The Feelies, Crazy Rhythms
Featured Album
Four brilliant nerds cut a hyper-minimalist indie-rock diamond — a classic nearly twenty years later
For the first few years of their existence, the Feelies played the same nine songs over and over and over and over and over. So when it came time to make their debut album, they ended up with, as producer Mark Abel put it, "the culmination of four years of fantasizing about how they were going to record those songs." Crazy Rhythms is a fetishistically hyper-precise album, even by the standards of the New York City of 1980: most of the songs hover around as few chords as they can get away with, with the thinnest, cleanest, driest dual-guitar interlock ever committed to tape, rattling percussion, and frontmen Glenn Mercer and Bill Million's uptight yelp occasionally surfacing in the mix. They're minimal, but they're fast. The one cover here is the Beatles' "Everybody's Got Something to Hide Except Me and My Monkey," and their arrangement suggests that what drew the Feelies to the song is its relentless cowbell-hammering. Most of Mercer and Million's songwriting is all about precision, too: the rocket-speed chantalong "Fa Cé La," re-recorded from their debut single, is so tightly constructed that the little shift in its bass pattern that appears a few seconds before the end shakes the whole thing apart, and "Raised Eyebrows" is basically just a minuscule riff played as hard as they can possibly manage, with roughly two lines' worth of lyrics as decoration. The album's title track encapsulates the Feelies' aesthetic: the lyrics are all about emotions contradicting themselves full-force, Mercer dispatches them as quickly as possible ("can't relax when there's things to do," he mutters), and then the band singlemindedly drills down on a single-chord groove until they hit an explosive pocket of chorus.
