Crazy Rhythms [Bonus Tracks]

The Feelies: Bill Million, Glenn Mercer (vocals, guitar); Keith Clayton (bass); Anton Fier (drums).
Producers: The Feelies, Mark Abel.
Bristling with that other often youthful sort of energy (nervous as opposed to sexual), the Feelies' CRAZY RHYTHMS is an overlooked/underrated masterpiece. The album is marked by Glen Mercer and Bill Million's furiously strummed guitars (both acoustic and electric), and propelled forward with some of the most primitive--yet outstanding--drumming since Moe Tucker, courtesy of Anton Fier. Off-kilter covers of the Beatles ("Everybody's Got Something to Hide (Except Me and My Monkey)") and the Rolling Stones ("Paint it Black," available only on the CD version) posit the New Jersey-based Feelies as a Garden State analog to Devo, while elsewhere the band excels at a taut, jittery nerd-pop that is invitingly their own. The title-track, however, is the album's masterpiece, and finds the band riding a six-minute-plus wave of Velvety hyperactive jangle-rock bifurcated by a brilliant rhythm break based on a minimalist, gloriously repetitive bass and drum pattern. It's an anthem for the awkward and confused, and a sterling example of the very best the American musical underground had to offer in the era following punk's initial blast. Crazy indeed.