Category: Music

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College Countdown: 90FM’s Top 90 of 1995, 5

Dan Seeger

5. Ned’s Atomic Dustbin, Brainbloodvolume As happens from time to time in this crazy endeavor of mine, I find myself downright startled by the high placement of an album on the chart being scaled through. The U.K. band Ned’s Atomic Dustbin had a couple of enormous hits on 90Fm during my time there. The band released their debut album, God Fodder, in 1991, and the singles “Kill Your Television” and “Grey Cell Green” were as constant of a presence on our Central Wisconsin airwaves as station policy would allow. Their follow-up, Are You Normal?, also did well, though I don’t recall … Continue reading College Countdown: 90FM’s Top 90 of 1995, 5

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One for Friday: Fire Town, “Turn To Me”

Dan Seeger

When I was a teenager, just starting to hone my musical taste into something respectable, I wanted to believe in a local music scene. As I read through my biweekly subscription copies of Rolling Stone with the sort of intense scrutiny others save for the Bible, I became enamored with any write-up about a town that was exploding with an influx of great new bands that were garnering national attention. The mixture of civic pride and being ahead of the curve was potently appealing to me for reasons I still can’t quite identify. Of course, I couldn’t truly take advantage … Continue reading One for Friday: Fire Town, “Turn To Me”

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College Countdown: 90FM’s Top 90 of 1995, 6

Dan Seeger

6. Juliana Hatfield, Only Everything I don’t think I was the only person at 90FM who actively cultivated celebrity crushes. At the risk of stating the obvious, boys are sorta gross when it comes to that, categorizing those to whom they’re attracted as objects of various degrees of desire in an effort to make sense of, well, mostly their own loneliness. Among my brethren, at least there was a little different set of criteria that guided our fetishizing appraisal of the singers and musicians that captured a shard or two of our desperate, addled hearts. For those of us who favored women, … Continue reading College Countdown: 90FM’s Top 90 of 1995, 6

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From the Archive: Dressy Bessy

Dan Seeger

This review came from my days submitted big gaggles of words to the Central Florida alternative weekly The Independent Journal, a publication willed into being by one of the most creative, ambitious people I know. As you can clearly surmise, I was still smarting from the pronounced disappointment of the Liz Phair album I’d written about a week or two earlier.  Hey, not every record has to change the world. There are hearts and minds for the winning by just locking onto an enjoyable sound and sticking to it. Enter Dressy Bessy. On their third album, Tammy Eaton leads the band … Continue reading From the Archive: Dressy Bessy

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One for Friday: The Feelies, “Away”

Dan Seeger

Today is apparently College Radio Day. I could write at near-endless length about my time as a student broadcaster and still note properly convey exactly how much I got out of it. I value everything about my collegiate experience, but the college radio station was special, in practically every way. It was a sanctuary, an enlivening mental obstacle course, a place of spiritual renewal. It was a place of constant discovery, for music obviously, but for so many other things, especially the reserves of belief, insight, and capability I had within myself that I’m convinced never would have been tapped … Continue reading One for Friday: The Feelies, “Away”

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The New Releases Shelf: Every Open Eye

Dan Seeger

(photo credit) Any question about whether Chvrches will be able to adequately follow up the arresting pop from their debut album, The Bones of What You Believe, is eradicated within the first seconds of the Swedish band’s sophomore release. Every Open Eye doesn’t roar to life or even explode into being. Instead, album opener “Never Ending Circles” simply is from the very beginning, as if a needle had been dropped square in the middle of a eternal pop epic. The track builds its extended chorus on a fantastic hook, but it feels deliriously as if it’s all hook, indeed hooks overlapping other hooks … Continue reading The New Releases Shelf: Every Open Eye

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Top 40 Smash Taps: “Your Time to Cry”

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. Joe Simon was a major player on the R&B charts during the late nineteen-sixties and early nineteen-seventies, including a million-seller that nabbed him a Grammy Award. As was too often the case, that success didn’t completely translate to the pop charts, where Simon had a respectable number of Top 40 hits (eight in total), but was largely unable to push his material to … Continue reading Top 40 Smash Taps: “Your Time to Cry”

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College Countdown: 90FM’s Top 90 of 1995, 7

Dan Seeger

7. Matthew Sweet, 100% Fun Matthew Sweet was probably alternative rock’s official King of Power Pop in 1995, not that there were many combatants for that particular throne. Sweet bounded from obscurity to the upper reaches of the college charts a few years earlier, upon the release of his brilliant 1991 album, Girlfriend. With a big guitar sound and deliriously catchy hooks, Sweet scratched an itch most college programmers (myself included) didn’t even know they had, sending legs thumping as joyously as that of a dog whose human pal has found just the right spot behind the ear. This underserved subsection of the … Continue reading College Countdown: 90FM’s Top 90 of 1995, 7

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College Countdown: 90FM’s Top 90 of 1995, 8

Dan Seeger

8. Garbage, Garbage I’m pleased that I sit in Madison, Wisconsin as I write this post. Seattle was the epicenter of the explosion of grunge rock that shifted, defined, and to a large degree eventually decimated college rock in the early-to-mid-nineteen-nineties, but the state capital of Wisconsin is connected to a murky asterisk in any geographic history of that shifting music scene. Madisonian Butch Vig had been in a few small, locally notable bands, Spooner and Fire Town among them. More importantly, as it turned out, Vig partnered with Steve Marker to open Smart Studios, a recording facility housed in … Continue reading College Countdown: 90FM’s Top 90 of 1995, 8

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One for Friday: Don Dixon, “Girls L.T.D.”

Dan Seeger

It sure seems like the most appropriate follow-up to last week’s One for Friday involves a song from Mr. Marti Jones. Most of the Girls Like to Dance But Only Some of the Boys Like To, Don Dixon’s solo debut, was first released in the United States in late 1986, only after it had proven successful as an import in Europe, where it had received distribution the year before. Making the journey seem even more arduous, most of the material on the album was first peddled to labels well before. As Dixon acknowledged at the time, practically every song on … Continue reading One for Friday: Don Dixon, “Girls L.T.D.”