Crazy Rhythms is both an artifact and a timeless piece of rock. Artifact given it was released an astounding twenty-nine years ago. Timeless in that it still sounds fresh, weird, undiluted. For all the previous acclaim that this band has received, their sound, especially on this first record, remains singular.
That sound? Angular, manic, clean, nearly chaotic yet obsessively controlled, highly caffeinated, playful, tribal. There are so many ways to describe it. Each song has the quality of a campfire: at first a spark here, a spark there, building into a flame before full-out blazing. The opener, "The Boy with the Perpetual Nervousness," opens with claves, sprinkled through the silence to create a dusky atmosphere, before the guitars of Glenn Mercer and Bill Million begin to bounce off each other. The rise continues for a full minute before Andy Fier's tribal percussion triggers the song. "Raised Eyebrows," the penultimate track, initially seems to defy this pattern, as both guitars and the drums labor from the beginning. But each bar adds a new element, whether it's an additional percussive nuance, a more fleshed-out melody, or a liberated guitar riff, until hell breaks loose and the song title makes sense in this aural and physical way.
Of course, it wouldn’t be a reissue without the requisite bonus material. Mostly, it’s just demos and live versions of the original songs, but the cover of Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers’ “I Wanna Sleep in Your Arms” perfectly articulates the Feelies’ ability to both honor and reconceptualize a song. They’ve always been clear about their influences. They cover the Beatles on Crazy Rhythms—"Everybody's Got Something to Hide Except Me and My Monkey"—and their live Velvet Underground covers seem to channel the original spirit of those songs. But the Feelies are able to chomp on those influences, chew them up, and spit out something that's almost unrecognizable yet completely in the Feelies’ character.
I remember playing the title track for my father back in the mid-'80s. He had the blue and red Beatles records, so I thought maybe he could make a connection. This song, the final cut on the record, is six minutes long and includes a prolonged plateau, with the same drumbeat serving as a foundation for a cornucopia of sounds, mostly percussion, that escape into the void. My father walked out of the room, muttering, "It all sounds the same." But he wasn't really listening. It was more complicated than that. Every second of that song was unique to all the other seconds, and he couldn't hear that.
It's a record that should never, ever be out of print, and yet its disappearance occurs regularly, a rather difficult situation to accept. The September reissue by Bar/None remains as ripe as ever.
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