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It's no secret that I'm Power-Pop-pilled.
and Real Heads already know this, but the Perfectly Imperfect spray logo is uhh... heavily inspired...by an obscure archival Teenage Fanclub t-shirt from the early 90s. That being said, I'm new to The Toms & this album, I'm just happy to have discovered it. Isn't the best when an artists comes out the gate with a debut that already feels like a Greatest Hits compilation? Unfortunately none of these songs ended up being hits, but they damn well sound have been.
This becomes even cooler when you consider that The Toms (which is really just a dude named Tom from Jersey) recorded all 32 songs in his garage over just 3 days. Legend shit for real.
My favorites are "Other Boys Do," "I Did The Wrong Thing," and "Passport to Heaven," but if I'm being honest I truly love every track on here. i LOVE this album.
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Zoomers may know it from Lorde's cover of "Swinging Party". But, being a GenXer myself, I have no idea when I first heard The Replacements. They're a band that have always seemed to be there in my life, with every song on "Tim", their should-have-been-a-hit album, always sounding familiar.
Broadly speaking, the Minneapolis quartet, known affectionately by fans as 'The Mats', have three phases: the early hardcore and noisy period, the middle period with power pop sensibilities, metallic guitars and big choruses ("Bastards of Young" is perfect), and the final period, without one of the core founding members, trying (and failing) to fit into the mainstream.
It's a cliché to say that The Replacements lost the game against themselves, lost to other bands of the same era who had talent and discipline, and lost precious time building a reputation as unreliable drunks. It's a shame, of course. But The Replacements wouldn't have been The Replacements with any other behavior, and that's part of the tragic beauty of the story told in the book "Trouble Boys: The True History of The Replacements", in which author-fan Bob Mehr traces the family roots of each member, tying together the story of the rise and fall of a band that sabotaged every opportunity they had.
Ken Burns should make a documentary about The Replacements as an essential American band. It's a story with everything that went wrong with the American Dream: families plagued by unemployment, alcoholism and depression, young people with little education and no prospects, childhoods lost to violence and abuse. The story is very sad and "Trouble Boys" challenges even the most hardened fan (especially since it's about three hundred pages longer than it should be).
"Tim", from 1985 (which was reissued and remastered in 2023 and received a rare 10/10 from Pitchfork!) is a seminal album that laid the foundation for what would become "alternative rock" in the 1990s - even if it's not loved by ‘Mats fans from the early days, when the band was closer to, for example, Husker Du. Mixed by Tommy Ramone, the original "Tim" marks the moment when the band got a contract with a major label (they signed wrong names in an attempt to leave the label later, go figure), a music video on MTV (the result is a brilliant piece of sabotage) and an appearance on Saturday Night Live (the band got drunk, trashed the place, got kicked out and didn't appear on TV for over three years, but the recording is great).
Never heard it? Start here: "Can't Hardly Wait", from the album "Tim", already in the less punk and more melodic phase. For me, that's where Paul Westerberg's punchy hooks and catchy melodies shine (guy wanted to be in Big Star so badly).
Feb 20, 2024
I'll state it right up front: This is a dad-rock rec.
Try to picture yourself (a theme of this album's third track, "Picture Book") back in 1968: songwriting pairs dominate the UK scene. Lennon/McCartney; Jagger/Richards; Page/Plant. Into this noisy fray saunters the Kinks' Ray Davies, who has had hits earlier in the decade with his group the Kinks that SOUND a lot like to guitar-up-to-eleven frenzy ("You Really Got Me," a number one, was said for years to feature a young Jimmy Page on the solo, until it was debunked) but is now fixated on a sepia-toned sort of quasi-nostalgia that is pivoting his band from England's Hitmakers toward the sort of cult band that would later be cited by Blur's Damon Albarn and Oasis' Noel Gallagher as a seminal source of material and influence (it's hard to imagine "Parklife" or "What's the Story Morning Glory" -- hell, Britpop, period -- without this album and the pathway it created).
Davies was busy wrapping himself in the cloak of the Union Jack, long before this sort of move would have had him branded as National Front (or Morrissey-adjacent). "Village Green Preservation Society" didn't sell much when it was released (it only went gold in 2018) but was notable for its acoustic, singer/songwritery pastoral vibe and a yearning for a return to a Middle England that arguably had never existed. Indeed, the mix of sarcasm and sentimentality that marks the title track ("We are the skyscraper condemnation affiliates/God save Tudor houses, antique tables, and billiards") and other key cuts such as "People Take Pictures of Each Other," "Last of the Steam Powered Trains," the music hall sounds of "Sitting by the Riverside" and "All of My Friends Were There" speak to a love of both the literal village green as well as the metaphorical village green -- many of these mementoes of the past are likely better left behind (which Davies either notes directly or through comparison) but the crank in him just can't resist making the point that a way of life and a slice of history is sliding away before our very eyes.
Davies spent part of 1968 writing satirical numbers for a late-night BBC comedy program, so it's entirely possible that this ironic sensibility (which would inform his writing from that point forward) spilled over into the writing and creation of this album. Earlier songs like "Dedicated Follower of Fashion" and "A Well Respected Man" pointed the way toward this endstate but Davies had never sustained it for a full LP. This was a novella about the premature death of England, The Concept and The Empire.
Two contemporaneous non-album tracks -- "Days" and "Wonderboy" -- do as good a job of explaining Davies' motives at the time (a sort of inward and wistful focus on their Britishness, which a five year U.S. performance ban for reasons that remain somewhat vague no doubt also created, by extension) as the album itself, which is nonetheless one of the first extant concept albums ever recorded.
These days, we think of Davies as doing his best work with a quiet, knowing, ironic smile -- this is the album that started his whole downstream career phase as the poet laureate of a quickly-evaporating Albion, which groups like the Libertines (and all their tongue-in-cheek Olde Ways mythmaking) were surely taking note of.
A top-ten all time record for me. All hail the Godfather of Britpop (I'm sure he hates that moniker but it doesn't mean it's not true).
Oct 27, 2024
Too tough to pick just one, I mean LCD’s self titled, Obscured By Clouds, All Things Must Pass, Crush, Longwave, The OOZ, pretty much every Kurt Vile record… all goated in my eyes. I’ll use my cop out answer to highlight 2 of my favorite contemporary album artists.
First, local dude Perry Shall, who has designed many releases on Dan Auerbach’s label Easy Eye Sound. Some great Shannon & The Clams covers, an overlooked but incredibly solid Radiator Hospital album — I especially love his portrait style covers. I certainly ripped that template when designing the bootleg cover in the pinned post on my page. Which leads into artist #2…
Andrew Savage of Parquet Courts fame has also designed each of the band’s releases, plus an Ultimate Painting split on Woodsist, plus I’m pretty sure both of his solo albums. Light Up Gold, Human Performance, Wide Awake!! C’mon… check out the portfolio section on his website, too, for some paintings from over the years. Asked To Leave and In Texas No Less are two of my faves.
Aug 22, 2024
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this site is pro sincerity
Dec 15, 2023
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tomorrow PI.FYI launches to the public
this project is the result of thousands of hours spent coding everything from scratch after I got laid off six months ago
no thiel-bucks or weirdo outsider money, just a pure desire to make something fun and true to Perfectly Imperfect’s day one goal of helping people find new things from real human beings, not algorithms or AI
a pure labor of love that I’ve been quietly plotting for two years and it’s completely self-funded from my (rapidly) dwindling savings account
so thank you for coming along for this weird ride 🫶 let's see where it goes
Jan 21, 2024
Feb 2, 2024