Happy Halloween! Robyn Hitchcock, with and without Egyptians, has been featured in this weekly spot more than any other artist, so I’m perhaps running out of insights to offer. I will note that this song comes from Hitchcock’s 1988 album, Globe of Frogs, which almost certainly provided my first exposure to an artist who looms as large as any for me. The single “Balloon Man” was a somewhat unlikely MTV mini-staple for a time, and the smack of novelty to the song got it some further play elsewhere. Naturally, then, when I got to campus radio station in the fall … Continue reading One for Friday: Robyn Hitchcock and the Egyptians, “Sleeping with Your Devil Mask”

By the late-nineteen-nineties, my connection to new music was in dire shape. It had only been five years since I’d last had the opportunity to log some regular hours on a college radio station, but my instincts for sniffing out the top newcomers had atrophied thanks to some time toiling for a commercial alternative station, where only bands that had a sound within echoing distance of Pearl Jam need apply. I did what I could with the resources at hand — including the increasingly fruitful but not yet fully helpful land of web-based music coverage — but I was finding … Continue reading One for Friday: XTC, “Your Dictionary”

Everyone deserves to have an album like Sicilian Vespers’ self-titled debut in Heavy Rotation when they first join a college radio station. It should be wild and challenging. It should be tuneful but relentlessly weird. It helps if the lead vocals are best described as an acquired taste, especially if even that heavily compromised compliment is itself charitable. It should be, in short, something that could only be heard (and valued and respected) on college radio. For me, that record was the self-titled debut from Sicilian Vespers. The creation of David and Francis Rifugiato, brothers who were indeed born in … Continue reading One for Friday: Sicilian Vespers, “I Want to Talk to a Squirrel”