Belle And Sebastian started its steady climb into the hearts and minds of thousands of bookish romantics around the world in 1996, with the Stow College-funded recording sessions for debut album Tigermilk. Thirteen years later, frontman Stuart Murdoch has led B&S from a quaint twee sound into experiments with full-fledged glam, Lee Hazlewood/Nancy Sinatra-style balladry and lush, ’60s-inspired pop. Murdoch has further expanded on his unique vision through the project known as God Help The Girl, a movie musical he conceived, wrote and is helping bring to the silver screen. With the soundtrack already on the shelves, it seemed time to assess the work of Murdoch’s band and see which songs are underplayed and which are played out. (Read our 2006 Belle And Sebastian cover story.)
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Weezer has always gotten more than its fair share of contempt. We come not to bury Rivers Cuomo, but to praise him. Tucked beneath its Cheap Trick riffs and nerd-friendly lyrics, Weezer managed to record some of the best power-pop anthems of the past 15 years. And even if the band’s recent efforts haven’t lived up to its classic debut and history of hits, this is still a band with the power to surprise us. While some of Weezer’s songs have passed into our collective memory (“Buddy Holly,” “Beverly Hills”) and have no intention of leaving anytime soon, others should never have been released in the first place (we’re looking at you, “Heart Songs”). With Cuomo and crew about to launch their own online radio station courtesy of Clear Channel, what better time to examine the most overrated and underrated Weezer songs?
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Blur was one of the most quintessentially English bands of the Britpop era. Drifting from shoegaze to grunge to pop, the group always retained its core influences of the Kinks, the Beatles and XTC. But despite a few solitary hits, Blur never quite made it in the U.S. And that’s a shame, because with a span of seven full-lengths, multiple EPs and some killer singles, Blur proved that it had the staying power many of its contemporaries lacked. But as the band succeeded financially, guitarist Graham Coxon grew more and more disenchanted, finally leaving after 1999’s 13. Following 2003′s difficult Think Tank, Blur went on hiatus. Since then, Coxon has developed a prolific solo career, singer Damon Albarn founded Gorillaz, bassist Alex James started a cheese farm, and drummer Dave Rowntree ran unsuccessfully for public office. Now reunited as a four-piece for the first time in nearly a decade, Blur is back in the public eye. And with rumors of a new album circulating, what better time to examine its most underrated and overrated songs?
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With Big Star best-of/rarities box Keep An Eye On The Sky slated for a September release, Alex Chilton, Jody Stephens, Andy Hummel and the late Chris Bell are about to enter the mainstream rock pantheon at last. Of course, Big Star has been a key reference point for three generations of indie and underground rockers. The band’s brief, highly romanticized narrative arc—Anglophile Memphis rockers set the bar for genius power pop, begin deconstructing the genre, then self-destruct before they can finish their third record—guaranteed Big Star’s canonization by alt-rock misfits, as well as that odd strain of culture vulture obsessed with watching talent implode. MAGNET wants to reexamine Chilton and Co.’s work in part because, though this is one of those cases where the music frequently does live up to the hype, for 30 years Big Star has unavoidably colored the way we hear the music. And despite a few post-mortem live releases and a handful of bootlegs both sublime and godawful, it’s in the limited studio recordings that Big Star’s glory lives or dies. So for this installment of the Over/Under, it’s to the studio albums we go, to give the mix one final stir before it hardens. (For more on Big Star, as well as Cheap Trick, Matthew Sweet, the Posies and many more, check out our special 2002 American power-pop issue.)
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This Liverpool foursome made the ‘80s worth living through. I bought the band’s debut LP, Crocodiles, the day it came out July 1980 and dug the hell out of everything about it. From Ian “Mac” McCulloch’s vertical hairpile and drab overcoat (the latter’s suave affect was one I would slavishly copy, the hairstyle, less so; I’d eventually opt for a version of bassist Les Pattinson’s pompadour with short back and sides) to the group’s previously unimagined admixture of the Doors’ dark doomsaying and the Velvets’ one-note symphonies, Echo & The Bunnymen turned gloom into glamour, made sadness seem sexy and went on to influence a generation of guitar bands (Jesus And Mary Chain, Radiohead, the Verve) who heard an orchestra of possibilities in Will Sergeant’s weirdly accomplished tone jamborees. The latter-day Bunnies have, sadly, become something of a nostalgia act, but we still have those first five albums—released from 1980 to 1987—to shine so hard even through the darkest of our turquoise days. See you at the barricades, babe; here are the five most overrated and underrated creations from the indie era’s Post-Fab Four.
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The Over/Under isn’t about the best and worst of Genesis. It’s the most overrated and underrated Genesis tracks, and the main theme here is that not everything from the Peter Gabriel era is genius and not everything from the Phil Collins era is crap. In fact, three of our five overrated songs date back to the Gabriel era, while four of the five underrated tracks are from the Collins era. And the one underrated track from the Gabriel era features Collins on vocals. So here we go with the most overrated and underrated songs in the vast Genesis catalog, as chosen by MAGNET’s Roob. Cue synth solo in 7/4.
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Say what you will about Elvis Costello—he’s certainly got a great sense of timing. When the young Costello first hit the airwaves in 1977, he was just in time to be typecast as a punk rocker with a wary sneer and some Chuck Berry riffs. But the label never quite stuck, and Costello has been a new waver, a classical composer and a blue-eyed soul singer whenever the mood has struck him. With a career spanning more than three decades, he’s resolutely refused to write the same song twice. He’s sung with the Attractions, the Imposters, been a member of the Costello Show and collaborated with Paul McCartney and Burt Bacharach. Not too shabby for the young man once stuck working a day job in the Arden cosmetics “vanity factory.” Despite a gift for pop songwriting that rivals the Beatles, Bowie or the Ramones, there are still some numbers Costello should have reconsidered—and others that should have been huge. On the eve of the release of the new Secret, Profane & Sugarcane, MAGNET’s Emily Tartanella picks the five most overrated and the five most underrated Costello songs.
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Once upon a time, Green Day was the little punk band that could, a heart-on-sleeve manifestation of the fiercely indie Berkeley music scene hovering around 924 Gilman St. back in the ‘80s (along with contemporaries Rancid and Pansy Division) and indefatigable champions of the “loud fast rules” associated with punk’s decades-old orthodoxy. Twenty years, eight studio releases and tens of millions of records sold later, frontman Billie Joe Armstrong, bassist Mike Dirnt and drummer Tré Cool are the last men standing in the rock ‘n’ roll army, a compellingly three-dimensional band capable of unleashing a magnum opus such as their brand-new 21st Century Breakdown on the masses. It’s an 18-song, hour-plus, honest-to-god rock opera that blows out an epic, Zen Arcade-like bildungsroman with economic, A Quick One precision while flaunting an almost encyclopedic knowledge of the entirety of rock history from the Beatles and Kinks to the Pretty Things and Clash. In short: Green Day is probably rock’s best example of how a little vision, a lot of talent and a dash of dumb luck can easily translate to rock-god status in our ongoing artistic recession. Fresh off the band’s appearance on Saturday Night Live and smack in the middle of a week’s worth of appearances at various venues around New York City, here are the five most overrated and underrated Green Day tracks, as chosen by MAGNET’s Corey duBrowa.
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Has there ever been another musician who’s had two such brilliant and successful, but entirely separate, careers? Peter Gabriel left Genesis after 1974′s The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway, his sixth record with the band. The run from 1970′s Trespass to Lamb is unparalleled, and if Gabriel had disappeared after leaving Genesis, he would have been remembered as a genius. Then came a solo career that has been just as inventive, groundbreaking and brilliant as his work with Genesis. Gabriel didn’t leave the band for commercial success; the group enjoyed far more of it without him. And while their first few post-Gabriel records brought Phil Collins and Co. bigger sales and turned them into a full-blown arena act, Gabriel’s solo career started with a sputter (not to mention four self-titled albums). Gabriel left Genesis to grow musically and artistically, and he pulled it off. And by the early-’80s, when Genesis was putting out crap like “Illegal Alien,” Gabriel was at the height of his game. But like any artist, there are high points and low points, and sometimes the high points have gone relatively unnoticed, while the low points have been wildly successful and universally praised. So MAGNET writer Roob (you’d know him if you saw him) is here once again to set the record straight. Here are the five most overrated and underrated Peter Gabriel solo tracks.
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Did the ‘70s punk movement produce a more important legacy than “The Only Band That Matters”? The Sex Pistols may have been the first, but the Clash was most certainly the best, blending amphetamine pacing with more esoteric musical forms (reggae, rockabilly, dub, ska) while taking on the establishment and its herd of sacred cows with a fierceness that would influence an entire generation of followers. That said, since Joe Strummer caught the elevator for that great gig in the sky back in 2002, his band has been granted the sort of revisionist sainthood the Clash would have no doubt despised in its younger, angrier days. In keeping with the band’s piss-and-vinegar spirit, we offer their most overrated and underrated screeds.
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When the Hold Steady formed in 2003, part of its mission statement was to combat the scourge of plastic dance rock and ’80s revivalism happening in its adopted hometown of New York City. Can a lovable band of underdogs produce such a thing as an “overrated” song? Given the near-unanimous critical praise of the Hold Steady’s output (MAGNET named Boys And Girls In America 2006’s finest album; read our feature on the band from that same year), we’re obliged to explore the possibility.
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Corey duBrowa’s Over/Under entries on Radiohead and Elliott Smith prompted insightful reader comments such as “This list fails,” “[Given] the fact Smith’s gone, this seems disgraceful” and “Where’s the html tag for sarcasm?” DuBrowa once wrote a lengthy Seattle Weekly essay lauding Pavement’s 1992 debut LP, Slanted And Enchanted, which stands among the finest releases of the ‘90s and established Pavement as one of the definitive voices of its era. Listed here are his takes on the band’s most overrated work and its satchel of underrated gems, as well as a preemptive plea to fellow Portlander Stephen Malkmus to call him sometime for a Spanish coffee at Huber’s. The first one’s on us, dude.
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The Wilco Over/Under was really well-received. So much so that somebody calling himself “sgtpepper64” on ViaChicago, the Wilco message board, lavished this praise on MAGNET’s Roob (you’d know him if you saw him): “What a dick who doesn’t know shit.” The Robert Pollard Over/Under was really well-received, also. So well-received that Pollard’s wife deleted Roob from her Facebook friend list, no doubt furious over the part where he called Pollard “the greatest songwriter who ever lived.” The R.E.M. Over/Under went well, too. So well that some guy called “haggis” on Murmurs, the R.E.M. message board, wrote, “This is crap. The guy obviously has serious R.E.M. issues” after Roob said that R.E.M. was one of his favorite bands ever. OK, so on we go with the Kinks. As the years go by, it becomes more and more apparent that the Kinks were equal to—if not superior to—the holy trinity of the Beatles, the Who and the Stones. When all is said and done, the Kinks just may be recognized as the greatest band ever. But for now, they’re just more fodder for MAGNET’s weekly Over/Under. Hopefully, Pete Quaife’s wife doesn’t zap Roob from her Facebook friend list after this one.
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Merge Records, the North Carolina-based label built by Superchunk, sustained by Neutral Milk Hotel and Magnetic Fields, and made mega by Arcade Fire (pictured) and Spoon, turns 20 this year. In honor of the anniversary, MAGNET presents the five most overrated and five most underrated items in the Merge catalog. It’s our weird, judgmental way of saying happy birthday.
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Corey duBrowa can clearly remember two pivot points in the career of Elliott Smith: the first solo show he attended (Sept. 17, 1994, at a long-forgotten Portland, Ore., all-ages venue called Umbra Penumbra, where Smith played a combination of acoustic Heatmiser material and some new songs that would later appear on solo debut Roman Candle) and Smith’s posthumous Portland memorial (Oct. 25, 2003; the event and everything leading up to it was first published by MAGNET as a free-form essay called “The Moon Is A Lightbulb Breaking”). Throughout his career, Smith recorded way more material than ever made it to the public’s ear, some of which comprises the “underrated” portion of this week’s The Over/Under. The rest of which, we eagerly await …
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MAGNET’s friend Roob (you’d know him if you saw him) was a Yes man until he took a trip to Chronic Town in 1982. He’s left the city limits since then, but now he’s back to inform you of the five most overrated and five most underrated R.E.M. songs.
I was 23 years old when I first heard 1982′s Chronic Town bursting from my friend Linda’s speakers, and that seminal EP, which was essentially a template for the entire indie-rock movement, managed to turn me overnight from a proghead who spent his free time in a room lit only by a lava lap, listening to Tales From Topographic Oceans (on headphones) spinning on an old turntable into a diehard fan of cutting-edge guitar-pop music. I gave up on R.E.M. sometime in the mid-’90s, disgusted not only with the obvious decline in the band’s work but by the notion that somehow the stuff the group was still putting out was even better than everything from 1983′s Murmur up through 1987′s Document. As I revisited all of R.E.M.’s records for this piece, I tried to approach the newer stuff with an open mind. Maybe it’s not as dreadful as I thought. Maybe I dismissed everything after 1996′s New Adventures In Hi-Fi too quickly. Maybe R.E.M. really is still a great band, only different. Sadly, I was wrong. No group in history has ever plunged from such remarkable heights to such dismal depths. But, then again, R.E.M. was once the greatest band in the world. Anyway, here are the five most overrated and underrated tracks in R.E.M.’s 29-year history.
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Unlike the Smiths’ fairly straightforward catalog of releases (surveyed in last week’s Over/Under), that band’s former frontman scatters album tracks, singles and b-sides like frisbees tossed into a hedge maze in another country. Here are the five most overrated and five most underrated Morrissey songs.
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MAGNET senior editor Matthew Fritch once camped out for 13 hours to have Morrissey sign his copy of the “Interesting Drug” single; this was topped only by a more dignified encounter with Johnny Marr. He is closing in on Andy Rourke and Mike Joyce even as he types out the five most overrated and five most underrated Smiths songs.
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When we last saw our friend Roob (you’d know him if you saw him), he was catching 10 tons of flak from Guided By Voices fans for expressing his opinion about some GBV songs. This time, he decided to address the catalog of a band whose fans are only slightly less rabid. Here are his five most overrated and five most underrated Wilco songs. Duck, Roob!
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Corey duBrowa once wrote a 1,700-word review of Hail To The Thief for the Seattle Weekly, ushering in a wave of fan mail that read like sour times at the Target returns counter. Which evidently hasn’t disqualified him from issuing the following list of the five most overrated and underrated songs in Radiohead’s lengthy, critically drooled-upon catalog.
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When Matt Hickey started writing for MAGNET in 1994, he made the mistake of mentioning how much he loved the Replacements. From that point on, he was Replacements Boy. He reviewed pretty much every ex-Mats-member solo record and interviewed everyone who’d ever been in the band, with the exception of Bob Stinson and Steve Foley. (Sadly, neither is doing interviews these days.) So it fell to him to create this Mats argument-starter. Enjoy. (The selections are in vaguely chronological order.)
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Our friend Roob (you’d know him if you saw him) convinced us that he’s the foremost authority on Guided By Voices and Bob Pollard. (He claims to possess 257 GBV bootlegs, which is probably 256 more than Pollard himself owns.) Somehow, that qualifies him to make the following list of the five most overrated and five most underrated non-GBV Pollard songs.
:: The Five Most Overrated Non-GBV Robert Pollard Songs
1. “Do Something Real” (1999)
One of the things that’s made Bob Pollard the greatest songwriter who ever lived is that he never quite comes out and says anything. His remarkable lyrics hint at a notion, suggest an idea, foretell a feeling. But they never just say it. With the musically jerky “Do Something Real,” from the otherwise awesome Speak Kindly Of Your Volunteer Fire Department (a collaboration with Doug Gillard), Pollard actually gets preachy, and it’s unbecoming of him. “Do something real with your life,” he used to say while introducing this at Guided By Voices shows. I’ll go to a Midnight Oil show and listen to Peter Garrett’s rambling morality lessons if I want to hear this kind of crap.
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Our friend Roob (you’d know him if you saw him) convinced us that he’s the foremost authority on Guided By Voices. (He claims to possess 257 GBV bootlegs, which is probably 256 more than Bob Pollard owns.) Somehow, that qualifies him to make the following list of the five most overrated and five most underrated GBV songs.
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