Give it to the Soft Boys - Wednesday, September 11, 2024
What’s the thing you can’t write down?
If you start acknowledging things, where do you stop? There’s much more horror than I intend to contend with.
The Soft Boys
A few weeks back, I wrote about Robyn Hitchcock’s memoir, which is worth reading. A few days ago, my friend Robert was posting on social media about the specific joy of recognizing a band in a public place—if you’ve never heard the song. It is a great feeling! He mentioned that he’s never really listened to RH’s first band, the Soft Boys, so I shot a six song playlist over to him containing my favorite Soft Boys songs.
For context, as the 70s became the 80s, this band put out two albums that weren’t hugely commercially successful, but found a following, and in the years to come the shining stars of what was then called college rock would regularly cite the Soft Boys as an influence. REM was high on the list of soon-to-be famous bands who name-checked the Soft Boys, and the folks from that band would go on to support Robyn in various ways, including Peter Buck being in his band for a time. Then, as happens when people live long enough, the Soft Boys did a reunion album and tour 20-odd years after they ceased to be a band the first time. This reunion was remarkable for at least two reasons:
Kimberly Rew deigned to rejoin the group despite having penned the perpetual number-one hit, “Walking on Sunshine” with his band the Waves.1
The Soft Boys were every bit as good two decades on.
Give it to the Soft Boys: The opener to their first album, A Can of Bees, featuring a great count-in bit. I like this one in part because of the brazen Beefheart influence.
I Wanna Destroy You: This song and the next one are kind of a perfect angsty-young-man suite. Here you can really appreciate the angular guitar work ricocheting around.
Insanely Jealous of You: If you were insanely jealous of someone, you would never be this direct about it.
Tonight: There’s an ominous tone to a lot the lines here that I find enticing.
Underwater Moonlight: The title track from their second and best album, released the month I was born.
Mr. Kennedy: From the comeback album. This song name checks another favorite band o’ mine: Sebadoh. I should do a playlist of songs that mention them and/or Lou Barlow. There are a few!
So there you go! The Soft Boys!
Collage: As High as an Elephant’s Eye
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