The Feelies were a bunch of geeky minimalists who are perhaps best known to at least this posterity from the fact that their debut record, Crazy Rhythms sneaked a place on Pitchfork’s best albums list of the 1980s. For my money though, like fuck it should have done – the album has some great percussion on it sure, but its mostly built around the rhythms with guitar drones stretched over it like rubber bands about to snap… on opener ‘The Boy With Perpetual Nervousness’ its a pretty powerful thing but boy does it get monotonous. No, its a good album but this is genius very much in pupae.
By contrast, second album The Good Earth has to be one of the most underrated albums of all time. I’d never even really heard of it before getting it packaged with Crazy Rhythms to review the two re-issues together but its really, really amazing. It takes all the sure listenably tense but ultimately aimless, buttoned-up-shirt-collar swell of the debut and turns it into something big and overpoweringly focused, that sounds like REM on a roadtrip gone backwards, falling asleep in a field and watching the sun set and then rise in reverse. Or, just “REM played on the wrong speed,” as a different observer noted. It really is a vastly superior record and more than that, it has to be ranked as a pretty much essential album for anyone who has ever demanded “just gimme indie rock.” Highlight of highlights has to be ‘The High Road’- rhythmically forceful, jangly, big, and poppy- the repetitiveness here is subtle but its still about as monotonous as a brick, it sort of changes up every now and then and even has a solo, of sorts, but really its just the same riff played over and over again, mostly, but you don’t really notice because that’s the song’s whole trick, I guess.
