One of my reasons for my antipathy towards Morrissey (and the Smiths) is the music, and I must say the music here is much artier and weirder than I was expecting. (I think we can thank Vini Reilly for that. He’s a musically interesting guy in ways that Street and Morrissey normally are not.)
Tag: Jangle Pop
Daddy’s Highway (1987) by The Bats
This is my first encounter with the ‘Dunedin Sound’ probably because, like so many music scenes from outside of North America and the UK, it didn’t get much play where I live.
Calenture (1987) by The Triffids
I can’t speak for the Australian critics, but i feel like the American critics who went gaga over this record are guilty of a fairly common problem, where they over-hype a band from a “smaller” English-speaking country like Australia or Canada when if the same band appeared in the US or the UK they might …
Tone Soul Evolution (1997) by The Apples in Stereo
I am not very familiar with Elephant 6 but, to the extent that I am, I am familiar with weird, idiosyncratic indie pop bands, with a big emphasis on the “indie.” I assumed that Apples in Stereo would be along the same lines as the other Elephant 6 bands but, at least based upon this …
Strangeways, Here We Come
To say I dislike The Smiths would be an understatement. I don’t hate them so much as I hate the aura around them and this idea that they somehow saved British music from itself (and synthesizers! don’t forget the synthesizers), almost like a younger, hipper Bruce Springsteen (because Springsteen saved rock music from disco, don’t …
Green (1989) by REM
When I first got into REM, my friends who got me into REM told me Green was the worst album. And so I didn’t listen to it for over 20 years. (Makes sense, right?) I do know a few songs from a mixtape a friend made me, but that’s less than half of the tracks.
The Best of James (1998)
I’m not going to go into how I got my hands on this, but let’s just say it wasn’t a deliberate decision; it literally fell into my lap.
The Queen is Dead (1986, Rough Trade) by the Smiths
I usually don’t have trouble liking rock I’m “supposed” to like. (I.e. the generally accepted rock canon.) I can’t say the same about pop I’m supposed to “like”. (Frankly, I just prefer inventiveness, grit, rhythm and other such things to melody, aesthetic angles to precision arrangements, appropriate to clean production and mixing, etc.) I usually …