The 1980 Listening Post - The Feelies - Crazy Rhythms

The Feelies - Crazy Rhythms

#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

The 1986 Listening Post - The Feelies - The Good Earth

The Feelies - The Good Earth

#189/1354

May 1986

The Feelies

The Good Earth

Genre: Jangle Rock

4 out of 5

Highlights:

On the Roof

The High Road

The Good Earth

I have a confession to make and it’s one that I find very hard to admit. After all, I am from New Jersey, I came of age in the “college radio” era and I consider myself well versed in that era’s music. Or at least, versed. 

I didn’t listen to Crazy Rhythms by The Feelies until around 2009. 

I know. I know.

Once I did, I listened to it about 100 times that year. It’s remarkable.

So remarkable and fresh and different that I never listened to another Feelies record, convinced was I that they wouldn’t be able to recreate that magic. 

I’m right. This isn’t nearly as magical. Instead, with Peter Buck at the helm, it’s a bit pedestrian in its approach and songwriting. 

But the sound and those songs, much as they sound like more accessible REM, are rich and warm and Holsapplely great. 

Instead of being “The Boy With Perpetual Nervousness Pt. 2”, “The Last Roundup” sounds like Violent Femmes. With much much less angst and extra…jug band? Too bad. And “Slipping Into Something” makes them sound like a one trick pony. Ugh!

This is a case of “I want more of what they did before but I also don’t want them to completely repeat themselves but if they veer too far I won’t like it!!!!”

This is The Feelies’ Reckoning to REM’s Murmur. But, unlike that record, there’s little need for this. It doesn’t add to the conversation. Not that it’s bad. Just redundant. 

https://music.apple.com/us/album/the-good-earth/328881450

Blind FlashBack: The Feelies - Crazy Rhythms

Blind Flashback is a new feature. It might go in depth, it very well might not. It may cease to exist in a heartbeat. But for the time being, it's here and we should enjoy it. 

;)

This is where I take a classic album that I SHOULD have heard, that I SHOULD know about, but, completely missed my attention. 

Thanks to Spotify, I've been able to rectify that.




The Feelies - Crazy Rhythms 1980

The title actually says it all. This is all herky jerky rhythms and jangle. The roots for everything R.E.M., Aztec Camera and a host of 80s bands can be found, sort of, in here. This is also ground zero for alternative music.

At once impenetrable and accessible, the first thing I noticed was how difficult it was for me to give over to the album. It took time for me to realize that these are as much mood pieces as they are post-punk songs. Is it Penguin Cafe Orchestra? Or is it Talking Heads?
Is it Jangle Pop? or is it No-Wave?

Yes.

The album cover screams "NEW WAVE" but the music is something entirely different. Something that I've never heard before and never since. And yet, it's all familiar.

The percussion is as important to the music in a way that percussion almost wasn't to many New Wave bands. And yet, it was VITAL to Adam and the Ants and Bow Wow Wow. But, in that case, it was a fad, aping African beats. Anton Fier IS tribal beats. And...crazy rhythms.

If Kraftwerk was a guitar band, they might have made an album like this. But they weren't. And they weren't from Suburban New Jersey.

if Jonathan Richman had a full band to play off of HE might have come up with this.  But he didn't.

I could go on and on. I had an album called "Red Snerts", which you can search the web for if you're interested in more about it. It was cheap at some record store in NY when I was 15. It featured New Wave bands of Indianapolis. Many of them sounded like they wanted to be The Feelies. But none of them got it quite right because The Feelies were also, weirdly, a party band. If your party was filled with pogo-ing nerds.

This is a spectacular piece but also one of those records I'm sort of glad I didn't hear in 1980. Because I wouldn't be able to discover it now.

Grade: A+