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March 12, 2010

Jeremiah Tucker: Shoes’ album remains a pop power classic

Shoes: “Black Vinyl Shoes”

Grade: A

Shoes was one of the first bands to have its music videos appear on MTV in the early ’80s.

“Tomorrow Night,” you remember that one? How about “Too Late”? Both songs are from its major label debut “Present Tense,” but it’s not surprising if you’ve never heard them because even if it could be argued that Shoes indeed achieved mainstream popularity, it was certainly short-lived. The band released three albums between 1979 and 1982 on Elektra, and then retreated home to Illinois, sporadically releasing music on its own label.

Shoes’ made melodic guitar pop with warm, ample harmonies, a style that was momentarily in fashion in the late ’70s and early ’80s, perhaps because it seemed like a less fraught iteration of the punk and emerging new wave scenes. “Black Vinyl Shoes,” the band’s first nationwide release and its best album, earned Shoes its deal with Elektra, but all of the band’s noblest attributes were crystallized in these 15 songs.

I recently listened to “Black Vinyl Shoes” after having not played it in more than five years, and I was struck not only by how great it is but how contemporary it sounds. With bands like the San Francisco group Girls garnering acclaim for pop songs recorded with intentionally low sonic fidelity, “Black Vinyl Shoes,” recorded on 4-track in a living room in 1977, sounds absolutely au courant.

Whereas today garage bands have access to cheap software that can give their recordings a professional sheen, Shoes were limited by circumstance, not by choice. They were, however, more ardent students of pop history than most.

Part of “Black Vinyl Shoes” charm is that the songs exhibit the ambition of The Beatles and the budget of recent high school graduates, which is what the Shoes were. There’s something affecting about such careful, lovingly-crafted pop songs presented so plainly.

But thank God when the record finally got noticed for the power pop classic that it was, it wasn’t ever re-recorded. Sometimes limits enhance. No one wishes Picasso’s blue period featured more color.

Luckily, “Black Vinyl Shoes” has entered the digital age and is now available on iTunes. Download “Tragedy,” “Running Start,” “Someone Finer,” “Not Me” and “Fire For Awhile.”



Song of the week

Ryan Bingham: “The Weary Kind”

“The Weary Kind” won the Oscar Sunday for Best Original Song, and it was deserved.

Written by producer T. Bone Burnett and alt-country singer-songwriter Ryan Bingham, “The Weary Kind” goes some way to making the movie “Crazy Heart” believable. In the film, when the washed-up, alcoholic protagonist Bad Blake — played by Jeff Bridges, who won the Oscar for Best Actor Sunday for his performance — writes the song, it redeems his reputation as a country legend.

And “The Weary Kind” is exactly the kind of scaled-back, classicist country song that someone who played outlaw country in the ’70s would write late in their career in a bid for a critical revival.

But as performed by Bingham — who began his music career after washing out as a bull rider and played in the same kind of dive bars Blake plays in the move — it sounds more like the spare, beaten-down reflections that populate Bruce Springsteen’s “Nebraska” than, say, something off Johnny Cash’s “American Recordings” series.



New release

Pavement: “Quarantine the Past: The Best of Pavement”

Grade: A

The best indie rock band of the ‘90s finally gets a greatest-hits compilation just in time for its reunion tour this summer.

Stephen Malkmus, the band’s lead singer and songwriter, in many ways seemed to epitomize the ’90s slacker phenomenon while simultaneously seeming above trends. Perhaps that’s why these 23 songs sound both fresh and incredibly tied to a now faraway decade.

Regardless, there isn’t a dud here. It’s a must buy.

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