formerly, The Paris Review of Mp3s

People have cast insult after insult at me for liking the following two bands. But in this age of apology, where Al Jarreau gets a week to himself, I’ll go ahead and give it one more shot. Here are a couple of tunes–both using the guitar theme from the Beatles’ “Getting Better,” I might add–that are just too great to be lacquered over by the shame of enjoying them.

The first is from Utopia’s awesome amazing “Deface The Music” from 1980. At some point I’ll have to do a full post on this album, which I discovered in my mother-in-law’s tape deck last year.

Utopia – Feel Too Good

btw, check out that bust of Willie Wilcox (bottom right) as a proto Ad-Rock.

Next up, we have SF band Jellyfish, from 1993′s Spilt Milk. Yep, I saw the band’s first video on MTV when I was a kid and totally got hooked. The fact that the album cover featured the band walking across a naked female torso decorated with Colgate didn’t hurt. Anyway, that was their first album, “Bellybutton”. A few years later I bought “Spilt Milk”, based solely on the memory of a video I vaguely remembered as being “psychedelic” Very cool to a 14 year-old. As the liner photos imply, this is meant to be the band’s “Pet Sounds,” and really, it’s crazy how hard they must have worked on it. It’s kind of all over the place and features so many instruments it’s hard not to imagine them all strapped to the same guy as he walks up a hill. “Sebrina Paste And Plato” is one of the less laden tunes. And if your heart doesn’t leap when you find out that Chesney’s crush is “the girl behind the boysenberry punch: Sebrina!,” well sir, you can just keep your fancy pop music!

Jellyfish – Sebrina Paste And Plato