20. Bob Mould, Workbook To me, this album represents the beginning of summer. Online sources of reasonable repute list its release date as April 1989. That may very well be the case, but my memory of the album begins with … Continue reading College Countdown: 90FM’s Top 90 of 1989, 20
I typically wax nostalgic in this weekly feature, spinning misty yarns about first encounters with certain songs or especially meaningful moments when a college radio favorite spoke to me most deeply. But I recognize that we’re living in an iTunes … Continue reading One for Friday: The Banana Splits, “In New Orleans”
For months now, this space on Sundays has been devoted to counting down the top 90 albums of 1989 on the college radio station where I made my home. I decided fairly early on that I wanted to write the … Continue reading College Countdown: 90FM’s Top 90 of 1989, Interlude
This week, I finally starting working on the backlog of record reviews I need to work through by offering up an assessment of the new album by the U.K. band Let’s Wrestle. It was one of those tricky instances of having to write about something when my primary reaction to it is “Eh, it’s okay.” What’s actually harder is writing about a film that’s terrific. Invariably, I feel like my words are inadequate. Lu Chuan’s new movie is tough, uncompromising and beautifully made. I am pleased that I wrote the review without ever using the word “epic.” That was intentional. … Continue reading Spectrum Check
One of the aspects of my personal era of college radio that I found interesting was the pronounced sense that the first wave of great left of the dial artists was coming to an end. By the time I landed there in the fall of 1988, it was already understood that Hüsker Dü and The Smiths were no more, for example. Several other bands that were mainstays of the college charts also seemed on the verge of calling it quits. In some ways, this made it feel like we’d just missed the Golden Age of our preferred music, but there … Continue reading One for Friday: Ian McCulloch, “Proud to Fall”
22. Ramones, Brain Drain When the producers of the 1989 film adaptation of Stephen King’s novel Pet Sematary were looking for a band to craft a theme song, they turned to some fairly unlikely suspects. Sure, The Ramones had a … Continue reading College Countdown: 90FM’s Top 90 of 1989, 22 and 21
This week I took my first crack at the Revisit feature over on the music side of things, which proved to be far more difficult for me. I initially thought I’d write about R.E.M.’s Out of Time this year stands as the twentieth anniversary of its release and, despite being a major success, it seems to be one of the forgotten albums by the band. I thought it would be interesting to give it a fresh listen, separated from the saturation play it experienced at my college radio station upon release. I may still try writing that piece at some … Continue reading Spectrum Check
There were bands at our college radio station that everyone was practically mandated to know. I’m not referring to the titans of the college radio charts at the time–R.E.M., The Cure, The Replacements, bands like that–as much as those otherwise obscure acts that were represented on our station playlists like they were among the most vaunted figures in the college rock canon. Usually this developed because one person discovered a band and started pushing it on other DJs like the opportunity to charge for future necessary doses was a given. Often, it was an attitude that the band had that … Continue reading One for Friday: Couch Flambeau, “Models”
24. Texas, Southside Yes, a cursory glance at the debut album Southside suggests that the band that released it is named after the rootinin’-tootinin’est state in the union, but that’s not quite right. The Scottish band that calls themselves Texas … Continue reading College Countdown: 90FM’s Top 90 of 1989, 24 and 23
My music collection, at least as represented digitally, covers a lot of sonic territory. Once I became a true and total convert to my iPod and its “Shuffle Songs” feature, I worked hard to make that little device into the radio station I always long for, the radio station that already existed to a large degree in my collegiate past. I adored the vastness and variety of our music library at the college radio station, which afforded the DJs the chance to theoretically tap into every conceivable genre and subgenre of music, especially if they were artful explorers of the … Continue reading One for Friday: Happy Hate Me Nots, “Things Wearing Thin”
Coffee for Two 