backward masking? Check. Oh yeah - that's the stuff.

"Another Planet" by Shimmer Kids UnderPop Association

In Stores Now: Wild Flag by Wild Flag

Illustration titled "Interior of Allens & Chapman's Drug Store" from History of the Pacific Northwest: Oregon and Washington, 1889

I know that this album has been out for a while, but it took me this long to give up on my local music store getting a copy of it for me (I ended up going to Amazon - surprise surprise.) I've been only a little better than lukewarm on Sleater-Kinney for a long time, but I have a lot of respect for what they were doing. For me, the main draw in Wild Flag is not Carrie Brownstein and Janet Weiss - the other half of the band (Mary Timony and Rebecca Cole) is where my allegiance lies (as a HUGE fan of both Helium and the Minders). The math bears itself out with Wild Flag as you might expect - two parts S-K, one part Helium, one part Minders - but there's plenty to enjoy here.

I was drawn at first primarily to the songs that sound like Helium ("Something Came Over Me", "Black Tiles"), as well as the poppier, Minders-style tracks like "Electric Band" and "Endless Talk". But the album is not really fractured enough to be listened to piecemeal, though, so I found myself enjoying the whole thing before long. Wild Flag is not playing to their strengths when they try to ROCK OUT in all caps - the clunky and overlong "Racehorse" is the album's weakest track because of this issue. On the other hand, the band is at their best when they are taking advantage of the four very distinctive voices they have at their disposal, which is why the songs with strong backing vocals are my favorites on Wild Flag. Tracks like "Romance" provide a good example of the band balancing their snarling rock attitude with a catchy, harmony-heavy chorus and a pretty, girl-group-style bridge.

"Romance" by Wild Flag

It's New to Me: Green by Green (1986)

Photo titled "Seoul" from the Willard Straight collection, 1904

The power-pop band Green had little in common with the other bands in the Chicago scene they came out of (Ministry, Big Black, Naked Raygun) - they were strictly purveyors of squeaky clean pop-rock, which is not to say that their music isn't well written and skillfully executed. Their self-titled 1986 debut record starts with two classic power-pop songs on traditional power-pop themes, pop music and little girls ("Gotta Getta Record Out" and "She's Not a Little Girl Anymore", respectively), but they make some interesting detours into other sounds on Green as well. "Technology" and "I Play the Records" stray into the territory of autistic new wave (a la Devo), and they pull off some nice folk rock ("Curry Your Favor", "For You") as well. The hooks on the songs are strong - tunes like "Better Way" and "I'm Not Going Down (Anymore)" combine the hookiness with a faux-punk sneer that staves off the power-pop monotony that often sets in around the mid-point of these records. Quite a good album for fans of '80s power pop, I'd say - if the creamy "Curry Your Favor" doesn't do anything for you, then you can move along.

"Curry Your Favor" by Green

Why Does This Exist?: "Unemployment" by the Moonglows

Image from a poster titled "Eat Fruit - Be Healthy" by the Federal Art Project, 1938

By 1959, the Moonglows were not really the Moonglows anymore. Harvey Fuqua was the only original Moonglow left - the remaining members had been replaced with singers from a group called the Marquees. Among these New Moonglows was a young singer named Marvin Gaye, and he sang the lead on the New Moonglows' 1959 single (Chess 1738) "Mama Loocie". The flip side of this single was "Unemployment" (I'm not sure if Gaye sang on this one, although that's pretty clearly Fuqua singing the lead). Considering the song's title, the peppy doo-wop arrangement is a little odd, but the song does a good job of portraying the process of cataloging one's woes while standing in line at the Unemployment Office. Still, it's a far cry from the Moonglows' famously romantic singles like "Sincerely", "Most of All", and "The Ten Commandments of Love".

"Unemployment" by the Moonglows

We Love Handclaps: "She's Not the Person You Think You Know" by Holiday

Panel from Spencer Spook comic book issue #100, March 1955

When I was really getting into the Magnetic Fields in the mid-90s, a few names kept popping up - bands that were especially recommended for Magnetic Fields bands. And one of the names was Holiday. In retrospect, the comparison is a little puzzling - although the Yale-born band had a Merritt-inspired sense of melody, a few things put the band more in the realm of generic indie-pop. First, frontman Josh Gennet's wispy tenor voice was just about as far as you can get from Merritt's baritone, and the band's straightforward British-Invasion-isms didn't cross over much with the Magnetic Fields' stage-ready witticisms. But Holiday's Ready, Steady, Go! ranks among my favorite twee-pop albums nonetheless, not in the least because of the liberal use of handclaps, used prominently on songs like "April Cries" and "Who's Gonna Find Out" and more subtly in songs like "She's Not the Person You Think You Know". The song is an odd one, made up of a single "Hello Goodbye"-quoting chorus that is repeated several times while modulating between different keys, interspersed with nice horn-and-clapping breaks.

"She's Not the Person You Think You Know" by Holiday

It's New to Me: A Passing Fancy by A Passing Fancy (1968)

Watercolor by Charles M. Russell, printed in The Pronghorn Antelope and Its Management, 1948

A Passing Fancy were one of the underrated psych-rock bands operating in the Toronto area in the late '60s. They had a couple minor hits, "I'm Losing Tonight", "I Believe in Sunshine", and "You're Going Out of My Mind", all of which are found on their self-titled LP from 1968. The album is surprisingly cohesive, considering that it is a cobbled-together collection of songs written by two completely different lineups of the band.

The original A Passing Fancy grew up around songwriter Jay Telfer and keyboardist Brian Price - Telfer wrote A Passing Fancy's early songs and helped to build the band's reputation as an impressive live band. When the band's singles failed to materialize into hits, the band's management fired Telfer (they could do that?!?), replacing him with Fergus Hambleton, whose lineup of the band was responsible for the band's more "sunshine-pop" songs like "Island" and "Under the Bridge". After the second lineup of A Passing Fancy dissolved, the band's managers released the LP using the tracks from the singles and a couple others that had been recorded. The album is not as scattershot-sounding as its pedigree might suggest, but it does display a good variety of styles, from the band's first garage-y singles and the acid-rock "Your Trip" to the twee "I Believe in Sunshine" and "Little Boys for Little Girls". My favorite track is the album's title track, which is one of those songs named after a band on an eponymous album (like "Living in a Box" and "Black Sabbath").

"A Passing Fancy" by A Passing Fancy