One of the all-time great Boston post-punk singles, every bit up there with Mission of Burma's "Academy Fight Song," the Girls' "Jeffrey I Hear You" still sounds forbiddingly weird today, over a quarter century after it confounded crowds at the Rat. The band's only release in their tumultuous two-year existence, "Jeffrey I Hear You" was produced by David Thomas and released on Pere Ubu's own Hearthan label, and Ubu's influence is keenly felt, especially in Robin Amos' wriggly, Allen Ravenstine-style synth lines. Early Feelies is also a good touchstone, but as tightly wound as the Hoboken boys often were, they never quite sounded this unhinged. (The story I've heard is that "Jeffrey I Hear You" is about singer/drummer Daved Hild's brother, who died when they were kids, but I don't remember where this interpretation came from.) Amos is still active in the Boston art-punk scene as a key member of the long-running Cul de Sac, and Hild has made some appealingly odd records with Ralph Carney (Tin Huey, etc.), but here in Boston, this is still what they're best remembered for.

-Stewart Mason

Since this record has been comped on Bloodstains Across Belgium, I will assume that is indeed the Gate Crashers' country of origin, but what's really interesting about this record is it's new wrinkle on the age-old question "Does the presence of a Farfisa organ automatically change 'punk' into 'new wave?'" Either way, we're quite pleased with the results, and wish there were more like this.

1979 was a good year for Th’ Dudes. After three years of building a large and loyal following in New Zealand, they delivered a debut album that was a critical and commercial success. The group toured 22 high schools to promote the album, often causing Beatles-style hysteria among the young, impressionable girls. Critics also fawned over the group: the Christchurch Star called Th’ Dudes “the best power pop group we have,” The Sunday Times said Right First
Time is the most impressive album ever recorded in New Zealand,” and the album’s first single, “Be Mine Tonight” was voted song of the year at the National Music Awards.

By 1980 however, the group was in disarray. Encouraged by their fast-talking manager Charley Gray, the group had been demanding star treatment wherever they went, often paying more for their dressing rooms and booze than they were actually paid to play. When the group toured in 1979, they used an imported sound system and employed the largest crew of any band in
the country. In addition to their mounting debt were the usual trappings of success: booze, girls, and ego clashes between the group’s two principal songwriters Dave Dobbyn and Ian Morris. The group lasted just long enough to record their second album, and then they were gone.

Dave Dobbyn, who wrote and sang “Be Mine Tonight” went on to have a successful solo career in the ‘80s. His heartbreaking ballad “Loyal” is still commonly heard in pubs all over New Zealand

-Mark Griffey

I gotta say, big ups for the Swedes. I've been in something of an orgy of Svenska Pop lately, having just consumed the entirety of the recent The Complete Studio Recordings box set by ABBA, DVDs and all, but just in general, big fan of our Nordic friends. Love the Volvo, especially the really boxy old ones. Love me some lingonberries. Oddly fond of IKEA. But for me, the best thing about Sweden is that in the '90s, there was an actual government program where you could apply for a grant for your band and if you were accepted, you'd get money for instruments and recording time. I don't remember if Gentle Tuesday benefited from this remarkable display of socialistic largesse (I received this single as part of a demo package for my label, which I turned down because this was the only one of their songs I really liked), but "Chanson de Geste" is a perfect example of where Swedish pop was circa 1995: trumpet, organ, acoustic guitars and an agreeably weedy, thin voice on top of it all. The Cardigans took this sound to the charts, but they were just the beginning.

-Stewart Mason

Flowchart -- who for all intents and purposes was just a guy named Sean O'Neal -- started out making records that sounded so much like Stereolab that some people thought they were meant as some kind of parody. After a couple of records in this style, O'Neal started incorporating a lot of other influences into Flowchart's sound, and they ended up being a really interesting, varied project. My favorite, however, is this 1996 single on a clearly Sarah Records-obsessed Japanese label called Motorway. "Sideshow All the Way" is rather unique in Flowchart's oeuvre because guitar takes precedence over keyboards, and the strummy-strummy-la-la melody and gently bossa nova-ish rhythm is much more Blueboy than Stereolab. Still, he doesn't leave the electronics completely out of the picture: what sounds like a crackle of vinyl surface noise at the song's beginning quickly reveals itself to be an integral part of the song's rhythm track.

-Stewart Mason

A new-wave tribute to a couple of our favorite TV characters. First, SF's Eye Protection uses the always classy spy jazz motif and a probable Rezillos influence to pay tribute to Judy's brother. This single was the entirety of their output, save for a comp track; they are perhaps most noted because singer Andy Prieboy replaced Stan Ridgeway when the latter left Wall Of Voodoo. More obscure yet are the Jurassics, two guys known as Jet Screamer (another Jetsons reference) and Surfer Joe Atomic who used two very fuzzy guitars and a very loud drum macine to create this open letter taking the original Starship Captain to task ("But now they call you Shatner, or worse, T.J. Hooker"). They then stuck it in a very DIY photocopy sleeve, mailed it out to a few fanzines, and disappeared.

Tim Best is a sporadically active singer/guitarist from Melbourne, Australia. I don't know what his connection to Parasol Records is, but he's had a home there since the early '90s, when he led the shimmering indie-jangle trio Girl of the World. (Incestuous trivia: another third of Girl of the World, guitarist Bart Cummings, later co-led the Shapiros, whose "Gone By Fall" was Little Hits' Song of the Day on November 29, 2005.) "Travel" was the title track of Girl of the World's four-track debut, which was one of Parasol's earliest releases, and it's a textbook example of a certain kind of shambolic, winsome indie pop that was seemingly everywhere in the first half of the '90s. Best's later records as Hispana Tim and finally under his own name have been less interesting, but I strongly recommend Parasol's Girl of the World compilation, titled Wonderboy and containing just about everything the group recorded.

-Stewart Mason

Kirsty MacColl was a lifelong Beach Boys fan who covered a few of her idols' songs during her career (most notably "You Still Believe In Me" on a 1981 single and "Don't Go Near the Water" a decade later), but "Please Go To Sleep" was her own tribute to Brian Wilson's vocal arrangements. The flip of 1985's "He's On The Beach" single, the song sounds as if it was intended as a lullaby for MacColl's infant son with producer Steve Lillywhite, who provides a swirling violin line and a few simple synths as a bed for an unadorned showcase of what made Kirsty MacColl so special: she was a one-woman Beach Boys, by some distance the greatest harmony singer in rock and roll history. Famously capable of creating overdubbed self-harmonies on the fly in the studio simply by standing in slightly different spots in front of the microphone, she had an intrinsic, intuitive gift that remains unmatched. Kirsty MacColl died off the shore of Cozumel, Mexico on December 18, 2000, hit by a speedboat whose driver still has not been charged with a crime. (Details at www.justiceforkirsty.org)

-Stewart Mason

Sometimes even the most shlubby of bands rises to the occasion and manages to capture lightning in a bottle, probably completely unaware that they’re doing so. Philadelphia’s Monkey 101 wasn’t around very long, played the occasional really sloppy show around town, and put out two singles. This is the first one, and boy did I have high hopes for them after hearing it. This recording sounds simultaneously tossed off yet full-on. Wonderfully trashy in all aspects, the clanging bass, the fuzz vibrato guitar, the mid-lo-fi production, the line “I’m so damn impatient/why the fuck didn’t you call”. Close listening reveals back-up spaghetti western vocal ahh’s, adding swagger and sonic glue. A bit Embarrassment, a bit Volcano Suns, and pretty much like a thousand punk bar bands across America, but with a great power chord hook and that “look Ma, the car’s got no breaks!” flying-off-the-handle vibe. Their second single didn’t come close.

Andrew Chalfen

The Fun Boy Three weren't as huge a stylistic leap from the Specials as was claimed -- the Specials' 1981 cover of "Maggie's Farm" was basically FB3's dry run, even if only Terry Hall, Lynval Golding and Neville Staples knew it at the time -- but they were still one of the oddest pop acts to hit the UK charts in the early '80s. Mixing African rhythms, deadpan chanted lyrics and post-punk cynicism, their debut album was at times so just plain weird it seemed like a novelty record, but there's an undercurrent of desperation here that groups like Bananarama -- who many people don't remember were given their first big break when they performed the female vocals on the Fun Boy Three's "It Ain't What You Do" -- never quite got. It couldn't last, of course, and it didn't: Terry Hall pissed off to form the Colourfield after a second album, 1983's David Byrne-produced Waiting, which featured a mesmerizing cover of the Go-Go's hit "Our Lips Are Sealed," which Hall and his ex-girlfriend Jane Wiedlin had written a few years previous.

-Stewart Mason