#137
by Jim Erbe
The Feelies
Crazy Rhythms
Genre: Musical Edging
Allen’s Rating:5 out of 5
Jim’s Rating: 5 out of 5
Highlights :
The Boy with the Perpetual Nervousness
Fa Cé-La
Loveless Love
Forces at Work
Crazy Rhythms
Requisite ‘80’s Cover:
“Everybody’s Got Something Hide (Except Me and My Monkey)” is stripped down and sped up to nearly double-time. Is it necessary? No, not all. Is it fun? Delightfully so.
The re-release of the album includes “Paint It Black”, which is obviously tacked on and features a different line-up of Feelies. It’s good, but unnecessary.
To be honest, I struggled with this review.
That’s not an indictment of the quality of the music, this album is great. The songs are sparse, almost utilitarian. The lyrics are simple and direct, or else nearly unintelligible (I’m looking at you “Forces at Work”). But underneath it all is a pulsating current of potential energy that is deliciously unsettling. These songs put you on edge and keep simultaneously anxious to get to the end and hoping that you can stay in this feeling forever.
It’s the musical equivalent of being in your early twenties and wanting to do EVERYTHING, but having no clue how to achieve any of it.
It’s the musical equivalent of…well…you know.
But that’s not why I’m struggling here.
This album is the Rosetta Stone of Jangle Pop for me. Every fiber of my being wants to strap on my pretentious jackass cap and go on and on about how this album changed me. How it allowed me to hear and enjoy bands like The Talking Heads and R.E.M. and even Sonic Youth. And how I unsuccessfully argued in a fifteen-page term paper/rant that the four-song mini-set that The Feelies played as the High School Reunion Band in Jonathan Demme’s Something Wild was the best use of diegetic sound in the history of cinema…
But I’m not going to do that. Instead, I’ll strap on my regular jackass cap and do what everyone else facing a deadline and impenetrable case of writer’s block does. Outsource it.
I reached out to my nephew, he’s twenty-six. He was raised by on a steady diet on 1960’s era Latin jazz, exclusively…no pop, no rock, no rap...just Antônio Carlos Jobim, Sérgio Mendes and the like. Why? No clue. I think maybe my brother was running some sort of Skinner Box experiment. It’s a mystery.
About five years ago, he asked for this album for Christmas. I jumped the chance to be the cool (and maybe a little cheap) uncle. I bought him Crazy Rhythms to inject a little modern music into his life.
And now, I asked him why he wanted it in the first place.
Apparently, “Fa Cé-La” came up on a random streaming playlist (thank you wacky Pandora algorithms), he was attracted to the experimental percussion and jangly guitar. The cool-awkward lyrics really appealed to him, too. The album has become one of his favorites and he revisits it at least once a month. Moreover, his musical tastes have grown. He now listens to bands like The Pixes, Nil Lara, Dinosaur Jr., Yo La Tengo and Vampire Weekend and mostly dusts off the Brazil ’66 when his dad comes to visit.
So, not particularly insightful, but it is nice to see that thirty-five years later this album is still working its magic as a gateway drug to other acts.
As for highlights, this album is full of them. I’m tempted to just recommend the whole the thing from beginning to end. It’s forty minutes well spent.
But if I’m doing my due diligence, I want to call out Forces at Work. It breaks my two cardinal rules of rock albums—no tracks longer that five minutes (it clocks in at a spritely 7:10) and no instrumentals (the lyrics are garbled and buried so far under the rest of the song, they are almost non-existent)—and still it manages to be my favorite song of the album.
The singles “Fa Cé-La” and “The Boy with the Perpetual Nervousness” are tight and serve as good introductions the band, just ask my nephew.
And, of course, “Crazy Rhythms” and “Loveless Love” hold a special place in my heart for participating in the four-song mini-set that is the best use of diegetic sound in the history of cinema…
I should go now.
https://open.spotify.com/album/4CoeBURVPhdWAq7AN7x7R6?si=7DkrFC0XST-g-PGwvMtKxQ
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