Tonight’s the Night is ragged, bleak, weird. It must have come as a complete shock to label executives hoping for more mellow classics along the lines of “Heart of Gold.” It sat unreleased for two years.
Yes, Teenage Fanclub is incredibly consistent, but there’s a huge amount of sonic variety on this album; it’s easy to imagine the guys spending five years saying “how about if we add banjo here?”
The original material is practically irrelevant; what matters is that Maherr has crafted seductively dark and textured swathes of sound.
Simone recasts ancient blues songs by Memphis Minnie and Kansas Joe McCoy to create the epic opening track “Levee/1927.”
Rock is often called the music of rebellion, but rarely is it so true as here. Koes Bersaudara ended up in jail for three months in 1965 for playing Beatles songs in their concert sets.
Morrissey cited them as a favorite, but really, who doesn’t like them? Their 1988 debut album Lovely, with its hit single “Crash,” still sounds great, as does the follow-up, Pure. Lovely showed more musical range than much of the competition.
This soundtrack for Marc Craste’s animated film Varmints is absolutely beautiful, of course, yet with an austere elegance and the occasional dissonant edge.
The fertility and innovation of the Athens, GA music scene in the late ’70s/early ’80s is legendary (B-52s, Pylon, Love Tractor, R.E.M.). Now, in the wake of DFA’s wonderful Pylon reissues, Acute, which has long had an interest in that period if not that locale, blesses us with more brilliant material from that time and place.
There’s a buzz about this 1974 album among collectors of vintage psychedelia and prog-rock; quite a rarity, the original LPs — only 200 pressed — were supposedly going for as much as $1000 in online auctions (the highest I saw was $800).
This album was inspired by Merritt’s image of ’60s folk music – big-production folk with dazzlingly complex arrangements.