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The New Releases Shelf: Art Angels

Dan Seeger

(photo source) I really liked Visions, the album released by Grimes in 2012. But I also found it to be a little uneven, prone to digressions that didn’t quite spin into full-fledged, satisfying tracks. Peaks and valleys are to be expected (and the peaks were absolutely glorious), but it’s nice when the valleys are worth strolling through, too. Still, every indication was there that Grimes was poised to make an album that could be deemed great without reservation. All she needed to do was take another artistic step forward. Turns out that step I hoped for is more of a … Continue reading The New Releases Shelf: Art Angels

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College Countdown: The Gavin Report Top 20 Alternative Chart, October 1992, An Introduction

Dan Seeger

I’m going to concede up front that this chart is presented as something as a place-holder. I have a much more significant countdown all cued up on one of the theoretical turntables, but I need a touch more time to get ready for it. Looking for something to carry this feature through to roughly the end of the calendar year, I landed on a chart from the fall of 1992. This isn’t purely random. For reasons not entirely unrelated to the next chart we’ll use, I was thinking a lot about my last year as a student in college radio. … Continue reading College Countdown: The Gavin Report Top 20 Alternative Chart, October 1992, An Introduction

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From the Archive: Hocus Pocus

Dan Seeger

This is another one of the record reviews I wrote for the short-lived but dandy Central Florida publication The Independent Journal. Enon was a band I hadn’t heard of — to my recollection, anyway — before becoming the General Manager and Staff Advisor for the campus radio station at Rollins College, but they were a favorite of some key staff members. The students even got the band to come into the station and play a live, on-air set. I carried around a CD copy of that performance for ages. It was my actual favorite Enon album. I’m selecting this for … Continue reading From the Archive: Hocus Pocus

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One for Friday: John Lydon interviewed by WPRK

Dan Seeger

So I’m going to do something a little different today. Usually I reserve this Friday feature to share an MP3 from some bygone record that I treasured in my college radio days, with the occasionally foray into music that was released after I got my paper and I was free. But the college radio experience was about more than the actual records to me. It was also about making connections with the performers that I enjoyed so much. While I didn’t have the opportunity to do it all that often, I retain a tremendous affection for those instances when I … Continue reading One for Friday: John Lydon interviewed by WPRK

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Top 40 Smash Taps: “It Should Have Been Me”

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. Amazingly, Gladys Knight and the Pips never had a chart-topping single for Motown Records. As towering as the act was, the closest they came was with their version of “I Heard It Through the Grapevine,” which was passed around to all of the label’s stars, including Smokey Robinson. Of course, it was Marvin Gaye who owned that particular number. His take was recorded … Continue reading Top 40 Smash Taps: “It Should Have Been Me”

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College Countdown: 90FM’s Top 90 of 1995, 1

Dan Seeger

1. Marques Bovre and the Evil Twins, Flyover Land Though I wasn’t at the station at the time, I can provide all sorts of reasons as to why Flyover Land predictably landed at the top spot of 90FM’s year-end chart. The simplest explanation involves the radio station’s biggest event of the year. A weekend-long affair modestly billed as The World’s Largest Trivia Contact takes place every April. Throughout much of the nineteen-nineties the weekend prior was marked by a couple of “Kickoff” programs: a midnight movie and a concert. In 1995, the movie was an indie crowdpleaser that likely challenges the sensibilities … Continue reading College Countdown: 90FM’s Top 90 of 1995, 1

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One for Friday: The Plugz, “Achin”

Dan Seeger

Sometimes I have no recollection of how a track came into my digital possession. Much as I appreciate the wide open bounty of the interweb, especially when it comes to those old and new acts that I surely would have never discovered without it, I sometimes miss the bygone ability to always identify the rough moment of discovery, to conjure up the origin story of each personally held piece of music, as it were. The vastness of what I can access now is better. But I can still be a little wistful about portions of the experience that are chipped … Continue reading One for Friday: The Plugz, “Achin”

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College Countdown: 90FM’s Top 90 of 1995, 2

Dan Seeger

2. Goo Goo Dolls, A Boy Named Goo There are a lot of albums on this particular countdown that sound intensely, almost painfully tied to their era. I tend to consider the different records that are so desperately trying to ape the Seattle sound as the most characteristic of the time. They contributed mightily to the numbing sameness of the commercial alternative stations that briefly flared up, including the one I worked at all through 1995. I think I may be a little off-base with that theory, though. Listening to it anew, I’m now convinced that A Boy Named Goo … Continue reading College Countdown: 90FM’s Top 90 of 1995, 2

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One for Friday: The Mekons, “Only Darkness Has the Power”

Dan Seeger

Back when I was a bratty twentysomething going to scruffy concerts in Madison, Wisconsin, I would occasionally look around and my fellow attendees and wonder about the older folks who were amongst the crowd, holding their own plastic cup beers and bobbing their heads along to the beat. I was so certain that spending nights in ramshackle rock clubs was a young person’s game that these folks with graying temples and developing crow’s feet seemed out of place to me. I didn’t begrudge them their place on the floor, but that place on the trajectory of a life was distant … Continue reading One for Friday: The Mekons, “Only Darkness Has the Power”

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Top 40 Smash Taps: “The Resurrection Shuffle”

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. Tony Ashton and Ron Dyke have the distinction of playing on the first solo album by a Beatle. Before the seminal band had officially broken up — or even finished releasing new music — George Harrison released the album Wonderwall Music, which was also notable as the first product from the Apple record label. The same year that record came out, the twosome … Continue reading Top 40 Smash Taps: “The Resurrection Shuffle”