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The old five-point scale has been retired in favor of just rating stuff 1-10, which allows me a much more nuanced final rating. Still don't take it that seriously. Most of these come from my own collection, so the grades skew rather high. Your results may vary if you send me stuff to review.

Each album is given three Essential tracks, my personal favorites, regardless of how weird and inconsequential they are. The Quintessential pick is the one I think best represents the album as a whole, so you can try one song instead of a whole album of songs. Non-Essential picks range from merely disappointing to outright unlistenable.

Fastball

[#] All the Pain Money Can Buy (1998)

Reviewed June 9, 2025

All the guitar pop $1 can buy.

Texas-born and raised Fastball are permanently indebted to the 60s and 70s piano and guitar rock that came before them. It's part of what makes "The Way" so singular yet fitting. This darkly seductive, frankly creepy Latin-inspired groove about a missing Salado elderly couple who gave up the ghost and passed on attached at the hip--it's sticky, it's catchy, and while nothing else on All the Pain sounds like it, just like their forerunners, these guys restlessly move between sounds and styles, songwriters Tony Scalzo and Miles Zuniga alternating genre exercises and lead vocals like it's nothing. It's uneven, but it's pretty hard not to find something to love about it.

Of the two, Scalzo has this kinda husky voice and a love for grand choruses and wistfulness that add up to some of the album's hugest moments ("The Way", the wafting, introspective "Out of My Head", the fuzzy vignette "Warm Fuzzy Feeling")--though that's not always to his benefit, if the glurgy ska rip "Good Old Days" is anything to go by. Zuniga is no slouch either though. His vocal tends to play like a more tuneful Lou Reed, and he's fittingly less shy about sleaze, like Charlie, the Methadone Man's leopard print thong, and cynicism, a la "Fire Escape"'s romantic hesitancy. Especially take note of his gorgeous starving artist Poe duet "Which Way to the Top?". That's Fastball at their finest.

Essential:	Quintessential:	Non-Essential:	Rating:
"The Way", "Which Way to the Top?", "Out of My Head"	"Better Than it Was"	"G.O.D. (Good Old Days)"

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