Artist: The Jealous Girlfriends Album: The Jealous Girlfriends Released: Circa 2007
Not gonna lie. I went straight to the NPR archives for 2013 to find this gem. I won't say which show or how, lest you steal my secret ways. Enough of that! Let's get started.
The Jealous Girlfriends released this self-titled album in 2007, a year for me that was marked by graduating from undergrad and discovering the world of downloadable music. This was a time when music podcasts were in their hay day. It was a new frontier, where anyone could make their own music podcast and, if you had good taste, get pretty popular (my music podcast of choice was some guy out of Texas who ran a show called Dallas Does Indie). If you loved the music that was coming out of the internet at that time, you will love this album.
A band named The Orwells tore up the Ed Sullivan stage last night.And I loved it.So I bought the EP Who
Needs You solely on the merits of this single performance.
Can't play another song though? Paul Shaffer & The CBS Orchestra are the best in the biz.
Back in 2010, Stephen Malkmus was quoted in Spin magazine saying, “Music is about nostalgia. From the minute you hear a song for the second time, you’re reliving it.”
The article is worth reading, if only as a primer to the release of Wigout at Jagbags, Stephen Malkmus & The Jicks sixth album.
The album is the band’s first since Malkmus completed his reunion tour with Pavement, the 90s indie-alternative legends. In it, Malkmus seems to be taking his own quote at face value. Many of lyrics sound like middle-aged introspection for the now 47-year-old Malkmus, no doubt sparked by his reunion with his former bandmates. It’s his standard fare: guitar-driven songs paired with ironic lyrics and a laissez-faire delivery. Lamentations on the silly and mundane in one’s life, work and music, coupled with a bit of good humor. And the album is good. It’s not great because I don’t know if he is the type of musician to ever want a great album. Not because he can’t, but because it’s not inherent in his style. Pavement was often characterized as “slacker-rock.” A bunch of Generation X poets. I don’t know about that, but I can hear the desire for nostalgia here.
Let me take
this opportunity to take you kids back to my freshman year of high school.Pearl Jam and Nirvana were blowing up all
over the place yet many of the students at my school were still rocking out to
the hair bands of the 80s.Augusta had
just launched an Alternative/College Radio Station called Channel Z and it was
fantastic.I will never forget the DJ saying,
“I am pretty sure you people are going to dig this next song.This band is like a poppy version of Pearl
Jam with enough punk to satisfy your edge.”That quote may be off a bit but you get the idea.The song he played was “It’s a Shame About
Ray” by The Lemonheads and he was right, I loved it.I had some birthday money burning a hole in
my pocket so I headed to the mall to see if I could find any albums from The
Lemonheads.I was crazy like that; I was
going to buy an entire cd after only hearing one song.This was likely due to the fact I could not
find the cassette (yes, I said cassette) single.
After I
hooked the cd discman up to the radio in my brother’s car, I hit the play
button.Evan Dando sang “She takes me on
a rockin stroll” and I thought to myself that this is really good!Less than two minutes later “Confetti” was off
and running.The song is about the
painful divorce of Dando’s parents.It
was evident the songs were deeply personal.Imagine singing about your father in an awkward marital situation, “He
kind of should of sort of, would have loved her, if he could’ve/ He’d rather be
alone than pretend/She just wanted him to love her but he didn’t.”Sorry about your pain Evan, but it has given
you an opportunity to write some amazing songs about it.How does he do it with an alarmingly upbeat
song?
From that
point on, I was a fan of the album.“It’s a Shame About Ray,” the album’s third song, is the track that
launched The Lemonheads into the cars and houses of just about every kid in
college.It was number one on the
college radio charts for a while and it was the reason I bought this
album.“My Drug Buddy” was another look
into Dando’s tough fight with addiction and “Bit Part” allowed Juliana Hatfield
the opportunity to scream on a track.To
this day, my favorite song on the album is “Alison’s Starting to Happen.”Perhaps it was the fifteen year old me loving
the line, “Alison’s getting her tit pierced, Alison’s getting a mow hawk,
Alison’s starting to happen to me.”However, I still think it is a great song.
The rising
popularity of The Lemonheads led their record label, Atlantic, to negotiate
that the band re-record “Mrs. Robinson” for the 25th anniversary of The Graduate.The track was added to a re-release of “It’s
a Shame About Ray” and it sold a lot of copies despite Paul Simon saying he
hated it.With the added song, “It’s a
Shame About Ray” is right around 30 minutes long.I had listened to the entire album on my way
home from the mall.It was near
Christmas so traffic allowed me to do so.
On the 20th
anniversary of the album, the band released a remastered version of the album
with many demos of the songs from the album.I recently purchased the Expanded album and it is just as good today as
it was in 1992.Head over to Dropbox and
give it a listen.Thirty minutes later,
comment and let me know what you think.
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