The Boo Radleys - Giant Steps

Man, I just dusted this one off for the first time in at least a decade, and now I remember why I loved it so much when it came out in 1993. It's awesome! The Boo Radleys were a british band who started off as a shoegaze outfit, making washes of sound, but who ended up a fairly upright britpop sounding group. The beauty of this album, which is by far my favorite of theirs, is that it came out when they were in between their phases, or before they stopped doing drugs, but were beginning to see the value of a sober head. Whichever. Giant Steps, instead of being a bunch of trippy washes of sound, or a bunch of composed, neat packages of pop music, is a bunch of together-enough pop songs vibrating and squooshing and zooming around all trippily without ever fuzzing out into bullshittery. It is the happy medium that doesn't compromise for either side. It is the golden ticket. It is tuneful pop with reverb drenched distortion giving way to trumpets and dub tricks and the occasional electronic texture. Their next album, Wake up, had all the fun bits shorn away save for the trumpets here and there, and while it was good, it was clear that what made the band great was now mostly missing. So if you like your 90s brit stuff, listen to this. It's like putting peanut butter on your chocolate ice cream. It's that eye-opening and delicious. Yes, "Lazarus" is magnificent, but so's the rest of it, and "Rodney King" mixes influences like few songs have ever managed to. There are 17 tracks on this, and all of them are well worth your time.