ALBUM RECOMMENDATIONS |

< Return to the review index

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.

Marcy Playground

[#] Shapeshifter (1999)

Reviewed July 8, 2023

Folklore as alt-rock, simple and endlessly appealing.

I believe the insatiable hunger for goofy, novel one-hit wonders in the 80s and 90s turned many promising bands into laughingstocks, and Marcy Playground were no exception. You got the trendy sound, the giggleworthy hook ("I smell sex and candy in here!"), the video (that, yes, features singer-guitarist John Wozniak bleeding out into a pool of white liquid), and that was the last anyone had heard of them. I guess they still got bigger than most of us will, but it does mean that terrific records like 1999's Shapeshifter got left on the table for lack of a "Sex and Candy". "Cammy, you're not about to make the case that Marcy Playground of all bands wrote one of the most underrated albums of the 90s, are you?" Yes. I very much am.

After a lackadaisical debut, Shapeshifter rocks. An emphasis on distorted riffs and new drummer Dan Rieser cause Marcy to sound more like a band and less like a singer-songwriter outfit, making the sillier tracks ("Secret Squirrel", "Pigeon Farm") all the more fun and giving the ballads ("All the Lights Went Out", "Never") serious muscle. Of course, even the more serious tracks have a nerdy lightness to them--see how "Wave Motion Gun" couches a drug intervention in Star Blazers references--and the album takes on a certain palate cleanser appeal as a result. Perhaps that's why Shapeshifter failed to take off; in a world where everyone wants to write grand epics, this album's lead single was about skipping school. That's a damn shame.

Essential:	Quintessential:	Non-Essential:	Rating:
"All the Lights Went Out", "Pigeon Farm", "Never"	"Wave Motion Gun"	Goose egg

[#] Marcy Playground (1997)

Reviewed July 12, 2023

File next to your sixteen books on magic spells.

Elephant in the room: "Sex and Candy" is a good song. Fun bit of Cammy lore for ya, when I was 9, I tried making a music video for it in MS Paint and Windows Movie Maker. I love the song, but it's hardly representative of Marcy Playground as a whole. Call it the "Mr. Jones" effect; it's not a total stylistic diversion for the band, but it's zingy and quirky in that 90s way and played well to a mainstream hungry for novelty for novelty's sake. Also worth addressing; John Wozniak doesn't remotely sound like Kurt Cobain. I feel like the contemporary press were still too focused on "the next Nirvana", and "Poppies" referencing the First Opium War somehow got the band labeled as Nirvana knockoffs. 90s music press was some hack fraud bullshit.

No, Woz is focused more on hiding his Dungeons and Dragons paraphernalia from his parents and dealing in Alice in Wonderland imagery than on the drugs. There's a whimsy to this album of easygoing hippie rock, talks of going to space, smiling clowns, and the Mad Hatter, that separates Marcy Playground from all the angst rock that was progressively growing leaden by the end of the 90s. Marcy's songs are dead simple, catchy and easy on the ears, acoustic-driven with distortion only occasionally used. This was probably the opposite of cool when it came out, a modest, sleepy record about schoolyard bullies, small-town suicides, and, yes, sex and candy, but it's pretty much a success overall--and Woz didn't need to shoot up to write it, no.

Essential:	Quintessential:	Non-Essential:	Rating:
"Poppies", "Sherry Fraser", "Opium"	"A Cloak of Elvenkind"	"Dog and His Master"

NOFI | LOFI