Review Summary: All you really wanted was to be alone a little while...
I once heard a man in bar refer to the Velvet Underground as “The Beatles on heroin,” only for the woman sitting next to me to turn around and point out that “The Beatles on heroin” were in fact The Beatles. The drift he was getting at is graspable however, and certainly legitimate enough. The Velvet Underground put forward the ethos of what jangly pop songs could sound like when threaded through a distinctly more evil prism. The two bands formed antitheses in sound. The Beatles forged whole albums of infectious, if only slightly downcast pop (Their acid-fuelled apoplexies notwithstanding). What Lou Reed and John Cale did was break down all that catchiness into its constituent parts, and then smash and twist it back together into a decidedly more septic twin.
There’s a reason why they say that not many people heard the Velvets in the 70’s, but whoever did went out and formed a band. The deconstructive tendencies they displayed in music fanned out its established constraints, creating a vast gulf of where sound could go. A similarly vast saturation of bands followed, binging on pop music’s new seemingly limitless capacities.
This is where we find The Feelies. Formed in 1976 in New Jersey, the band took its name from a leisure suite out of Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World,” a sort of virtual reality device that lent you textural pleasure of what you were seeing. The Feelies cut their teeth at Maxwell’s, a tavern in Hoboken that a decade later would become a mecca for future indie giants. Guided by Voices, Yo La Tengo, the Meat Puppets and the Oblivians would all go on to record seminal concerts in that small dank room. Maxwell’s was also the prime spot where R.E.M. would perform whenever they passed through Jersey, and where Michael Stipe first heard the Feelies, allegedly stating what a stimulus “Crazy Rhythms” was for him to continue recording.
“Crazy Rhythms” is how most recognize the Feelies nowadays, and as close to a formative album as the band’s got. The record failed to score a big single when first released in 1979, but did end up atop many critics’ year-end lists, beating out Joy Division, Bowie’s “Scary Monsters,” and the Stones’ soppy “Emotional Rescue.” It’s only telling how deeply-mired pop music was in old established safe havens at the time, since the closest the Feelies got to having a chart presence in those years was a cover of the Stones’ “Paint it Black,” a toss-off that figured on “Crazy Rhythms” as a B-side. Sadly, the decades that followed would continue that trend of critical success without commercial dividends. Today, “Crazy Rhythms” is mostly known as having the front cover that Weezer ripped off for their own debut.
The Feelies went on to record three more albums before going on hiatus, with all three receiving critical nods. At the point of their breakup in ’91, the band had become a mainstay of the underground elite, respected as much for the quality of their material, as they were for their D.I.Y. approach to recording. All their pre-hiatus records were self-produced, and band members handled most of their own bookings and roady-ing.
By the time the Feelies came back around in 2008, the musical landscape had changed drastically, going through a whole mess of critical shifts. The band may have witnessed the nascence of college indie, but they’d slept through the rise of the cult of Cobain, post-grunge and its mangled nu-metal afterbirth, hip-hop’s big takeoff, former humble colleagues the Pixies becoming household names, and the whole world’s lurch back into electronics. By the end of the noughties, even indie’s biggest frontrunners had been relegated to a niche market, and so the Feelies ended up right back where they’d first started. And all in all, that is the best scenario they could have hoped for.
“Gone, Gone, Gone” is the single the band put out from “In Between,” and it’s easy to see why. The song is bursting with everything that made them so goddamn easy to love in the first place. A steady jangly swing with the lead guitar ratcheting fuzz all over it. The song, in all its “Loveless Love” glory, stands right up there with the Feelies’ best.
“Flag Days” is another highlight, building gradually into purified college rock goodness, with Glenn Mercer calling “Hey now!” happily, or as happily as an inherently-glum indie poet can allow himself to be. The song ends on a euphoric squeal from Mercer’s guitar, whose chops have never really been paid their proper due. He'd always been a more modest shredder than J. Mascis or Thurston Moore, choosing to coat the listener's ear in oscillating resonance, rather than charge it full-blast.
Acoustic guitars kick off “Turn Back Time” and “Stay the Course,” back-to-back tunes that show the band’s unchanged M.O. The music, catchy and chorus-heavy, is at the fore-front, with the blurred vocals acting more as an accentuating pivot than a driving force.
“In Between” begins and ends with its title track. First, a rushed acoustic number that sounds foggy and full of sublime vigor, and then the reprise in full electric treatment, chugging along for nearly ten minutes without growing stale, Mercer riffing himself blind. Everything about “In Between” feels un-asked-for, and that is where this album’s and this band’s enduring vitality lies. They were always this level of obscure, and this adroit. To those who’d been listening this whole time, the facile excellence comes as no grand reveal.
This isn’t the sound of a band revitalized and searching for new meaning. It’s another worthy notch on the post of a group of self-reliant musicians who make great music for the hell of it all. And it sounds damn good.
