Nights out

If I had a dime for all the rock narratives with well-meaning male singers who messed things up with their ladyfriend, and now she's out on the street among all kinds of danger, and he only wishes he'd done something different and would do epic task TBD to get her back in his safe arms. It's a funny strand of patriarchal condescension — the sleazy and the daddy rolled into one. Kinda awful and yet classic enough to maybe be a useful reflection on the culture that produces it. And certainly worthy of a representative moment here.

The Only Ones — Out There In The Night

Sugar squares

I can't help but love songs that announce themselves as the sound of a local scene. Forget about an ambition to speak for a generation or even an emerging genre, give me your neighborhood cheerleaders.

From what I gather, Airebeat is the band's answer to Merseybeat, replacing Liverpool's River Mersey with the Aire River that runs through Leeds. I have never been to either place, so I'll take the song's description of the place as a backwater at face value. All the more reason to stir up some energy with this nugget of infectious power pop.

The Squares - This Is Airebeat

Tomfoolery

Another one from the gifted/ignored one-man-band files. Songblague has already paid this Tom some much-deserved attention, but I finally got ahold of his album and can't help myself. What can you do with infectious pop but be feverishly devoted to it for a time?

The Toms - Other Boys Do

Who's that on my radio?

Happy MLK Day. Hopefully, you're enjoying a day off, appreciating the gift of your civil rights. And on a much shallower level—albeit one full of easy, immediate pleasures—hope you appreciate this excellent power pop nugget. Thanks to Mark Prindle for making me aware of these guys' existence. No mean feat. Apparently, the pinnacle of their stardom involved a spot on MTV's New Years Ball to usher in 1983. We all have dreams.

The Producers - She Sheila

So pretty in the city of industry

There are lots of times when texture is everything, and I'm often happy to wile away the hours rubbing musical contours over my ears. Then there's sweet guitar pop, with its equally sublime pleasures.

Oranger - Crooked in the Weird of the Catacombs

Hooray for the day

It's been baking outside these last couple days. Hopefully, it's the last gasp of the cruel summer heat. Does Songblague Nation wilt in response? No! We choose to embrace the sweat and rock it out. And I sound this battle cry with the full weight of my office. Literally, I'm sitting in my very climate-controlled office. But still, onward!

In addition to its blissful rock out-ness, this little nugget ranks as one of my favorite GBV song titles, right up there with this one. Can't say I'm too interested in their reunion tour though. Let 1996 stay 1996. As for today, I keep finding myself focusing on the harmony vocal, which I think is an important marker for spiritual development.

Guided By Voices - Your Name Is Wild

You seem cool, but get a load of me!

The Toms is really just one Tom. That’s him—Tom Marolda, of New Jersey—on every instrument on this home-recorded album of perfect, breezy pop tunes from 1979. Today’s track, “Better than anyone else” sounds like a typical crush song: Tom’s met a pretty girl and wants to get with her. Specifically, he says to her in the song’s infectious chorus, “I want you to know me better than I know myself.” Aww…? Let’s take a closer listen. He wants her to know him better than he knows himself. Meanwhile, in the 2nd verse he recounts how he worked up the nerve to talk to her, asking her if she’s a dancer, and then reveals he can’t remember her answer! He was so excited about his own bravery in approaching her, and that she’s willing to talk to him, that he didn’t even listen to what she had to say. In the 3rd verse, he drops the bomb—he doesn’t even know her name! And yet he’s dreaming of her becoming the foremost expert on Tomology. This song raises the troubling question: how often is romantic love and attraction based on a fantasy we construct of another person who we don’t even know, or even care to? The most important thing is the ennobling reflection of ourselves we see in their eyes, and the shine they bring to us by allowing us to be seen beside them. That’s something I learned from this one guy, The Toms.

The Toms - Better than anyone else

Love song or filibuster?

It is Songblague's position that the best love songs are the ones where bitterness and ambiguity, however appropriate, get banished straightaway. Which would seem to put this one right in the wheelhouse. When you spend a full 65% of a 5 minute song locked into a 'love love love' refrain, you're either the most devoted dude in the world, so smitten that no other words come, or you're hijacking the air until your demands are met. I'm not sure this song is such a straight arrow. Maybe there's some ambiguity after all. Unrelatedly, Happy Birthday, B!

Teenage Fanclub - Norman 3