#401: Sundays, "Hideous Towns" (1990)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bQSGLVJU8p4

The fact that one of my favorite first-wave punk songs is expressed as an attempt to start a dialogue, though, hints at the real mismatch between me and punk rock: I don't, anymore, do self-righteous anger well. I used to, and certainly there are no shortage of worthy targets: too many of the world's nations are run by rank-hungry sociopaths, too much of its land and air and water is churned through in the ruthless pursuit of short-term private economic profit, and too much of its culture is run by cowards terrified of funding anything but the latest escapist sequel to an escapist sequel that had already lost whatever spark of individuation it began with. Anger is, as Johnny Rotten observed, an energy, and some extraordinary people (I.F. Stone, Lyndon Johnson, Ralph Nader, Walter Reuther, Catherine MacKinnon, Malcolm X, Cesar Chavez, Greg Palast, Glenn Greenwald, to name some post-WWII Americans) have clearly found it an endlessly renewable one -- but in my body it burns up too quickly, and gives off toxic pollutants. So even if I try to focus on the evils of the other, rueful awareness of my own imperfections gets in the way, or I veer off topic and find myself more interested in the good things about my allies than in the bad things I'm supposed to be fighting.

I was a low-level community organizer once, in poor areas around Boston. I was okay at it -- helped one neighborhood get streets full of horrible potholes repaired after a decade-plus of being ignored, helped another get some traffic enforcement on cars racing 50 mph through streets that were the only place their kids could play -- but the relentless earnestness and long hours made me miserable, and I doubt I could do it again any time soon. Too, I could try to be punk rock, but I would probably come out more like the Sundays' "Hideous Towns".

#403: Sloan, "Underwhelmed" (1993)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MkN_qkN5JLQ

Glenn McDonald, in one sentence, described Sloan's debut single "Underwhelmed" more accurately than I can improve on: it sounds like Ozzy Osbourne and band covering a lost They Might Be Giants song. Depending on your mental image of TMBG, if you have one, that could be deceptive: they have their educational songs ("James K. Polk", "Mammal") and their absurdist songs ("Hall of Heads", "the Guitar") and their gleefully petulant children's sing-alongs ("I Should Be Allowed to Think", "Boss of Me"), none of which he or I are referencing directly. But They Might Be Giants also have a romantic streak that leads, in some of their greatest songs, to the kind of relationship and/or character portraits that an over-educated, absurdist, self-awarely petulant romantic might write ("She's an Angel", "Ana Ng", "They'll Need a Crane", "Sleeping in the Flowers").

Sloan's public emergence came on the college-rock circuit in 1992 or 1993, depending where you live, either of which was in the post-Nirvana period of mandatory loud distorted guitars; but the Chris Murphy-penned "Underwhelmed" is exactly that TMBG sort of relationship song.

Faith, unknown pleasures, and one imaginary girl

(This is one of my favorite of my old Epinions.com music writings. It's a concert review from late 2003, so it's not remotely practical, but Facebook's been abuzz with here's-some-cool-concerts-I've-seen nostalgia, and re-reading this, I figured this can be my entry.)
 
In logical terms, I suppose there’s two reasons why you should want to hear about the Mary Timony concert I saw Wednesday night.  First of all, you might be a fan of the type of music she and bassist Jeff Goddard were playing.  Do you like the starkness of the Faith/ Pornography-era Cure and their drum machines, the weird but disciplined guitar howl of Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures, the fierce if muddy monolith that was Black Sabbath?  Then never mind, this was written 13 years ago, ha ha ha ha. Or, secondly, do you simply like Mary Timony: for Helium’s dissonant multi-guitar blur, or for the mediaevalized indie-rock of her solo career?  Then obviously you’d be curious to see how her songs transfer to other settings.

Neither of these, however, has much to do with why I found her concert so revelatory, or why I’m telling you about it.

#409: Modest Mouse, "Tiny Cities Made of Ashes" (2000)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3EA5b3FNI4w

My Mom wouldn't have liked Modest Mouse, I feel sure. I don't mean the music, necessarily; once I introduced her to rock music, she developed some pretty interesting taste. Most of it was gushingly melodic, to be sure -- XTC and They Might Be Giants and Barenaked Ladies; sugar-rush bands like the Primitives and Stretch Princess; modern folkies like Dar Williams and Christine Lavin and Kate Jacobs; some punk-pop (she enjoyed her little moments as the white-haired woman in glasses carrying used Bad Religion and Vandals cd's to the puzzled young men at the counter). But she loved the jangle and the textural haze of the Church, and the sultry bass and sinister dance pulse of Shriekback, and you can triangulate to "Tiny Cities Made of Ashes" from that. That lithe exercise-friendly bass line, the Ennio Morricone guitar and violin stabs, the alarmed-rattlesnake-racing-through-cookware percussion, and the way Isaac Brock doubles every word he sings by simultaneously speaking it as close to the lowest audible frequency as he can manage: she might have found it perversely sexy, as she did Shriekback's Barry Andrews. It's conceivable.

#422: Mary Timony, "Blood Tree" (2002)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VL0EaJTYGjA

Mary Timony's first prominent-ish band Helium were, like the Pixies, a Boston-area band who got played on 120 Minutes -- they also got her lusted after by Beavis and Butthead. They were largely immune to Pixies lessons about dynamics. They began as a multi-guitar noise-and-drone band (even Timony's singing had a flattened, droning way to them and was kept back in the mix), the American version of bands like Slowdive/ Swervedriver/ Ride/ My Bloody Valentine who won't be showing up on this countdown because too many thick guitar sounds hurt my ears.

But when I moved to Boston, Helium suddenly released

#423: Pixies, "Monkey Gone to Heaven" (1989)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EHC9HE7vazI

My countdown's introductory post specifies "Don't take the rankings seriously" and "I'll arrange the list for nice song-to-song segues", and starts a longer thought by saying "The list will progress slowly from Songs I Love". I bring this up because, while many of the songs I nominate will be unused to widespread honors, sometimes I'll do something like place a Pixies song at #423. I want to make sure the take-away, as readers, is "I love this song" (true!) and not "I'm dissing one of the most important and admired bands in Alternative Rock by putting 422 other songs by other acts ahead of them". Everything on my countdown, I list out of fondness, full stop.

If they'd made their first record in 1979 instead of 1987, the Pixies would likely have been