A.C. Newman: Get Guilty (2009)

(Matador)

RECOMMENDED

The first time I listened to Get Guilty, I dismissed it almost right away as going too far in the "record collector rock" direction suggested by some of Carl Newman's material with the New Pornographers. When I listen to Mass Romantic and Twin Cinema and trip out on their pure and ample pleasures, there's this feeling in the back of my mind -- I get it with Beulah and Apples in Stereo records as well -- that the songs are just ever-so-slightly close to going past chorus and hook-filled pop bliss into being just, well, annoying. The tension generated from teetering on that edge and rarely falling over gives the band a lot of their spunky, outrageous appeal, solving a problem the Cars struggled with throughout their post-debut career (they ended up making their music overly anonymous in reaction). It doesn't help that Guilty is Newman's first real project to surface after the Pornographers' Challengers, an underrated and actually quite lovely album but still an undeniable game-changer and turnaround for them, with a hint of parade's-gone-by heartbreak and loss reminiscent of early-'80s Kinks. Album centerpiece "Prophets" comes across as a direct sequel to that flawed LP, but its strangely uneven, memorable but difficult chorus calls another UK luminary immediately to mind: Paul McCartney.

More specifically, Paul McCartney in the '70s. The most apt comparison for the way Get Guilty initially came off to me is suggested by conjuring up the excited claims I made about the New Pornographers on first discovering them and thinking of their unmitigated joy and pop subservience and audience connection as our equivalent to the Beatles; they were the band that frankly made the indie rock of the 2000s come alive for me and become visibly worth my consideration. So therefore, Get Guilty reminds me of Wings... one member of the supergroup running amok, with none of the filtering his very talented fellow Pornographers usually provide, so that his skill at crafting melodies and hooks that burrow their ways into your skull and refuse to leave is more prominent than ever... but as with Wings, there's the question of whether you really want these tunes in there. The repetition of these uproariously catchy bits and pieces can come off initially as, to put in kindly, a bit grating. It's hard not to grimace at the application of Newman's pop smarts to songs as plodding as "Thunderbolts" and poorly placed opener "There Are Maybe Ten or Twelve," and a song as persuasively complex, so lovingly designed for a journey of upheaval, as "The Heartbreak Rides" deserves a far stronger chorus than the letdown nonentity provided.

Happily, Newman's second album is deceptive and intricate in ways its predecessor, the more immediately pleasurable Slow Wonder, did not approach. By a third or fourth runthrough, the sophistication and undercurrent and even the jugular pleasures of the songs, the accents that his band might have made more pronounced, come into stunning focus. One lesson: the record isn't made for headphones and needs to be played as loud as possible. Sure, Newman, like McCartney, is more difficult to love when his intensity and raw populist eccentricities are not diluted by any outside force, but his songs still have hidden treasures and subtleties to discover, which makes the record easier going as familiarity grows -- there's a lot more going on here than in Wings at the Speed of Sound or something -- and there's even something to be said for the album's misdirected "bigness" and its immensely charming fliching before its own hedonism, the good-time rock & roll clichés meeting with nice-guy hesitation.

Newman rounds out his lineup variously with the ever-reliable Jon Wurster, appealingly Neko Case-like backing vocalist Nicole Atkins, and most interestingly, Lawrence's Mates of State, a band that's made a career out of toying with pop structure to render it twisted and unrecognizable but still subliminally pleasurable, an appropriate correspondence for the songwriting here that would never occur in a New Pornos setting. Note the way that "Like a Hitman Like a Dancer" tosses halting rhythms on an NPs-like arrangement. On "Submarines of Stockholm," Newman and cohorts add dynamic extremism and a defiant (if slightly dated, maybe on purpose) Midwestern college rock sound to a tune that's otherwise indistiguishable from the New Pornographers. Newman still has a taste for pop gimmicry to which he totally gives in on "Elemental," complete with well-timed falsetto, but the new crew gives him license to cut loose on the unexpected British Invasion stomper "All of My days and All of My Days Off," which degenerates into a lovely singalong worthy of his greatest work.

The second half of Get Guilty changes things up a bit; the songs are stronger and come on less empathically, offering more room to breathe, with a heretofore unexplored (at least, as far as I can remember) Brian Wilson fixation that manifests itself quite gorgeously on "The Palace at 4 AM." The track's towering intensity marks a clear debt to the Wrecking Crew (and there seems to be a bit of Hal Blaine-infested Wurster drumming on "The Changeling" as well), while the Smile-like "Young Atlantis" is such a standout it scarcely seems to belong on the record. The sweet string arrangement, the vocal sophistication, and the feel of an extremely softened Pornographers track add up to an injecion of something that seems outside Guilty's emotional scope, and indeed outside of the pleasure-upon-pleasure devotion of much of Newman's work to date. On reflection, it's surprising that the following year's NP return Together did not move farther in this direction. More reflection of its sort could prove revitalizing.

But hey, a Wings album isn't necessarily a bad thing; "The Changeling (Get Guilty)" is a triumph, building drama with its very '70s Paul-Linda-Denny solidity. McCartney wasn't always hard to listen to in the '70s, and he was always interesting... and always impeccably skilled. I was immediately crazy for The Slow Wonder, but that was tempered by a feeling that it was Carl Newman on autopilot -- that he could've written and performed it without more than a modicum of effort and it would've still been just as strong. In many ways, I prefer the trickier and much more difficult Get Guilty; it's almost too much at times, like an over-the-top disaster flick, but that seems to be a function of who Newman is. Perhaps it feels more endearing because it's so personal. You can hear when he's pushing himself, and that always manifests with the New Pornographers in the feeling of sheer joy and smart tweakery that made them the astounding band they were at their peak, and still are if you catch them live on a night like we did last June. That version of ringleader A.C. Newman guest stars here in "The Collected Works" -- bouncy, feverish and ferocious, and just a little bit back-of-the-room dorky. Here's to seeing and hearing where the dork takes it from here.

[SEE ALSO:]
The Slow Wonder (2004)

PJ Harvey: Let England Shake (2011)

(Island)

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

I don't know if Let England Shake is the best rock LP ever made about World War I; believe it or not, it has at least one stiff competitor. But I know this -- it is a special and remarkable thing, a record of enough grace and intelligence to transcend any pop boundaries it brings with it, enough sophistication and passion to make any number of other brilliant and enjoyable songs and albums on the current landscape sound lacking, even silly. It sounds and feels like a classic, and potentially like a crown jewel in a two-year period crowded with exquisite albums, and all you want to do when it ends is hear it again.

Polly Jean Harvey's imagery in tackling the horrific loss of an entire generation in the Great War ("Weighted down with silent dead / I fear our blood won't rise again"), intermingling it with jabs of modern warfare, was informed by Eliot and Goya, by interviews with Iraq vets and stories of Gallipoli. (This review is accidentally timed with ANZAC Day. I honestly did not know until moments ago that April 25 was the anniversary.) But listening to the album conjures up cinematic images for me, the unforgiving, color-filtered bleakness of Elem Klimov's Come and See or the oppressively sparse disorientation of Andrei Tarkovsky's Stalker, the oblique beauty of An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge or a book of Civil War battlefield photographs. All the same, as its brilliantly straightforward but poetic lyrics periodically suggest, these songs are made for a personal struggle, even as the fog of war permeates them.

The dichotomy, indeed, of this music's immense pleasures -- its addictive spaciousness and brevity -- and its cloud-covered darkness, akin to the work of Harvey's onetime lover Nick Cave, lends it much of its urgency, like the Velvet Underground's deliberately unresolved conflicts of reassurance and chaos. There are times when the music absolutely shimmers, occasionally just before it gives way to an all-encompassing (but no less stunning) dread; witness the deeply affecting pillow of comfort in "On Battleship Hill" falling away to stark dread. The title cut's twisted curiosity cheerfully invites a boy to descend into the bowels of "the fountain of death." This ingenious use of traditionalism reaches its peak on "The Words That Maketh Murder," morbidly bouncy traditional folk that -- along with much of the album -- evokes a modern spin on the sea chanty, or the murder ballad. No novelty, this, as it's most chilling: "Flies swarming everyone / Over the whole summit peak / Flesh quivering in the heat / This was something else again / I fear it cannot be explained." And by the time it quotes Eddie Cochran's "Summertime Blues," it's such a warm injection of humanity into the breathless story as to render it a rapturous rock & roll moment. Very seldom is this war music in any obvious fashion; even the songs that sort of march, like "Bitter Branches," do it upside down, and for all the warlord chanting on "Written on the Forehead," it feels in the end like a cry against the darkness.

The classicist music is playful as often as unsettling (current single "The Glorious Land" verges on new wave), but seldom lacks a vicious bite -- the wry quasi-national anthem "The Last Living Rose" sarcastically romanticizes ("Take me back to beautiful England / And the grey, damp filthiness of ages, and battered books") against a disturbing, claustrophobic performance. For all the airy precision and economy of the songs, for all their airtight composition, they are nothing without Harvey's bending, teasing, evocatively belted vocals. Nearly as striking, and just as vital to the album's success, is the male chorus of backing vocals provided by her band on several tracks, which adds a fascinating dimension and fills out the sound into something roomier, new, scary.

That voice, those backing voices, the sad brass, the watery foreboding, the easy humanist depth suggestive of Patti Smith at her peak, and alarming eloquence -- "We got up early / washed our faces / walked the fields / and put up crosses / Passed through the damned mountains / went hellwards / and some of us returned / and some of us did not" -- would be enough to make this a terrific mood piece, a turn-the-lights-out and have-a-drink-and-lament experience, but it's considerably more, for Harvey tops the grand achievement with a parade of memorable songs that don't even necessarily need the context, much as it enhances them. The electric guitar stab on the persuasively hushed "In the Dark Places" would have immediate impact regardless, and this holds true for everything, especially the shambolic, drama-building "England" (capturing a stirring double-track vocal by Harvey going mental) and the crushingly sad, haunting, vulnerable "Hanging in the Wire," its piano a note of gorgeous desperation, its words beyond hope:

Walker's in the wire
Limbs point upwards
There are no birds singing
The white cliffs of Dover
There are no trees to sing from
Walker cannot hear the wind
Far off symphony
To hear the guns beginning

The male chorus is used most effectively on "Words That Maketh Murder," potentially tied with "Hanging in the Wire" as the best cut, and the stirring folk eulogy "The Colour of the Earth," on which Harvey resigns herself to the background, as a mere bystander as the tale is told:

Louis was my dearest friend
Fighting in the ANZAC trench
Louis ran forward from the line
I never saw him again
Later in the dark
I thought I heard Louis' voice
Calling for his mother, then me
But I couldn't get to him
He's still up on that hill
20 years on that hill
Nothing more than a pile of bones
But I think of him still
If I was asked I'd tell
The colour of the earth that day
It was dull and browny red
The colour of blood, I'd say.

Ray Charles: Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music (1962)

(ABC)

!!! A+ RECORDING !!!

"If you ever want to see a grown man cry," the nice record store clerk told me when I bought this LP, "put this one on. Get ready for some schmaltzy strings." He glanced at the tracklist on the back and pointed to a couple of specific songs. "Yeah. This one and this one. Every time."

Popular music has its artistic elements, and certainly deserves the respect that we afford art. But it also has a utility, a utility that trumps its loftier pretensions. All those Jackie Gleason mood music records had a function, served a need. 1962 was before anything mattered in pop music except what the people would use; that such mentality served up a recording as unassumingly, achingly beautiful as this seems like a miracle until you consider that it's specifically the Thalbergian concern for emotional impact that gives Modern Sounds such immediacy. Over the top like Paul Anka, sung with the respect and individual spin that an older singer might have afforded an album of true standards, the album's defiantly populist heartstring-tuggery hits where it hurts -- it means to mark a moment, a sorrow, a blissful wallowing, and it nails it. Every second is felt and genuine.

Decades now past Charley Pride, we understandably fail to appreciate the synthesis of R&B and C&W, and in a youth music context built by Elvis, such aural fusion was nothing special. But as interpretation, the record was extraordinary: confident, freewheeling, respectful but almost ruthlessly nonconformist. Charles is clearly moved by the songs, but spins them into what amount to original compositions; the bounce he applies to "Bye Bye Love" and "Hey Good Lookin'" have virtually nothing to do with the Everlys or Hank Williams. "Half as Much," also once recorded by Williams, could easily be one of Ray's mid-'50s jazz numbers; he hisses and begs despite himself against the album's hottest bed of horns, though "Just a Little Lovin'" approaches it, verging on big band.

It must be said, those bright moments bookend a lot of elegant darkness. It begins with the first tearjerker, the lushly arranged (ridiculous strings and chorus become somehow profound) Eddy Arnold oddity "You Don't Know Me," ingeniously engineered for the wistful lost-love dark nights of the soul -- but hear it at the right depressive moment and you might not even want to get better.

For all the fanfare Modern Sounds has gained over the years, past it already being positioned at the peak of Charles' career, the concentration has always been on its Civil Rights-period innovation, its florid sound. But so much, indeed nearly all, of what makes it such a peerlessly brilliant and monumentally sad recording is the responsibility of Ray Charles' voice. His singing drips with character and sorrow, a cockeyed sweetness and resignation he can pour over the most banal lyric to make it an immovable truth:

I'll just live my life in dreams of yesterday
Those happy hours that we once knew
Though long ago, they still make me blue
They say that time heals a broken heart
But time has stood still since we've been apart

And the way he puts that shit across, it hits you suddenly. Do you realize what he's singing about? He's talking about the feeling that you've just been crushed, your heart in pieces, and there is no consolation, and hitting bottom only proves there's nothing at the bottom, and you are in love and they don't love you back and you're left to sort through the lingering threads of all that with your beer or bedsheets, and either way you're on your own. Completely. That is serious soul-stomping shit and everyone knows the feeling, everyone knows it to such an extent that it's ridiculous and trite to even mention... but if you're Ray Charles, you can bloody sing about it and everyone knows what you mean because it's not the words, not at all, it's that hint of longing -- gruff, masculine, but soft and shattered.

That's the blues, and therein lies the point of the record, that country and blues' racial divide is just so much bullshit, the despair that is this record's calling card belonging equally to them -- both far away from the excuse-making and impulse censorship of pop, both stirring in their frankness. "Worried Mind," "It Makes No Difference Now," and "Careless Love" all make the relation plain with their application of skilled traditional blues piano and stylistics to now-unrecognizable country and western. But Charles knows that such intellectualism barely registers against the immensity and tragedy of the emotions these songs capture (if not document) for their audience.

Side Two is a nearly unrelenting parade of distress. No lonely reflective night is complete without the crestfallen "Born to Lose" and broken "You Win Again"; close your eyes accompanied by either and hear Ray Charles capable of turning your bad stuff into catharsis, just carrying you away like the years between this record and you never existed. And if you really want to cement a dank Sunday night at a bar, give "I Love You So Much It Hurts" a spin and watch the lonesome types tip a glass to its eloquence. And don't tell me they don't feel a little bit better for the outlet. They do. I did. You did. The similarity of everything, you see, isn't limited to genres of music or generations of people. Jesus, it's everything. So yes, get ready for some schmaltzy strings, and get ready to cry, and get ready to start feeling better about the world you live in because a world in which something like this can be created is one worth waking up to, goddammit.

The Mountain Goats: All Eternals Deck (2011)

(Merge)

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

Read my review at Metro Times.

Check out my thoughts on the Goats' Apr. 8 show at Cat's Cradle!

R.E.M.: Chronic Town EP (1982)

(I.R.S.)

!!! A+ RECORDING !!!

Sure, R.E.M.'s first 12" release is a jangle pop record -- one of the first of its kind -- but if that were all, you could name another recording as baffling, mysterious, and seductive within its narrowly eccentric Southern dreamscape framework. If the British Invasion offered the music of outer-space creatures, this was the music of ghosts.

These songs seem to have existed always, to have been merely discovered by R.E.M., who exist here on a completely separate plan from their less auspicious debut, the Pere-Ubu-meets-B-52's new wave single "Radio Free Europe." Their music, creepy but sexy, enigmatic and painterly but invariably quick and engaging, offers layer upon bewildering layer of Byrdsian guitar, shifting, haunted textures, and joyfully anguished vocals.

R.E.M. was always obviously a southern band, but they simultaneously evoke urbania. Defying any conventional definition except that they borrowed equally from Gang of Four, the Everly Brothers, and Television, their songs are something above and beyond the widespread postpunk college rock of their day. "Carnival of Sorts," "1,000,000," and "Wolves, Lower" are like small, puzzling film strips, unlabeled and left behind in a cabinet somewhere. The songs even have a scare factor at times, and the closing track, "Stumble," immerses the listener in a completely unfamiliar environment during the bridge. Michael Stipe maintained that R.E.M.'s music was highly visual; they and producer Mitch Easter have tweaked each song, each short film, to its maximum effect, like editors in the cutting room. As a result, the intricate, precise details in the music make it an teasingly absorbing listen.

"Carnival of Sorts" is a chilling moment, capturing the paranoia of the times the way the New York groups did but in a passive, dadaist fashion that makes it both emotionally evocative and sincerely mindbending. The befuddling lyrics make it all the more personal. What's especially riveting is the way Michael Stipe not only belts out all this free-associative nonsense, but does it in a way that sounds terrifying in its insistence. You really believe every word he says no matter how much it lacks any kind of linear structure. Even Tom Verlaine managed to sound like he at least had some point to get across. Stipe has the wonderful qualities of someone who's lost it altogether, whose flashes of sanity and conventional anecdote -- in "Gardening at Night" -- last for a sentence at the most. Guitarist Peter Buck said once that Stipe's postcards were like plays without the beginning and middle. But there's a liveliness in his words.

This band's songwriting always was astonishing. Their radically unconventional musicianship -- the melodies are often in the bass from Mike Mills, the unofficial backbone of the group -- and sense of both joy and restraint allow the songs to wrap around Stipe and the listener, as if both of you are lost in the same maze.

On this EP, Bill Berry's drumming is pronounced enough that the band carries identifiable traces of new wave on the way to their college rock pantheon, but this would change by the time of the debut album and it has no negative effect whatsoever on the songs. Their surrealism allows them to confront you with freewheeling, quickly transforming emotions. A single song, like, say, "1,000,000," might be happy and sad and funny and dark and nightmarish at once. Stipe is thrilled to announce that he could live to be the title number, but all the while he's wandering through a graveyard.

In a sense, rock & roll is a quest to eradicate meaning. Of course the words can matter but they're best if they are subordinate to the music and if ultimately the complete ignorance to real-world fact and folly is what makes you throw your head back and dance. CHRONIC TOWN reminds me of "Sweet Little Sixteen" or Talking Heads' "The Great Curve" or the Beatles' "Strawberry Fields Forever," those points when things just shift and everything works perfectly, everything moves out of the way for you to surrender, and it supports you when you fall. In 1982, R.E.M. were pure rock & roll. Perhaps even more than the insistently enigmatic Murmur LP that would follow, this is the perfect capturing of R.E.M. as the strange entity that initially won hearts. It may look small but it's really gigantic, and despite its length it is remarkably close to being their finest work.

[Originally posted at my webpage in 2004.]

[SEE ALSO:]
Eponymous (1981-87)

Radiohead: The King of Limbs (2011)

(s/r)

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

Read my review at Metro Times.

As noted in the review, posted at MT the week after the LP's digital release, it was too early to fully grasp the layering and complexity here. Since then, I have only fallen more in love with the album. Just to be clear, this is precisely the music Radiohead should be making right now: intriguing but not exclusively cerebral body music that bounces and shakes seductively. It's the most addictive record of 2011 thus far, and it may be the best. I wasn't on board with the post-Kid A output, but now I feel like this is my band again.

[SEE ALSO:]
In Rainbows (2007)

non-LP cuts: #

When this blog initially went online, I intended to review singles occasionally; I later decided that since individual tracks that really matter tend to be discussed in the LP reviews, there wasn't much point. But what of the tracks that aren't on reviewed albums or that belong to albums I have no real interest in hearing or reviewing? That's where this alphabetical collection comes in. Beginning today, every once in a while we will venture into the dredges of my hard drive and collection of 45s to offer some thoughts on various material that won't inspire dedicated entries... This ranges from great songs by artists whose full-lengths I don't particularly care about to curiosity items to compilation chestnuts to things I can't remember why I have to things I have strictly for DJing purposes, which should be horrendous and fun. For this punctuation section (keep in mind we are using iTunes alphabetization here) we begin, appropriately enough, with *NSync, who end up dominating this entry. (Sort of forgot I had so many of their songs on here...)

*NSync: Tearing Up My Heart (1997): HIGHLY RECOMMENDED - Most definitely the best male group of the late '90s teen boom, *NSYNC released a couple of excellent singles, got self-aware and pretentious, and disbanded after three fluffy albums, subsequent to which their most famous member became a sexay superstar and another one admitted he was gay. A perfect career trajectory, and more historically reverent than they could possibly have realized -- at the time they were active, rock & rollers who were listening to terrible neo-grunge bands like Creed and Limp Bizkit bitched endlessly about the popularity of groups like *NSYNC, but in retrospect this seems to have been born out of the same brainless homophobia that plagued disco in the '70s, and lo and behold, Justin Timberlake is now artistically celebrated for returning something like disco to the mainstream arena. I reject comparisons to NKOTB, who truly were half-baked and awful, and Britney Spears, who never could sing like these fuckers, out of hand. I only have half a dozen *NSYNC songs in my library but they are primo bubblegum, I don't care what you think. To me, this is their best cut -- please note its conservative length -- and if you want, I can tell you the reasons it's different from the execrable teen pop of ten years prior and closer to the wonderful bubblegum of the '60s. In the first few seconds, the song's more evocative of the explosion -- early the same decade -- of a gay-centric dance club movement (La Bouche, CeCe Peniston, Haddaway, C+C Music Factory, etc.) than it is of the typical cult of personality that surrounds teen pop acts. Additionally, these guys actually have decent voices, and the hook is tremendous, and doesn't come off as stupid even all these years later so much as just easily applicable to whatever catchy occasion. This kind of rousing stupidity is pure and ageless. I wouldn't put it on a level with "Wannabe" by the Spice Girls, who are probably the most accomplished band in the history of teen pop, but I don't apologize for thinking this is more rock & roll than "Freak on a Leash."

*NSync: I Want You Back (1998): RECOMMENDED - The Backstreets did more with the exact same backing track, the Jacksons did more with the exact same title, but in a certain mindset, surrender is inevitable.

*NSync: I Drive Myself Crazy (1998): HIGHLY RECOMMENDED - It's pure ignorance to deny yourself any groove this hot. I don't blame people for being afraid of *NSYNC; this video, for instance, was horrifying. In case you don't remember, it took place in a padded cell, where the members of *NSYNC were strapped in straitjackets, the consequence of the literal insanity described in the lyrics. The implication was that they were hoisted on the path toward this inevitable destruction by you, the supple female with hard nipples who wants to sleep with the members of *NSYNC, who are not permitted to touch you because Louis Pacifico or whatever the fuck his name was will castrate them and after all, you are all jailbait. But whatever, the end of the chorus is sick as all hell.

*NSync: Bye Bye Bye (2000): HIGHLY RECOMMENDED - Again, more dance-pop than teen-pop, this was never a difficult song to imagine an adult enjoying, specifically because it isn't stupid and condescending. Compare Britney Spears' "...Baby One More Time," essentially a Converse ad set to music, free of its own actual worth, engineered toward half-baked fantasy and dunderheaded, manufactured joy. "Bye Bye Bye" is interesting, sideways, subtle... I mean, not Tom Waits subtle, but way the fuck better than you think it is.

*NSync: It's Gonna Be Me (2000): RECOMMENDED - Virtually all of *NSYNC's hits are about conflict; they tended to be cathartic rather than sexual, which may be why their music has aged more gracefully than the rest of the teen-pop smorgasboard of those days. This song is the discovery of sex in all the anger and misery, a more important step upward than it seemed then. The herky-jerky chorus weirdly recalls Devo, a notion Justin Timberlake would later carry to the bank when he more or less single-handedly revitalized dance music.

*NSync: This I Promise You (2000): HIGHLY RECOMMENDED - Though I loathed New Kids on the Block, it was beyond me to deny that "Right Stuff" was a stylish danceable teddy-bear public service. What really made them contemptible was their ballads, all engineered and product placement-ready. It was easy to look past the pandering as long as there was a beat. Perversely, the '00s teen pop has the opposite issue, though it's generally a more obvious problem with the Backstreet Boys: the fast dance songs are often generic and condescending, the ballads revel in the shameless melodrama that only aging fools will deny is what they loved about the Shangri-Las and Phil Spector, precisely because teendom is itself melodramatic. Those petty problems we lose the ability to even look at can be life-or-death; they swirl around our heads and strangle us. Accidentally copping some of its melody from the Beach Boys' obscure "Where I Belong," this is absolutely peerless schlock, the only time *NSYNC bested BSB at this particular game. And the lies are inherent... there is no pandering because the growing up and forgetting all these promises is not just part of the song but indeed, it may be the point.

5000 Volts: I'm on Fire (1975) HIGHLY RECOMMENDED - The blast of demented machismo at the chorus of this completely delirious single captures disco as a filthy club subculture rather than a corporate marketing term; "I'm on Fire" seldom appeared on the Bee Gee-filled '70s compilations that used to receive perpetual promotion on Nick at Nite, because to remind audiences of it is to remind them that once this movement lived and cackled, and at an overwhelming breakneck speed. It's not soul, it's just fast and furious.

80 Drums Around the World: Caravan (1965) RECOMMENDED - (The date is approximate.) This comes to us via Capitol's inordinately enjoyable Ultra Lounge series, an ideal venture for the space age bachelor. 80 Drums made demo music for the bachelor's hi-fi set; this particular cut is awash in vibes and eventually a somewhat half-hearted Middle Eastern texture. I frankly prefer all those French Girls who can't be wrong.

This entry is subject to be supplemented as additional marginals that don't start with letters come to light!