Bang Bang Machine – Geek Love a true gem of a single, good enough to win the Festive Fifty on John Peel’s show in 1992, in fact. Whilst John Peel and his listeners are known for championing a lot of material that never gets off the ground, it’s extremely rare for a Festive Fifty winner to come out of the bag from an artist who then never receives even moderate chart success. This is precisely what happened here, though… it’s a peak most bands could only dream of reaching, and it deserves a damn sight more acclaim than a bunch of blogs on the Internet frothing about it. If I had to place money on one flop record from the nineties getting used on an advert or a television programme and then going on to sell stacks of units – this would be it. left-and-to-the-back
Manic Street Preachers – Motorcycle Emptiness began life as a shambolic 80s indie-inspired track called Go Buzz Baby Go – audibly indebted to the June Brides’ B-side Josef’s Gone – and wound up as the first evidence the Manics could succeed on the kind of scale they kept talking about in interviews: an ambitious, widescreen rock ballad that works perfectly guardian
Sugar – If I Can’t Change Your Mind As much as I am a sucker for Mould’s archetypal (and distortion charged) alterna-rock fretwork, I readily recognize that it’s an acoustic number that’s his foremost songwriting triumph from his Sugar tenure. “If I Can’t Change Your Mind” was the fourth and final single from Copper Blue. Out of that assortment of impassioned a-sides, the faultless “If I Can’t Change Your Mind” is simultaneously the most reserved and the most moving. Bright and buoyant, the song’s sparkling rhythm guitars are a reassuring ray of sunshine as Mould comes to terms with an impending breakup. “Tears fill up my eyes / I’m washed away with sorrow / And somewhere in my mind / I know there’s no tomorrow / I see you’re leaving soon / I guess you’ve had your fill”, he tells his departing lover as the truth of the situation dawns on him… the heartache and heartbreak expressed … are universal, and transcend all sexes and orientations popmatters
The Magnetic Fields – 100,000 Fireflies the dichotomy at the heart of the Magnetic Fields — in love or out of love, with sex or without sex, you won’t find happiness, and things will probably get worse — but the hell if we’ll ever stop searching stereogum
The Lemonheads – Alison’s Starting To Happen showcases Dando’s profound gift: the title is perfect, the instrumentation and arrangement unfussy but utterly alluring, and Dando’s melodic sense is simply unimpeachable. The way he changes key in the build to the final chorus as he sings “She’s the puzzle piece behind the couch that made the sky complete” is a thing of miniature wonder. Dando is one of the great melodists of guitar music of the past 30 years guardian
The Lemonheads – Confetti a carefree jangle and a knockout chorus, but lyrically it deals with the before, during and aftermath of the split of Dando’s parents louderthanwar
Nirvana – Lithium Cobain was at his best when he was merging heavy alt-rock with Beatles-inspired pop melodies—and that is exactly what “Lithium” was and remains. It’s perfect and catchy and everlasting. Cobain wrote the song about people whose vices are religion-based, specifically through the context of a heartbroken man—post-breakup—attempting to find God before killing himself. pastemagazine
Pulp – Babies sad, funny, grubby coming-of-age tale turns teenage voyeurism, unrequited lust and wince-inducing memories into one of the greatest songs of the 90s, so stark and conversational in its approach that listening to it feels – appropriately enough – like eavesdropping. It’s also got a killer tune guardian
Beat Happening – Godsend I suppose I should explain why exactly I love the album You Turn Me On as much as I do. Well, first of all, it is an extremely sweet and nice album with childish and lovey-dove lyrics that make me feel quite young again, which is honestly one of the only things I look for in music anymore because I’m now in my later … years and I miss my early childhood but we won’t go into any of that…
Of course, one of the most fascinating and interesting things about You Turn Me On is the way the band manages to create remarkably simple songs with sparse arrangements but somehow make them last for more than six minutes or more (nine minutes in the case of the wonderful “Godsend”) without it ever becoming boring or dull…
I guess what I’m really trying to say is that Beat Happening has made a truly classic record with You Turn Me On. It may not seem that way on the surface or when listened to the first several times, but its beauty and excellence becomes apparent after awhile and whatnot. I was listening to the album while I was writing this, and now that it’s over, I believe I’m going to listen to it again and become flooded with childlike wonder and nostalgia all over again. sputnikmusic
Black Tambourine – Throw Aggi Off The Bridge so long as timid young rock bands choose to hide their innermost emotions behind a foggy veil of feedback, songs like the urgently despairing “For Ex-Lovers Only”, the hypnotically propulsive “By Tomorrow”, and the giddily expressed girlfriend murder fantasy “Throw Aggi Off the Bridge” will forever stand as paragons of the form. pitchfork
Heavenly – C Is The Heavenly Option
Heavenly – So Little Deserve
I took a break from posting after my dad died at the start of last week. I said to myself that when I returned to updating this site, it would be for music that made me happy. And the music of Heavenly certainly makes me happy. It’s had that effect for more than three decades now.
The sound here defined what indie was supposed to sound like for me. I know that others call this twee, but somehow that doesn’t indicate just how robust this pop is still. There’s something resilient and stubborn (in a good way) about the whole DIY vibe here
But they are glorious, even 31 years later…“So Little Deserve” is an early indication of just how bracing Amelia’s vocals had become. It helps that the heavy chords and restless rhythmic track on this one keep things interesting on those levels too. It’s really one of this band’s very best numbers. And I’ve barely mentioned “C is the Heavenly Option” yet, you know? The band’s new video for the song should please long-time fans of this lot, and remind one yet again of how special they were. It’s twee for some, but wonderfully vital for even more of us. apessimistisneverdisappointed
Pavement – Here Depending on what you think of Pavement’s legacy and your definition of making it big, “Here” is either self-consciously prescient or self-effacingly wrong. Standing out above and beyond any other song by the group for its melancholy undertone, “Here” finds Pavement at its most poignant and vulnerable, but without losing any of its edge or humor. When Malkmus exhorts, “Come join us in a prayer / We’ll be waiting, waiting there / Everything’s ending here,” he’s reaching out in the only way Pavement knows how to, through a rallying cry that’s delivered in a world-weary whisper. It’s a touching moment that makes you realize after the fact that a palpable sentimentality was always the flipside of smirky irony for Pavement popmatters
Blur – Popscene Released ahead of what would have been their second album, it unfortunately failed to make much of an impression on a public too busy buying flannel shirts and ripped jeans to go with the grunge lifestyle. But I loved it. It sounds dirty and energetic, full of squally feedback and urgent horns. If it had been successful Blur would have been a very different band. The story that follows speaks of a band who had to all but scrap their second album and go back to the drawing board, the tracks that would have featured spread across the singles as B-sides. Select magazine once pieced together in track order the songs that would have formed this mythical album and it is so different to Modern Life is Rubbish, much more noisy and disjointed, but thrillingly dramatic and messy. Had it been a hit, I’m convinced we never would have gotten Parklife. whydidibuythat
Ride – Leave Them All Behind In which the shoegaze scores a remarkable top-10 hit. Dragging the band onto Top Of The Pops, ‘Leave Them All Behind’ saw Ride take an eight-minute, ‘Won’t Get Fooled Again’-inspired epic into the mainstream. A daring, ambitious statement, its sheer chutzpah alone would prove almost impossible to top clashmusic
Luna – Anesthesia If Galaxie 500 were from a different part of this galaxy, then Luna were from a different region of the universe psychdelicbabymag
The Sundays – Wild Horses I’m not really a huge Rolling Stones fan. However…… their cover evokes a vacuous chamber where all sound wavers and melts. All except for Harriet Wheeler’s vocals, which, instead, dance on a cloud, the quiet whispers and the plaintive and aching vocals, all call out into the wilderness, scream out to you for an embrace mylifeinmusiclists
The Cure – Friday I’m In Love I’m not saying Smith created poptimism, per se. But I am saying that he knew he could create head-rush pop anthems and they would enhance, not detract from, his artistry… Only someone who has plumbed the depths of despair that Smith has could so completely fling themselves in the polar opposite direction, eternally grateful to have made it out of the darkness and to have found a reason to never go back. theringer
Suede – The Drowners the one that started it all, Suede’s first single and as good a place as any to begin an origin story for Britpop. Coming on the heels of a Melody Maker cover touting Suede as “The Best New Band in Britain”, “The Drowners” lived up to the hype, the first of the group’s triumvirate of singles. Introduced with Simon Gilbert’s booming drums, with Bernard Butler’s guitar locking in with them, “The Drowners” is more rhythmic and grooving than the other singles from the self-titled debut, more of a sashay than a strut.
Lyrically, Brett Anderson more than made good on the androgynous polysexuality he played up in the media with his immortalized soundbite about being a “bisexual man who never had a homosexual relationship”: when Anderson suggestively croons, “When he writes the line, wrote down my spine / It says, ‘Oh, do you believe in love there?’, the possibilities, permutations, and perspectives seem endless. popmatters
Denim – Back In Denim came out at the end of 1992, at the start of Suede’s glam-driven rise. The 1970s, and its pop templates, had suddenly come in from the cold… It’s a memoir of the decade as seen by a British kid, an acting-out of boyhood superstar dreams (“Back in Denim”), and a pledge of devotion to better times. Like most of Lawrence’s projects, it relies on his slightly nasal, flat-affect voice, which can be a hard taste to acquire. But this time, Lawrence is backed by the famed producer John Leckie (Public Image Limited, the Fall), which makes the stomping, platform-booted hooks sound authentically massive. In the end, Denim came no closer to the big time than Felt, but Lawrence’s tunnel-vision dreams of the 1970s and his unashamed pop aspirations helped light Britpop’s fuse pitchfork
The Fall – Free Range a Top 40 single that had a hook big enough to end up on a TV advert for cars, but also had as impenetrable a lyric as any hit in chart history: a scholarly annotation online finds references to Nietzsche, Arthur C Clarke, a second world war anti-aircraft gun, Shakespeare, a Nazi-era German hit song, as well as a classic bit of Smith advice: “It pays to talk to no one. No one!” guardian
Spiritualized – Shine A Light It is my firm opinion that the best way to experience Spiritualized is at marathon length. Most of their albums bleed over the hour mark, and each time I’ve seen them play they’ve stretched toward double that (if not longer), which gives them so much room to illustrate the complexity and many joys of their project… Each contains multitudes and offers the same to you, should you choose it. Start with one, but you’ll be back. There’s whole universes to explore vice
Spectrum – True Love Will Find You In The End A cover of a Daniel Johnston tune, the track becomes a perfectly happy, utterly sweet, and sparkling psych zone of a song, with keyboards mostly leading the way with a bit of guitar around the corners, and Sonic’s singing is some of his warmest ever allmusic
Spectrum – How You Satisfy Me a retrograde journey (albeit a gorgeously dappled one) backward into Summer of Love popcraft. Songs like “How You Satisfy Me” are colored in bright dayglo tones by Kember’s distorted organ and Geoff Donkin’s insistently exuberant drumming trouserpress
The Nightblooms – Butterfly Girl for most of the song, the band lets Sprikkelman and bassist Petra van Tongeren sing with scant accompaniment, though the constant low-level feedback hints at what happens when the Nightblooms do let loose trouserpress
Guided By Voices – Over the Neptune/Mesh Gear Fox “G-B-V! G-B-V! G-B-V!” chants the raucous crowd at the beginning of the nearly six-minute epic… As we’d discover later, the “crowd” was the band themselves using echo and a little striving wish fulfillment to imagine the kind of frenzied excitement that would greet the band a few years later. The track itself is like many of the group’s forays into prog-rock: blazing mini-songs (technically two, if the title is to be trusted, though three by structure) strung together like a “Stars on 45” for the British invasion (non-Beatles edition), starting restless and rough, turning bright and hopeful, and then concluding in a cascade of reverbing choral tranquility. slantmagazine
Sonic Youth – 100% plays like a relic of its era. Trebly feedback rides atop a lurching beat that never quite settles into a pocket… “100%” perfectly captures their marketable edginess. pastemagazine
The Jesus and Mary Chain – Far Gone And Out As a kid getting into alternative guitar pop music this just seemed so perfect, so right, so cool. Like it could have been made in a garage, but it’s just got that little bit more of a pop tinge to it, in all the right ways. They hey, hey, heys, the beats, the guitars going full on fuzz overdrive at all the right times… Most of all I just love how this comes across as the sound of a band having fun. “I can’t explain, exactly what I’m doing, standing in the rain, Don’t do it for fun, do it if you feel it, kiss it on the tongue” everythingflowsglasgow
The Wedding Present – Come Play With Me By 1992, the cult of Gedge was so powerful that they managed to match Elvis’s record of having 12 top 40 UK hits in one year, putting out a single a month as part of their Hit Parade project. It was a roaring success, the limited edition singles selling out on the day of release across the country by June, and Gedge becoming a snook-cocking Top of the Pops mainstay. For July’s Flying Saucer, the band appeared in radiation suits, Muppet masks and goggles, and ended the song spinning slowly on the spot. But in many ways The Hit Parade capped their fanbase at the 10,000 dedicated disciples willing to camp out, dash across the country or fight like the blackest of black Fridays to secure each copy. I certainly spent 1 June racing between Kent record shops hunting down an elusive 7in of California like a desperate, depressive Anneka Rice. guardian
Brian – You Don’t Want A Boyfriend Just lovely. Resigned sadness of guy saying goodbye to girlfriend.and realising “maybe you hurting me wasn’t a bad thing.” Jangly guitar and strings at the end. Don’t own it. Remember hearing it. Anyone remember this. Think they were Irish… howdoesitfeel
Another Sunny Day – New Year’s Honours On Friday nights I like to drink beer with my mates in our pub. Amid the debates about sport and the usual old jokes / stories that we have all heard a 1000 times but still find ridiculously funny (as only inebriated men can) we sometimes address things that genuinely matter, that are genuinely important, to such an extent that it is not beyond the wildest stretches of the imagination to presume that President Trump and that Russian fella who got him the gig, probably talk about similar things.
One such such topic that my beer addled friends and I discussed, that I am convinced would have been addressed by the Donald and Mr Putin over a beer when less important matters of state had been addressed for the evening is ‘What Sarah Records band is most typical of the whole Sarah Records aesthetic’.
Now Donald may well have flicked his poerfectly lacquered hair off his orange brow and placed a temporary cessation on his favourite hobby of cursing Mexican chaps, in order to argue the point that Brighter were ‘the’ Sarah Records band. Which would obviously cause Mr P to stop the training preparation for his World Cup hooligan squad and counter with Blueboy, thus risking immediate nuclear reaction or at least a ‘your fired’ from ‘The Don’.
Luckily for us, despite the dutch courage emanating from several weak lagers, my friends and I were eventually able to reach consensus that Another Sunny Day were probably the most ‘Sarah type band’ of all the Sarah Records bands. The initial reason for this is that ASD were effectively a Harvey Williams side project of whose most prominent successes at the time were emanating from another Sarah band in The Field Mice, which incidentally, is rumoured to be Theresa May’s (British PM) choice of music which she takes a rare moment off from avoiding the implementation of Brexit.
Another Sunny Day may not have received the plaudits that Trump, Putin and May’s ‘Sarah band’ favourites did…but if me and my pub mates were running the world, they would! janglepophub
Brighter – Killjoy Brighter were mostly content to stay within the bounds of the sound they sketched out on their first release: ringing guitars, drum machine, melodic bass, and above all Keris Howard’s almost painfully personal lyrics and bedsit perfect voice allmusic
Stereolab – Peng! 33 an ebullient blast of speaker-blown fuzz in which Sadier coos, “Magical things are happening in this world,” exclaim
Pavement – Frontwards In retrospect, “Frontwards” feels so classically Pavement that it’s hard to believe the fan-favorite never wound up on a proper studio album. A cut from the band’s 1992 EP Watery, Domestic, “Frontwards” sees Malkmus reminisce on his upbringing in 1970s Stockton, California: “People [were] just starting to smoke, and chicks with those combs and feathered hair and those tight jeans that make camel toes, and migrants, farm workers and stuff,” he explained in 2015. “To me, it’s evocative of that. I can really see those images in my mind.”
With its simplistic composition and structure, “Frontwards” is by no means Pavement’s most sophisticated song. But as it chugs along with a sort of freewheeling bliss, it serves as a testament to Pavement’s no-frills approach that served them well throughout their career. If a song so straightforward can feel this good, it’s nothing short of magic.
Yo La Tengo – Upside-Down represents the path not taken, since it was after that fork in the road that Yo La Tengo took on the identity that has been its profile ever since. Still, “Upside-Down” proves that Yo La Tengo wouldn’t have gone wrong had it decided to be a straight-up alt-rock band, with the track’s just-grungy-enough riffs and head-bobbing boy-girl vocals popmatters
Leonard Cohen – The Future just moral decay and the rise of the worst of man. It brings to mind Cormac McCarthy’s end-of-the-world novel The Road, published over a decade later, in the warped ruins of it all; how Cohen, over the slinky and rolling riff, talks of the “blizzard of the world” that’s destroying all in its path, warns ominously how “things are going to slide”, sneers at the wannabe poets “tryin’ to sound like Charles Manson” and babbles about faded memories of seeing “nations rise and fall / I’ve heard their stories, heard them all”. But what really makes it tick is how much he’s enjoying being the nihilistic fly in the ointment. “Give me crack and anal sex!” he barks. “Give me back the Berlin Wall / Give me Stalin and St Paul.” Terrible, terrifying fun guardian
PJ Harvey – Sheela-Na-Gig it’s still fearless, forever timeless. It’s both vicious blues-punk – a noise that’s bruised and battered, murky and muscular – and a fuck-you manifesto: a subversion of stereotypes, a takedown of male hypocrisy and twisted expectations of femininity. Sheela-Na-Gig (a title inspired by old carvings, often found on Romanesque churches in Britain, of naked women with exaggerated vulvas) is powered by a fierce, ferocious riff that helter-skelters this way and that so giddily you almost miss the sneer in Harvey’s voice, or the wicked taunt in her words. Here, she’s trouncing some prudish man who deems her appetite for sex to be sordid. “Look at these, my child-bearing hips / Look at these my ruby-red ruby lips,” she breathes, poking fun at a million man-made fantasies of female submissiveness, as he runs for the hills lest he be corrupted by sins of the flesh: “He said, ‘Wash your breasts, I don’t want to be unclean / He said, ‘Please take those dirty pillows away from me.’” What a snivelling coward theguardian
Velocity Girl – My Favourite Thing a pop gem enveloped in sheets of white noise trouserpress
The Candyskins – Wembley a blast of fiery, Buzzcockian tuneage trouserpress
The Boo Radleys – Lazy Day It had a killer instrumental chorus driven by a super-catchy lead guitar line, gorgeously minimal vocals, and a tendency to shift abruptly — especially on the verses — between pretty acoustic strumming and walls of distorted feedback noise. I was delighted to discover the song, and crestfallen to realize that it was only a little over 90 seconds long… but if there’s one thing Martin Carr always understood, it was the fundamentals of pop songwriting. Make your point and get out. Leave ’em wanting more offyourradar
The Flaming Lips – Talkin’ ‘Bout The Smilin’ Deathporn Immortality Blues (Everyone Wants To Live Forever) a fast paced psychedelic punk jam with noisy guitars & the comically low pitched “woop woop, woop woop, woop woop woooooop” hook. Once this is stuck in your head, it’s there forever. I can think of worse fates. scruffytheory
Morrissey – We Hate It When Our Friends Become Successful That the cheerful, winsome melodic rush of “We Hate It When Our Friends Become Successful” belies its fundamentally toxic message is likely not a coincidence. Morrissey has often contemplated his contemporaries and critics, but rarely had anything overly cruel to say. This particular paean likely addressed the ascendant successes of fellow Manchester acts like the Stone Roses or Happy Mondays, while allowing as an aside, “It should have been me.” stereogum
Lush – Nothing Natural Lush’s first full-length album, Spooky is a relic of a past which no longer exists, but which incessantly reminds you that it once did… a dialogue, a certain way of looking at the world, which has everything to do with the tone, the sound, the feel, and often nothing to do with actual meaning. The meaning is conveyed in the delivery.
Spooky operates on the listener like any good story. It’s got a beginning, a middle, and an end. It ebbs and flows, and you feel the time passing as you listen: it starts with a sunrise and ends at nighttime. There is a warm and comfortable blanket of desolation spread over the whole affair, a thick production (provided by the Cocteau Twins’ Robin Guthrie), heavy with effects, laden with harmonies and angelic, nearly indecipherable vocals. As you start to listen you wonder, “what are they talking about?” and as it ends you ask yourself, “does it even matter?” you feel the time passing as you listen
The album works best as an album, though there are perfect songs sprinkled like glitter throughout… “Nothing Natural,” which drones on for nearly six minutes, sums up their weird energy better than any other piece on the album. Still, it is best to take it as a whole organism, to let it soak through your bones, one song melting into another, at as loud of a volume as your delicate ears can manage. There are weird bits of noise — random echoes and hints of laughter — throughout the Lush back catalogue which can only be accessed in the right light, with the right ears, at the right moment. Such was their magic.
… when you strip away the effects and the production, you are often left with breathlessly perfect pop songs about dogs or cars, but while you’re listening, it’s easy to wonder if this music was even made by humans. It’s shocking to dig through the layers and hear a structure of verse, chorus, verse, with two guitars, bass, and drums. It would be easy to allow that realization to drag you down to mundane, dry vocalled reality. On the other hand, what more true expression of loss is there than the one that you feel for a dog? theverge
Adorable – Sunshine Smile starts all chiming and jangly while frontman, Pete Fijalkowski waxes poetic about his subject’s smile. Then, it gets all noisy, guitars move to crunchy and then, seamlessly back to reverberating chimes. The bridge gets all quiet with some taps at the cymbals and Pete goes quiet, too (“how does it feel to feel?”) and the feeling explodes and it all races to a crashing crescendo. It’s got Creation all over it.
The Lightning Seeds – The Life of Riley a phrase that dates back to the early years of the 20th century… Ian Broudie, at the tail end of the same century, took the phrase and turned into a song that didn’t stray too far from the original sentiments but was cleverly worded as a tribute to his new-born son who had been christened Riley. Twenty five years on, and Riley Broudie is part of Lightning Seeds, appearing on stage alongside his dad. It must be a strange feeling to perform a song written specifically for him. thenewvinylvillain
Carter USM – The Only Living Boy in New Cross I feel guilty because admitting I like Carter USM is admitting the 18-year-old me was more honest, and more open-hearted, than the me which didn’t like them through most of my twenties. They’re part of my history as a pop fan – and their story’s interesting beyond that, as an example of what happens to one-trick ponies when the rides dry up (it was listening to The Streets that got me thinking about Carter again, as it happens). I wouldn’t recommend them to you – a lot of the time they were rubbish, after all – but I won’t apologise either. And if I had the chance to do it all again? I’d change nothing. freakytrigger
The Beautiful South – Old Red Eyes Is Back While other bands would come up with drinking songs, Heaton and Rotheray would reach back into the sensibility of blues and country music, and create drunkards’ songs. This one is a painful chronicle of the alcoholics you might find down the pub or in the bookie’s, the sort of people with nothing left for them but the bottom of a bottle. As ever, though, they don’t stop on the surface, instead getting right under the skin and into the mind of the drinker in question – they can’t help wondering what it is that made him that way… Red, of course, dies at the end. pennyblackmusic
The Orchids – Thaumaturgy means miracle working, and it’s precisely what the Orchids do in the course of four minutes, because it’s very Scottish, very Sarah Records, yet also dubby, free and loose pantry.wordpress
Tindersticks – Patchwork in a world of Nirvana and Ned’s Atomic Dustbin, Tindersticks strode besuited, tipsily romantic and touting singles of mordant lushness… eight million half-arsed fads on, there’s still no-one like them nme
The Darling Buds – Sure Thing The third album, Erotica. It had the misfortunate to come out a mere two weeks before Madonna’s astronomically higher-profile album of the same name, though that gaffe did ensure a deluge of mistaken purchases of the wrong Erotica would frequent used bins around the world… Sure Thing” and “Long Day in the Universe” are bursts of (sometimes blistering) sunshine, ringing with great chord changes and Lewis’ lighthearted, inviting tone hauntedjukebox
Blueboy – Popkiss Michael White has finally written a book I’ve waited twenty years to read: Popkiss tells the story, or really the set of stories, around Sarah Records, the Bristol, England indiepop label whose seven years (1987-95) left us with 100 releases the size of a 7” single (99 were music, but one was a boardgame), 30 albums (whatever you else you do today, listen to Unisex), a few famous gigs (the last one took place on a boat), and a startling contingent of superfans.
… Sarah fans didn’t just like the bands (and few of us liked every one of the bands); we felt a rare personal connection to the prose style, the sense of how to live, and the way of doing business (yes, it was a business, though one with clear left-wing views) that the label represented, a connection that makes Sarah worth remembering even above and beyond the sparkle, crackle, melodic glee or melancholy glow in the music that it released. queenmobs
Radiohead- Creep (acoustic) will still be playing in karaoke bars long after our great-great-grandchildren and their flying cars have graduated from space college. Yorke’s masterful vocal release in the bridge… all that teenage angst condensed into four minutes — timeless, is the word popmatters
R.E.M. – Find The River finds R.E.M. at their simultaneously most chilled out and yet euphoric. It’s a call for us to abandon the speed and chaos of metropolitan life and return once again to our natural habitat. As Stipe urges, we must simply “find the river” to find joy once again, seeing as the city implores us to work and do little else faroutmagazine
Jonathan Richman – That Summer Feeling one of Richman’s most gently devastating songs, is about knowing that the good old days really weren’t, but finding yourself longing for those sensations anyway pitchfork
Keep Pollution Tidy 