Aquatic/tropical ambient gone wrong. Hazy and hypnotic. The ethereal surreal vibe insidiously gets threateningly cataclysmic.
From the lo-fi ambient/psych-drone end of hypnagogia comes this slice of atmospheric weirdness. I still can't quite figure out why Ferraro was so compelling in his peak era 2006-2010.
The power pop party that never stops! Bringing you more non hits and non memories from long lost nobodies from nowhere.
Todays region for our unknown legends of power-pop is Lincoln Nebraska.
[Baby] It's You really doesn't have new wave-ification so it's not your typical power-pop sound for 1979. Just the classic crunchy variety of crunchy classic. Sweet 70s guitar pop with hooks galore.
The power pop party continues... this time with some mighty Aussie action from The Go-Betweens label The Able Label
Sometimes I think this is the greatest seven inch single to ever come out of Straya.
An irresistible blazing romp, Sunset Strip is surf influenced new-wave power-pop performed with so much youthful enthusiasm and urgent melodiousness you can't help being delighted.
Look out euphoric claps galore!
They were from Brisbane but singing about LA's Sunset Strip or a tv show or something yet still he's singing about a girl in there somewhere... it's catchy as hell with a gloriously sunny summer sound.
Some bands just don't make the big time... who cares I suppose because we will always have this bit of magic where The Riptides captured the pure power-pop lightning in a bottle.
The power-pop party carries on and we're just getting started.
Speaking of Blondie this is Gary Valentine who was once the bass player in Blondie. He wrote X Offender and I'm Always Touched By Your Presence Dear. After he was booted from the band he formed The Know with the drummer from 20/20 and the old bass player from The Motels.They were highly touted but onlymanaged just the one seven inch single and this is it.
Our Gazza sounds like Tom Verlaine's horny younger brother here in this frazzled frenzy of punky power pop.
Power Pop is almost always about male lust and liking girls and guess what I Like Girls is about.
Liking all kinds of girls.
I think one of the line's in this song is:
I like girls and without exception they like me
Which is abso-fucking-lutely legendary.
Here's a further sample of some of the hard to catch poetry:
Some guys like to wear them skinny ties and look in the mirror
And other guys like to think otherwise they make believe
And there's only one thing that I like and it's the best thing in the world
Catchy bit of garage-y Beatlemania... a brisk bit of power pop action, ultra melodic with dazzling close harmonies and a hell of a beat... undeniably pretty bloody good.
Hangin On The Telephone - The Nerves [1976]
Sorry but it's just impossible to go past quite possibly the most addictive two minutes of guitar pop that fucking rocks ever put to wax. The anguish and desperation of teenage lust is captured here with immense palpability.
Frantic.
Nerves singer/Guitarist Jack Lee wrote the greatest power-pop song of all time, a coupla years later Blondie brilliantly covered it. However The Nerves devastatingly delicious version of this tale of romantic teen turmoil is at least 75% better.
The power-pop party continues with all the misses and non memories from all the lost regional nobodies you never heard of.
Real Life Saver's got all of the lovely hooks... melodiousness for days... everything here is in the right place... an array of tasty guitar goodness... a Pizza dee resistance! A platter du jour!
Despite being released in the new wave era, no new-wave-ification detected here, this is just classic old school power-pop. Coulda been made five years earlier, know what I mean. Who the hell is/was this guy? All I know is this primo slice of pure power-pop turned up on one of those Shake Some Action cd compilations I bought many moons ago, twenty five years ago. Turns out Gazza came from Kansas City and made one of the sweetest unknown seven inch singles in the game... that's it.
Speaking of The Nerves Jack Lee used to perform this one with his old band back in '77.
This is from his debut 1981 solo record and of course you know it because a coupla years later Paul Young covered Come Back And Stay which became one of his biggest hits that was also included on his million selling album from 1983 No Parlez.
However the original Jack Lee version is quite different: Melodious driving jangly power pop with some fantastic soaring tripped out guitars. A great lonesome & longing in the midnight hour atmosphere captured here. Top stuff. Shoulda been all over the FM airwaves then and now and forever.
Soft rock gold keeps on coming. All the gold. All the soft rock magic. All the time. CardrossManiac delivering the soft rock golden goodness.
Diamond Girl is most golden romantic soft rock with jazz inflections which = pop perfection: Makes you feel good, makes you feel fine.
This gets on such a euphoric in the pocket groove with that smooth driving bass, alluring guitar hooks and those swinging congas plus all the catchy vocal melodies, breezy harmonious back ups, jaunty keys, jazzy flute, enticing tempo changes...
Speaking of long lost summers, nostalgia and romance here's the ultra smooth soft rock masterpiece Under The Jamaican Moon.
Impeccablewith its light latin feel, exquisite vocal melodies, breezy harmonies, sublime smooth jazz guitar and immaculate baroque touches from the master arranger Nick DeCaro himself.
Get out your summer drinks with umbrellas in, pop on your best Hawaiian shirt and luxuriate in this splendorous tropical atmosphere... .
...it's time to get free and easy...
Its all about the sand between your toes, the tide rippling at your ankles, the sea breeze in your hair, seduction on your lips and everything going just right in the moment...
C aka Untitled #5 aka Königsforst 5 aka the 15 minute track from Königsforst [1998]
Now for a walk in the Black Forest.
Because some people have not heard this, here it is.
Worth checking out even if you were never that enamoured with techno. Fans of classical, ambient, minimalism and rock's outer reaches or anyone should be able to get into this splendid track as it's transcendent... undeniably great.
Where the ancient meets modern, putting the ye olde into the futuristic 90s.
Bringing the bucolic to the urban.
The swirling changing sameness will have you hypnotised.
Speaking of strange electronic novelty pop. What about this futuristic slice of state of the art disco pop made by Avant-guard composer Basil Kirchin. A somewhat positive ode to the silicon chip, I think... maybe. I guess old Basil wasn't to know the silicon chip would be instrumental in psy-ops, mind control and ultimately community division. Progress...
*This wasn't released in 1979. It languished in some vault for over 35 years until Jonny Trunk got his oven mitts on it and issued it on seven inch in 2016. Silicon Chip really coulda been in the same gang as the game changing futuristic chartbusting number one singles of 1979 like Are 'Friends' Electric?, Pop Musik, Video Killed The Radio Star, Cars etc.
The supreme jittery janglers from New Jersey doin their trembling thin and dry repetitive thing with frenetic intricacy. Their maniacal insistent instrumental build-ups, from silence to ominously slow burning evolving into frantically explosive, are legendary. These guys were tight.
Those that know, know that every tune's a winner on their toppermost debut LP Crazy Rhythms. The outstanding Moscow Nights has all the tense jangles and suspenseful strums along with a sharp focused intense and twitchy percussive track. All done with The Feelies signature youthful nervous urgency.
Blue Velvet/Blue Star Montage - Isabella Rossillini and Angel Badalamenti [1986]
Speaking of Blue Velvet which is still kinda my favourite all time movie like The Pixies' Doolittle is my all time favourite record because I experienced these at the age of 16 and 17 and they were my favourites then and apparently this is how brains work...
Perhaps everything Lynch did after this was better but this was the seed from whereth it all groweth.
Here we have the deliciously aberrant nightclub singer Dorothy Vallens played to perfection by Isabella Rossillini having a a bit of a sing. Accompanied by Angelo Badalamenti's stylish arrangements (he even appeared in the film as the cocktail lounge pianist).
...so dark...
Lumberton U.S.A. / Going Down to Lincoln Sound Effects Suite - Angelo Badalamenti [1986]
Disorientating jazzy nightmares with unnerving creepy dark ambient and sound effects.
Akron Meets The Blues - Angelo Badalamenti [1986]
Further disorientating jazzy dreams, noir blues and quirky lounge-core.
Honky Tonk Part 1 - Bill Doggett
I mean the title says it all. This is a supreme honky tonk instrumental jam perfect for the cinematic vision of David Lynch. What a groove, mesmerising guitar and rock'n'roll sax-a-muh-phone baby! Originally a hit single back in 1956.
The lovelorn dreamy teen sound of Ricky Dean's Blue Tears was on the label Del-fi who had previously brought the talents of Richie Valens to the world.
This is the sorta thing you could imagine being in either a cheesy nostalgia movie or a David Lynch film.
So these guys didn't always miss. This was their debut single and their one and only hit in America reaching #16. I mean it shoulda been number one for two weeks at least...
Hooks galore in a crunchy power pop style with a great glam-y caveman beat and an undercurrent of chunky chugging boogie.
Stunning infectious pure pop that outdoes Cheap Trick and Big Star at their own game...
All the non-hits and non memories. Cardross Maniac bringing you all the the great misses of the 70, 80s & 90s.
Today it's the sound of supreme melodicists, the power pop duo Dwight Twilley Band. That's Dwight Twilley and Phil Seymour.
Talk about out of time and in between scenes.
This was kinda late glam, pre new wave power pop, sorta pub rock but also classic rock'n'roll in the original rockabilly sense. I mean it sounds like it coulda been recorded anytime between 1969 and 1982.
Looking For The Magic has been described as a song to rob banks to, whatever that means. Insane fluttering vocals giving Alan Vega a run for his money. Like a lo-fi drug fucked ELO without the disco element but going ecstatic and throwing in more hooks than a tackle box. The vocals, hand claps, Jangly guitars, drums and slippery bass are all put through an echo chamber and then some for maximum dream-a-delic affect.
As heard on 3MA on Sunday nights in the late 80s. The show which was maybe called Underground or The Underground or something like that. They played independent Aussie hits of the day. Stuff straight off Juke' Magazine's Independent chart which of course was where all the best music was to be found at the time. I think the radio announcer/DJ was Pat Gary.
Anyway I never understood why Mad Turks weren't as big as say Died Pretty or Ups & Downs. They had the pop smarts and the catchy tunes with great guitar interplay in a brisk jangly power pop style but I don't think they ever got anywhere near the top 40 which is a shame. They missed. While they were out of time and in between scenes their debut LP Cafe Istanbul is an unheralded 80s guitar pop triumph. We get twelve tunes with plenty of hard strumming and pop hooks galore all done with an irresistible youthful urgency.
On Holding My Breath you gotta love the take it down now moment at 2:23 where the instruments drop out and its just the "chicka chicka" of the muted strummed guitar and vocals. This trick is always excellent because you can't wait for the rest of the band to come back and when they do it's satisfaction guaranteed.
Thanks boys.
Looking Forward To Destroy [1987]
You can't get more 80s power pop than this.
More hooks than a butchers shop here with imaginative and infectious vocal melodies as well as toppermost tuneful guitars.
One of those tunes you've heard your entire life and finally you go "hang on! wait a a fucking minute, this is fantastic!"
The state of the art sound of the 70s with all of the gorgeous hooks effortlessly in the right place.
Like a really excellent multilayered cake. Each element is a delicious harmonious hook: the jaunty piano, those melodic tom toms, the slide-y Harrison-esque guitar, the immaculate multi-tracked backing vocals, the bass, the myriad of minuscule percussion flourishes, the entire delectable melody ripped straight from Carol King etc.
Evocative of first love, carefree summers and more innocent times, I Saw The Light kinda now makes you wonder "Where did my life go?"
I can't remember when the last essential American 60s garage rock compilation was issued... sometime in the early 00s with the ace Teenage Shutdown cd series and those seven volumes of Fuzz, Flaykes & Shakes. This month however an excellent cd has been released Teen Beat Mayhem: Slipped Thru The Cracks.
So these never previously compiled tunes come from the secret stash of Mike Markesich's record collection. Markesich is of course known to garage fans as the author of 2012's TeenBeat Mayhem, the most exhaustive and authoritative reference guide to 60s garage rock, teenbeat & garage psych 45s.
Below are the only four tunes from this cd I can find on youtube at the moment and they were only just recently uploaded by the legendary channel Bolt24 Hot Sounds. Discogs info on almost all of these groups has only been added in the last couple of days. So this is rare stuff indeed but I wouldn't be talking about if it wasn't such good stuff so as Molly used to say "do yourself a favour"
Rogues 5 - Oh So Right [1965]
Outa Lorain Ohio comes the restrained menacing fuzzed twangery of Oh So Right from one and done group Rogues 5. All shadowy and threatening but uptight and controlled creating a simmering sinister tone.
Incredible stuff.
Egyptians - Walkin' Shoes [196?]
Mesmerising moody and brooding teen garage. A dreamy lo-fi sound not dissimilar to the Velvets in mellow mode. A pulsating, haunting and ultimately addictive tune.
Downbeat baby!
Soul Survivors - Need You Love [1967]
Scuzzy party time. Get the dance floor sizzling at your next shindig with this groovin' organ driven garage banger.
Resurrection - Like The Way [1967/1968?]
Catchy girl/boy lusty obsessions lyrically captured in a tune with great organ riff, jangly guitar, hypnotic organ and a groovy beat.
All done in a nonchalant rudimentary manner.
The coolest.
Outa sight!
*That's just the tip of the iceberg there's another twenty four crude unknown regional gems waiting for you to discover. I gotta say I'm pretty fucking surprised at the strike rate of the tunes on this cd. Who would have thought that we'd still be finding toppermost primitive 60s garage, homespun jangle-y pop and lo-fi moody teenbeat tunes in 2026.
Roll up roll up for some teenbeat moody and broody garage from Holland Michigan group The New Era.
This killer sunshine pop smash has got all the irresistible rolling jangly guitars and hook laden sweetness you could want from an ace 60s pop song yet it's still barely even a cult record.
Classic supremely melodic moody and broody garage from one and done group The Wonders outa Omaha Nebraska. Soaring haunting harmonies in cool disorientating guitar pop gem.
Funky psychedelic bubblegum glam in an atmospheric horror pop style.
The sort of novelty hallucinogenic glam you'd imagine was a seminal influence on the hypnagogic pop underground... er... maybe I'm just imagining Ariel Pink doing a cover of this brilliant tune for a limited edition Halloween release.
Charming and tuneful pop perfection from 1979 baby!
If your idea of a heavenly pop hit is soft rock somewhere between Drivers Seat and Baker Street hold on.
Everything here is in exactly the right place: That lovely 12 string, prominent melodic bass, cascading somewhat eerie piano, a masterclass in understated or perhaps perfectly stated hook laden harmonies & backing vocals, great sounding drums and to top it all off a reigned in clear saxophone played by the guy who funnily enough played on Baker Street. Cozy, slightly melancholy and ultimately romantic, Hold On's still highly resonant today. Timeless baby. FM AM... it belongs everywhere forever on your radio dial...
Surprisingly #18 Billboard chartbuster Hold On wasn't a top 40 hit here or even in Canadia...
A lo-fi slacker rock jam that's probably mostly forgotten these days.
In 1993 before burning cds from your mates became a thing I had One Sock Missing on a TDK D90 blank cassette with Archers Of Loaf's Icky Mettle on the other side. A couple of years later I saw The Grifters support Jeff Buckley at The Palais in St Kilda which I guess is a notable gig because soon Jeff was dead and he became a superstar in the rock history while this excellent tune has just 3436 views on youtube.
Ramshackle Rolling Stones damaged rawk. A messy drunken singalong where the raw lo-fi noise becomes cosmically unhinged.
From the raucous garage-y end of slacker rock comes this ultra scuzzy monster of a tune. A style much closer to ye olde noisey proto-punk groups like The Electric Eels than contemporaneous lo-fi acts such as Pavement.
The greatest group you didn't know in the 90s. It's the dude from top 80s band Great Plains Ron House and with TJSA he put together an even more explosive group to realise his vision of charming yet volatile drunken nihilism.
Bringing you all the underground misses of the 90s!
The guitarist from St✮Johnny Tom Leonard had a solo side project called Luxurious Bags. Their little known cd Frayed Knots was a toppermost lo-fi psychedelic slacker noise pop jam. There's a gorgeous euphoric pop anthem hidden beneath the muffled lo-fi layers of hazy sound here.
The 90s you never heard... it doesn't get any better.
A lot of people missed St✮Johnny at the time. I mean you'd already had Dinosaur Jr for ten years plus Swervedriver, Flaming Lips, Mercury Rev, Pavement, Polvo et al. for a while so by the time these guys got signed to Geffen they got overlooked. However Bill Whitten had a way with a downbeat melody and in conjunction with guitarist/Moog-ist Tom Leonard they stacked together cool sometimes surreal layers of thick ecstatic sound. The noisey pop aesthetic on their 1994 cd Speed Is Dreaming was slacker rock in excelsis.
St✮Johnny - I Give Up [1994]
Slacker anthem folks!
Blissed out dejection at its finest.
Daydreamy daze...
St✮Johnny - You Can't Win [1994]
A bewitching tune from the dreamy shoegaze end of slacker rock.
Lovely & wistful with energetic bursts of euphoric noise.
These guys were called Iron Virgin so... after two singles Scotland's very own answer to The Sweet vanished into obscurity. Yet since 2003 they keep turning up on glam "nuggets" type compilations on a regular basis. The junkshop glam aficionados consider this one of the finest and most beloved lost singles of the glam rock era, who am I to disagree. I'm no British heavy metal expert but Rebels Rule has even been cited as proto-NWOBHM.
Obscure moody and broody garage psych from another one and done group from Michigan
You gotta love the intense mandolin and misanthropic sentiments delivered with tormented desperation by singer Bob Glese and those mournful dirge-y backing vocals... all in a pop song that coulda got played on the radio.
You could imagine them playing this in a dusty saloon in a scene from a south of the border acid western.
In the great British tradition of singles not included on albums. Roxy Music's second single came out a month prior to their second LP For Your Pleasure but was not included on that record.
It's crazy that such sonic weirdness dressed up as pop made the UK top 10 back in 73.
It all begins with an outstanding intro with notable drummage then the tune floats along on a surreal electric marshmallow with an underlying ecstatic aquatic feel. Next is a totally off kilter studio manipulated sax, unconventional arrangement of words for pop ie. no chorus applied with Ferry's unpredictable quivering tones, cool disorientating guitar shenanigans, further toppermost drum action with added maracas and an ace fade out.
Eno said this tune shouldn't have been released as a single but he was so wrong, as he often is, because for many of us Pyjamarama is Roxy's greatest single and one of the best chartbusters of the 70s.
*When I started this blog most songs and albums didn't have their own wikipedia pages but now everything's got an entry which engulfs the efforts of the little bloggers and kinda makes blogs redundant. However wikipedia are still often inaccurate and just don't have the Space Debris touch plus the once neutral wikipedia website is now slimy and ideologically captured with their not so subtle hidden agendas, smear campaigns and biases. For proof just seek out any interview with original cofounder Larry Sanger from the last five or six years.
Scuzzy Acid fried surreal space rock musique concrète.
The soundtrack to your horrifying nightmares becoming reality.
Chaotic junkyard psychedelic noise recorded by a couple of deranged cyber-punk sailors of the mind.
The astonishing psycho-geographical sound of a lysergically altered brain.
Far out man.
Really though you need to listen to the Half Machine Lip Moves LP in its entirety in one sitting. Zombie Warfare out of this context is strange... well I mean it's already strange but it's weird for me hearing it on its own not surrounded by the rest of the album's insanity... so...
[1979]
I was only seven when this came out so I missed it at the time. In the early 90s we knew of this record because Chrome had been mentioned by groups like Butthole Surfers, Pavement, Jesus Lizard and I'm sure a few years later Steve Albini wrote about Half Machine Lip Moves once in Melody Maker. However finding their records or cds in Melbourne was hard because they were out of print so for many years I only had a tape of this with the previous album Alien Soundtracks on the other side thanks to an old friend and bandmate. Now all you young folk and late-comers have it all immediately available at your fingertips which is kinda cool but also kinda weird because you didn't have to invest the money, time and travel to gain the knowledge to anticipate getting a hold of and eventually listening to such a coveted artefact. Also renting music on streaming sites is an odd and poxy concept. You really need to own the music otherwise you don't own the music, know what I mean.
One of those songs that nobody ever says is one of the greatest but...
What a sound! Everybody's favourite louche lounge lizard with one of the heaviest and most brazen guitar-centric things he ever did.
The 'In' Crowd was an old 60s soul tune that Ferry rendered unrecognisable with this glorious racket. Also preempts Bowie's plastic soul period.
Menacing bass, hard riffage, quicksilver vocals and anthemic ominous horns... wait for the 3:18 moment when the guitars go bananas, well the whole song gets wonderfully unhinged at this point and doesn't let up til the end. He really was doing something different, I don't think they've named whatever this is properly yet. It's hard to pin down while somewhat psychedelic it's dramatic, heavy and dark, seedy yet glamorous, and obtuse, arty and intense.
The 'In' Crowd is loud hypnotic funky sleazoid music for soundtracking disreputable discotheques everywhere.
A delirious one of a kind psychedelic glitter scuzz jam.
If you chucked David Essex, Neu, Hendrix and Glitter Band into a blender...
The sort of thing you imagine Helios Creed and Damon Edge were probably into... I mean if you stripped the vocals off here it would resemble Alien Soundtracks/Half Machine Lip Moves era Chrome.
I thought back in 1985 "Geez this dude from Mr Mister is pretty old. What's he been up to? Where's he been till now?" Forty years later I've finally found out the answer, he was the dude in Pages. Turns out two of the dudes from Mr Mister were in Pages.
Pages were a soft rock duo, consisting of Richard Page and Steve George, who formed in LA in 1977. They did three LPs of soft rock with jazz and soul inflections, I guess the kids would call this breezy AOR shtick Yacht Rock these days.
Only A Dreamer is a lovely laid back tune with melodious sweetness and breezy harmonies whilst covering adult themes concerning a bleak relationship scenario. Tasty guitars supplied by none other than Jay Graydon, the dude who played the guitar solo on Steely Dan's Peg.
Smooth.
Nice.
Perhaps too smooth for some but smooth nonetheless.
How was this not a worldwide chartbuster? Surely it charted in Canadia at least. A quick interweb check reveals this wasn't even released as a single, it was just too smooth. None of their singles were hits. These fellas would have to form Mr Mister to finally achieve international chart success a few years later.
Hits and memories with the gold soundz of the 90s.
The genius of a song like this was that despite being seemingly generic this was absolutely undeniable even in the face of the facts that we were coming to the end of slacker rock. Dinosaur Jr had been around for almost ten years, Pavement were about to reach saturation point, David Baker was departing Mercury Rev and the uncommercial Trumans Water had already arrived. The whole idea seemed to be running out of juice and you knew that slacker rock was on its last legs. Then out of nowhere an unknown group of upstarts bursts onto the radio with one of the most vital bangers of the era. Audacious.
Web In Front still has that fresh energetic sound today. Hook laden youthful exuberance doesn't get any better.
I loved CHiPs when I was little, even had CHiPs pyjamas. Friday nights were the best. When CHiPs finished its run we then got ace replacements like Nightrider and the A-Team.
A lot of bands were doing Beach Boys influenced stuff in the 90s. The Moles, The Fauves, Mercury Rev, Flaming Lips, Primal Scream, My Bloody Valentine, Boo Radleys etc. etc. etc. It was all pretty enjoyable.
This one was totally unexpected and beautiful.
It's a forgotten song now but one of the best Brian Wilson tributes.
I've always been perplexed by Green Mind and some people's opinions of it since it came out. I mean surely we all thought it was pretty crap after the astonishingly exhilarating electrifying insanity of You're Living All Over Me and the masterfully crafted devastation of Bug's mess of noisy slacker grunge and the sweet slacker-daisical vision of The Wagon single. Weren't we all disappointed with the lack of fuzzed up loudness on Green Mind? Once they'd released this half baked effort I thought they were finished as a cool, credible and influential cult group. I mean if you weren't absolutely killing it or pushing the envelope musically it was time to move on to somewhere else. There was an abundance of excitement, innovation and peak musical creativity in this era. There was no point hanging around listening to sub standard artistical statements.
I mean J Mascis can be found talking about Green Mind on the youtubes saying: "Maybe it didn't work out as well as it could have"
Yet some people liked it and five years ago many more were getting misty eyed and nostalgic about the 30th anniversary of Green Mind. I didn't get it and thought they'd all lost their minds. Somewhere in the back of my mind though lurked some doubts that maybe I'd been wrong all along about this album. So finally I had a little re-listen and while I haven't had a full revelation or complete reversal of opinion, I've had a surprisingly significant change of heart. I'm pretty sure before I traded in my Green Mind cd in the early 90s I thought it all sucked except for the first and last tracks but now of those eight despised songs How'd You Pin That One On Me is the only one so irritatingly offensive that I have to skip it.
I get why the album was all so startlingly weird and disappointing at the time. A lot of the grunge noise and dreamy haziness had been stripped away for acoustic guitars, stark loud drums and an unnecessary close up focus on J's vocals. On those previously mentioned records the beauty was when J's warm lethargic but melodious vocal hooks were couched in just the right amount of distorted guitar overload for their classic signature languid maelstrom sound.
It's Water that has become my new favourite forgotten Dinosaur Jr. song. In a way it's a precursor to the Neil-isms and crushing melancholia aesthetic which was the blueprint that would be deployed on their 1993 classic Where You Been. Water's got that cool lazy slacker sound. Wait for that 2:28 moment when it accelerates into gorgeous melodic ecstasy. It's J's best trick and it's irresistible.
Blowin It/Live For That Look [1991]
Dinosaur Jr. do the segue song thing once again and it's pretty glorious. I mean I still have my reservations about this record's production but these conjoined songs are undeniably top Mascis tuneage.
*God what next? Am I gonna give Without A Sound another go next to see if maybe my disappointment about that cd was wrong too?
One of their finest pure pop moments. Still sounding remarkably fresh today.
This recording is an absolute anomaly for Dinosaur Jr. For one single only they were a five piece. Lou's gone but we've got Donna Dresch on bass, Don Fleming on guitars, J doing his thing and two drummers: Murph in one channel and Jay Spiegel in the other.
The Wagon was later remixed by J Mascis with some parts totally edited out for the cleaned up version that appeared on the Green Mind LP the following year..
So I was still in high school when the first couple of Swervedriver EPs came out. These were Rage classics that we taped on VHS months before we could ever get our hands on the records. I mean we lived in the bush mate! This tune to me and my mates was just a grungier, more testosterone fuelled version of You Mad Me Realise. Which didn't make it any less great. I mean it rocked like a high octane drag racing mutha fucka didn't it.
Rave Down [1990]
Then five or six months later came the Rave Down film clip and EP.
Creation Records were on a fucking role with Loaded, Come Together, Glider, Ride, Play, Fall, Nowhere, Slowdive and these first two Swervedriver EPs.
Rave Down's a glorious fuzzed up heavy psychedelic noise-rock tune of the highest order. All sorts of swirling waves of sound, layers of textured noise, driving riff-a-rama, wild drumming and hooks galore.
Blistering, bouncy and blissed out... the best!
Peak 90s rock.
Zedhead [1990]
Another stellar rocket fuelled noise rock work out.
Sandblasted [1991]
Just over six months later came the third ep. Epic noisey psychedelia with dream-gaze passages and gorgeous hooks. They really packed it all in here!
*I still kinda don't get why they weren't the premier noisey shoegaze band after My Bloody Valentine because at this stage they were very fucking killing it and had the highest strike rate of all the gazers of shoe. I saw both Ride and MBV live in Melbourne in '91 but Swervedriver didn't even tour down here until much later in like 94 or 95 when I finally got to see them at the Corner Hotel in Richmond.
Back to the good ole days when I was twenty. Me and my mate Tony would stay up late, drink and smoke, when the girls had gone to bed, listening to all the new and groovy sounds on the cd player. I'd totally forgotten the epic grunge-gaze and kaleidoscopic sax-haze of Never Lose That Feeling/Never Learn. Alan Moulder sprinkles some magic at the mixing desk.
What a jam.
Glorious.
Cars Converge On Paris [1993]
Unbelievably this tune, one of their greatest, was exclusively tucked away on the import only US version of The Last Train To Satansville cd EP.
Cars Converge On Paris might be Swervedriver's most psychedelic moment. Like a hazy mirage the desert highway with a mesmerizing intergalactic bass that swirls to infinity and vocals, drums & guitars falling upwards backwards in a disorientating dreamy daydream.
Glorious.
Last Train To Satansville [1993]
Speaking of which here it is one their most famous video moments. An edited down version of Last Train To Satansville. A classic 90s guitar pop tune from these eternally underrated grungy shoegazers. A get home from the pub late and watch Rage classic.
Duel [1993]
Ok ok I can't stop now. There's just no way you can go past this remarkable historic tune.
It's another one of their singles but this isn't the video because the original six and half minutes shouldn't ever be cut down. I mean it starts out pretty blissed up right from the get go but the sprawling euphoria keeps growing then it just keeps on expanding into wide screen ecstatic peaks so that by 1:35 the elation is reaching unbearable levels. The dreamy psychedelic exhilaration gets overwhelming then later in the comedown lulls it becomes a bit melancholy that is until it starts its upward trajectory again. Then the take it down now fade-out gradually winds down to a a splendid sonic seaside scenario.
One of the the most sublime guitar tunes of the 90s.
