Send "The Feelies " Ringtones to your Cell 
| Pitchfork |
 The Feelies formed as a four-man rock band in a New Jersey suburb whose biggest 20th century shakeup was a textile strike. They wrote some original material and learned a couple of Beatles songs. They took their show 20 miles southeast to Hoboken, drove to Manhattan under the Hudson River, tucked in their shirts, pushed their glasses up on their nosebridges, and unleashed a kind of hypnotic punk-lite so buttoned up that it sounds choked-- like they counted to four and grabbed an electric fence. Did I say the Feelies are a rock band? I misspoke. They're a particle collider.Crazy Rhythms, their 1980 debut, has none of the attitudinal markings of rock-- no looseness, no swing, no danger, no laughs. Its cover-- a band portrait on a sky-blue void, echoed 14 years later on Weezer's "blue album" -- is bland and eerie. It looks like a misplaced rendering of four boys whose closest contact with rock music came from fixing radios. The title of the album appears as some innovative form of non-joke. And yet, and yet. Three-chord punk-- apparently too excessive for them-- is boiled down to two-chord devotionals: one for the first three minutes, one for the second. Two- and three-note guitar solos drone over the mix like a Muezzin's call. Bill Million and Glenn Mercer sing in grey, unimpressive voices-- probably influenced by the Velvet Underground, but just as likely a product of the belief that lead vocals were for generally immodest people....full text |
| Rollingstone |
| These suburban guitar geeks nailed their sound in 1980 with Crazy Rhythms' "Raised Eyebrows": two post-punk guitars chopping up a jagged surf riff, weird percussion clatter, tension building until it all explodes into a climactic power-strum rave with three dudes yelping, "The glory, glory, oh, oh!" in incoherent joy. Rhythms remains an indie-rock landmark, but the less famous Good Earth is every bit as crucial, with the hypnotic drones of songs like "Slipping (Into Something)." Reissues bonus: fantastic covers of the Beatles' "She Said She Said" and Neil Young's "Sedan Delivery."...full text |
| Dustedmagazine |
| Released simultaneously, reissues of the two first Feelies albums show how dramatically this band re-imagined itself during the 1980s. Although now mostly identified with jangly college rock (a la REM, the dBs, the Beat Farmers, etc.), the Feelies just missed NYC’s first wave of punk. During their early years, they played the same clubs (CBs, Maxwells) a year or two behind bands like Television, the Talking Heads and the Ramones. Their first album, Crazy Rhythms, released in 1980, bears a strong whiff of that era – lots of jittery rhythms, angst-ridden vocals and a general aura of nervous intelligence. You can hear a little of the band’s later ease and shimmer in cuts like “Original Love” and “Loveless Love,” but for the most part, these songs are twisted tight and punched out hard. The Feelies may never have been a punk band, but they certainly breathed the air. Six years and a good deal of obstacle-jumping separated Crazy Rhythms from The Good Earth. In between, the ”crazy” rhythm section of Keith DeNunzio and Anton Fier, left the band, and the Feelies fell out with their original label, Stiff. Glenn Mercer and Bill Million sidelined the Feelies for a time during the 1980s, performing as The Trypes, Yung Wu and the Willies around the New York Area. (These gigs also sometimes included members Brenda Sauter, Stanley Demeski, who became part of the Good Earth line-up.) The Feelies that recorded The Good Earth were a different band – or at least a different version of themselves – than the one who gave us Crazy Rhythms. They had a different label, different people, and different experiences. They also had a very different, and far more congenial, producer. For Crazy Rhythms, the Feelies had grudgingly brought in Peter Ambler, the soundman at CBGBs, when the label wouldn’t let them produce their own debut. For The Good Earth, Peter Buck manned the dials. And somewhere along the way, the whole musical aura around the Feelies became slower, driftier and more elegiac. The drums receded, the vocals turned more sustained and calm, the guitars interlocked not in combat but in delicate lattices of jangle and drone. Crazy Rhythms leads off with the clicking, knocking, one-guitar-note-driven-like-a-spike-into-your-head anxiety of “The Boy with the Perpetual Nervousness.” Six years later, The Good Earth, opens with the dreamy jangle of “On the Roof.” “Fa Ce La,” the first album’s single, bristles with adrenaline and rhythmic intensity. “Let’s Go,” the best known song from The Good Earth, builds in slow crescendos and the breezy mesh of dual guitars. Even the relatively percussive “Two Rooms,” with its submerged clattering of toms and aggressive guitars, is mixed so that the main flavor comes from the vocals. It sounds like a superior sort of hammock song, despite the rampage of 16th notes underneath....full text |
The Feelies lyrics
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