One From The Vault: The Feelies – Crazy Rhythms

The album cover may feature four young men staring out from a blue background like extras from Revenge Of The Nerds, but this ain’t no Weezer record, ladies and gentlemen. Given the release date of 1980, it will surprise no one to learn that The Feelies emerged from the post-punk New York scene to boldly declare their brilliance to the world. Or at least they would have done, had anyone actually been listening.

Perhaps the record’s relative lack of commercial clout is appropriate in its own way. The Feelies do subtlety very, very well; at times it’s almost as if their music exists on this earth as the cosmic counterweight to a Jerry Bruckheimer film. Crazy Rhythms is approximately 30% intro, with songs fading in and often taking two minutes to reach normal volume. But if this is foreplay, the main act does not disappoint once the jiggery-pokery has concluded. The spiky, driving guitars that characterise so much of the era are present with bells on, accompanied at times by mildly unintelligible vocals that mask a lyrical maturity sadly lacking from most of the group’s peers. But while that may sound like the group run the risk of erring on the wrong side of sloth, the real star of the record is Anton Fier.

Ascribing an album’s greatness to its drummer’s skill is a rare claim for the same reason that nobody admires the Taj Mahal for its foundations, but this record is all Fier. His skins drive the tracks along with a fierce, kinetic energy that, allied with the stuttering guitar lines of founding member Bill Million and Glenn Mercer, ensures the album’s title aptly describes the music’s manic charm. ‘Original Love’ and wonderfully-titled opener ‘The Boy With The Perpetual Nervousness’ dance to the beat of Fier’s drum like some sort of voodoo hex, while the group’s delicious version of The Beatles’ ‘Everybody’s Got Something To Hide...’ rips through the middle of the record like it’s late for a doctor’s appointment.

The sad thing is, like so many other groups of this ilk, they never again came close to hitting these sorts of dizzy heights. The group went into stasis after the release of this opening salvo, and while Million and Mercer did reunite in the mid-‘80s to fashion another couple of very credible efforts (and again recently for selected shows), Fier never again recorded with his old cohorts (although he did go on to pen his own masterpiece, 1985’s Visions Of Excess, under the Golden Palominos moniker). But rather than pine for what we lost, let’s celebrate the geeky delights of what was forged from those early days. This is an LP very much born of its era; and yet it manages to capture the best traits of the post-punk scene, while remaining sufficiently individual to still sound fresh today. If The Damned had somehow been surgically conjoined to early Talking Heads, Crazy Rhythms is the unholy offspring that might have been emerged.

You know what though?... This actually outstrips them both.