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One for Friday: The Godfathers, “Birth, School, Work, Death (Live)”

Dan Seeger

There’s an interesting choice on Texas Chainsaw Massacre, the live album released by the U.K. band the Godfathers, in 1989. To the best of my knowledge, this full-length wasn’t issued for sale in record stores, at least not in the United States. Instead, I believe it was a promo-only release, largely targeted at college radio, Epic Records’ means of keeping the band in the minds and hearts of fickle student programmers, many of them already coming down from the energized highs of the group’s debut release, Birth, School, Work, Death. That album’s title cut served as the perfect angry anthem, after all, for … Continue reading One for Friday: The Godfathers, “Birth, School, Work, Death (Live)”

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The New Releases Shelf: Patch the Sky

Dan Seeger

On Silver Age, Bob Mould reclaimed his history after several years that could reasonably be characterized as messy (which doesn’t mean altogether bad, but his explorations sometimes verged on aimlessness). He followed that with Beauty & Ruin, expanding the scope of his productively nostalgic creativity to deliver music that sounded like every skipped stone ripple of his career gathered together to formulate something just new enough to turn heads anew. Now we come to Patch the Sky, which feels like the end of a trilogy. This time, Mould is settling into a comfortable mode, or as comfortable of a mode as his somewhat … Continue reading The New Releases Shelf: Patch the Sky

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College Countdown: CMJ Top 250 Songs, 1979 – 1989, 217 – 215

Dan Seeger

217. New Order, “Love Vigilantes” “Love Vigilantes” was widely considered a significant departure for New Order and something of a statement of purpose, or at least against reflexive pigeonholing, when it notably led off the band’s 1985 album, Low-Life. Though there are familiar sonic signatures throughout the track, it is distinctively lean and even a touch twangy. More strikingly, the lyrics actually tell a story, which was rarely the case with the jagged merging of words and music on earlier New Order songs. According to Bernard Sumner, the song’s lineage begins with a U.K. tour undertaken with the Buzzcocks in the … Continue reading College Countdown: CMJ Top 250 Songs, 1979 – 1989, 217 – 215

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One for Friday: Close Lobsters, “My Days Are Numbered”

Dan Seeger

Continuing to draw inspiration from the recently posted autumn of 1989 90FM album chart, we turn to a band that was one my favorite discoveries upon landing at the college radio station. Close Lobsters hailed from Scotland and played a brand of punchy pop laced with tender paisley twinkling and brutal cynicism in roughly equal doses. In my late teens, nothing could have pleased me more. Headache Rhetoric, the band’s sophomore LP and final full-length release until a reunion some two decades later, landed in rotation during my first summer as a student broadcaster, and I gave it loving attention (though … Continue reading One for Friday: Close Lobsters, “My Days Are Numbered”

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Top 40 Smash Taps: “Love of My Life” and “Bowling Green”

Dan Seeger

These posts are about the songs that can accurately claim to crossed the key line of chart success, becoming Top 40 hits on Billboard, but just barely. Every song featured in this series peaked at number 40. By my rough, hasty count, the Everly Brothers placed a total of twenty-seven songs into the Billboard Top 40, including three that topped the chart. The siblings were such a constant presence on early rock ‘n’ roll radio that disc jockeys routinely turning singles over, giving the B-sides enough spins to merit respectable chart placement. That was the case with “Love of My Life,” … Continue reading Top 40 Smash Taps: “Love of My Life” and “Bowling Green”

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College Countdown: CMJ Top 250 Songs, 1979 – 1989, 220 – 218

Dan Seeger

220. fIREHOSE, “Brave Captain” “Brave Captain” was the ideal opening salvo from fIREHOSE. Recorded in October, 1986 at Radio Tokyo studios, in Venice, California, Mike Watt and George Hurley put the song to tape less than a year after the tragic death of D. Boon brought an end to their prior band, the Minutemen. Inspired punk rockers still reveling in acclaim showered on the recent double album masterpiece Double Nickels on the Dime (though the now rarely invoked 3-Way Tie for Last was the band’s true final statement) at the time of the van accident that claimed the life of their lead singer, … Continue reading College Countdown: CMJ Top 250 Songs, 1979 – 1989, 220 – 218

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One for Friday: Michael Penn, “No Myth (Acoustic)”

Dan Seeger

Though it clearly charted at my college radio station, I have no clear recollection of playing any music from Michael Penn’s debut LP, March, when it was in the new music rotation. I probably did, but it didn’t stick with me, even once its lead single, “No Myth,” started edging its way up the charts (eventually becoming Penn’s sole Top 40 hit). Very much in the know-it-all phase of my late adolescence, I was probably given to a needlessly reactionary indifference to Penn’s music, so certain that he had a record deal only because his brother was a movie star, … Continue reading One for Friday: Michael Penn, “No Myth (Acoustic)”

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College Countdown: CMJ Top 250 Songs, 1979 – 1989, 223 – 221

Dan Seeger

223. Lou Reed, “No Money Down” By the mid-nineteen-eighties, there were two surefire ways to stir up extra interest in a single: make a attention-getting video that MTV couldn’t resist playing, or make an attention-getting video that MTV rejected from their cable-waves for one squeamishness-based reason or another. When Lou Reed released his 1986 album, Mistrial, he was in a strange, unsettled place professionally. Thanks to his creative leadership in the Velvet Underground and a edgy nineteen-seventies solo career that could be used as a shorthand introduction to that decade’s drug-addled grittiness, Reed was approaching the status of legend, albeit one … Continue reading College Countdown: CMJ Top 250 Songs, 1979 – 1989, 223 – 221

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The New Releases Shelf: A Man Alive

Dan Seeger

Operating with the mixed blessing of a highly distinctive voice — in every sense of that word — Thao Nguyen could presumably get along all right taking an easier, less deliberatively disruptive course. She could probably make a string of records laden with relatively straightforward, folk-tinged rock songs and keep herself and her band, the Get Down Stay Down, in regular music biz work for some time. Instead, she ties composition into tricky knots, constantly seeking the challenging dynamic, as if enough effort in that direction will finally create the song that can surprise her in midstream. As a listener, it’s … Continue reading The New Releases Shelf: A Man Alive