Friday, February 19, 2010

The Remains : Don't Look Back

The RemainsA ton of great rock music came out in the late 60's, as everybody and their brother (and sometimes their sister) wanted to be the next Beatles. And like today's interwebs, which lets everybody and their laptop write, record and distribute their own magnum opus, there were a slew of little garage bands recording actual 45's for local labels. These labels would push the tunes out to local radio and sometimes they would become regional hits.

"Don't Look Back" is a one of these garage rockers from '66. It's got a driving beat and rocks as hard as anything Green Day's released in the past ten years. It's got a hammered three-on-two stuttering stop-start chorus with excellent harmonies and a wild freakbeat breakdown smack in the middle of the tune. And the lyrics are a curious mix of hippie/punk anarchist seize-the-day attitude. It's a fantastic tune.

Cover for the Remains' 1966 eponymous release.In the late 70's and early 80's some collectors gathered up some of these garage and psychedelic songs and pumped out a bunch of compilations dedicated to this stuff, primarily the Nuggets and Pebbles series. This one comes from the fantastic Nuggets box set on Rhino records. If you like this stuff, you can't go wrong with it. You can also find it on the re-release of the Remains' eponymous only album.

[You can listen to The Remains' "Don't Look Back" by navigating to the post "Song035" and clicking or right-clicking on the title or the link.]


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