Underrated, Overlooked, and Forgotten: Sunday, April 26th, 2020

It’s a cloudy Sunday here as I listen to some songs to write about for the first edition of Underrated, Overlooked, and Forgotten. This is a new piece I’ll be writing every Sunday which goes over songs that I find are underrated, overlooked or forgotten.

We start today with a track off of Steely Dan frontman Donald Fagen’s 2006 LP; “Morph The Cat”, the title track; “Morph The Cat”. Having grown up on Steely Dan through my dad’s love of the band, I’m pretty aware of their music. “Aja” is, in my opinion, one of the best jazz-rock albums of all time. I was looking at the Wikipedia page for Donald Fagen after finding out a jazz guitarist played on one of his solo albums and I found this album. There is not much info as to if the album was well received or not, and that almost gave me more reason to listen to the first track. The first thing that struck me was the drum sound. The snare is punchy, the cymbals are bright, and the kick is thumpy, everything drum wise sounds great. I then was surprised to hear that Donald Fagen’s vocal performance wasn’t actually too bad, another thing that stuck out to me. The song follows more of a funk-jazz narrative with a bit of soul mixed in. The songwriting is great and sounds just like a classic Steely Dan song, interesting chorus, cool instrumentation, everything someone who is a fan of the band already would like. If you like what Steely Dan does, this is another great song in that style, if you don’t, this won’t change your mind.

We’re going to take a little turn in the playlist here, as I generally will do with this weekly piece. The setting is New York City, the year is 1988. The band The Lounge Lizards have just released their album; “Voice of Chunk”. The song I will be picking from this album is, again, the title track; “Voice of Chunk”. It’s hard to pinpoint The Lounge Lizards, which came out of the punk and no-wave scene in New York City in the 80s. I found the band while looking through Father John Misty’s playlist on Spotify, a great playlist by the way. The band is sort of a fusion between no wave, a genre of punk music that came out of New York, and jazz fusion. It’s like jazz fusion-punk fusion. No wave is a genre that would take way too long to dissect, that’s for another time, but nevertheless, “Voice of Chunk” is a great track. The song starts off with this distinct, cool drum beat. The whole song almost feels like it’s angled sideways, the groove always feels slightly odd. In terms of structure, the song is structured like a jazz song, but in terms of composition, it's very much a rock song. This is a song that I never get tired of listening to, and has a strong reach as it is in the wheelhouse of jazz fans and punk fans.

The final song I’m going to talk about today is a long one! 16 minutes long! The song is by a band called 40 Watt Sun, and is called “Stages”. The song is a track off of the 2016 album, “Wider than the Sky”. 40 Watt Sun originates from the UK and definitely has a European feel, almost falling into the irish category, even though they aren’t irish. They are originally a doom metal band, but wait! Don’t let that turn you off if you’re not a metal fan! This is NOT a metal song. Which is why it pissed off the few fans that they have. I, personally, love the album. On “Wider than the Sky” they favour more melancholic, moody rock music with a folk feel instead of bass heavy doom metal. They still love long songs, though, which is a staple of doom metal music. You would think that a song that takes 6 minutes to get to it’s chorus would be hard to get into, but the melodies and slow, lush instrumentation really put the listener in a trance, to the point where you’re unaware that it took 6 minutes to get to the chorus. The song is wonderfully orchestrated, and if you’re needing a good cry because of the troubles of self-quarantine, I suggest listening to this song.

That’s it for today, but I’ll have more song suggestions next Sunday.