Big Star

The template for the let's-try-anything aesthetic of Beck and Badly Drawn Boy. Fans of this shambling masterwork tend to confuse Big Star's biography with the actual music: remembered as despairing, it's actually full of eccentric, defiant, life-affirming pop rockers like "Thank You Friends" and "You Can't Have Me," as well as tracks entitled "Holocaust."

It's safe to say there would have been no modern pop movement without Big Star.
Everyone from the Replacements, the dB's, the Bangles and R.E.M. to Teenage Fanclub and
Ride is beholden to Big Star for the post-Beatles, post-Velvets trails the band blazed in the
early Seventies. Big Star dared to be poppishly offbeat when both pop music and
nonconformity were being beaten back by the industry-driven push toward cor... More >

In late 1974, Alex Chilton--already the inventor of self-conscious power pop--transmogrified himself into some hybrid of Lou Reed (circa The Velvet Underground and/or Berlin) and Michael Brown (circa "Walk Away, Renee" and "Pretty Ballerina"). This is the album that resulted--fourteen songs in all, only two or three of which wander off into the psycho ward. Halting, depressive, eccentrically shaped, it will seem completely beyond the pale to those who already find his regular stuff weird. I think it's prophetically idiosyncratic and breathtakingly lyrical. (Grade - A-)