I'm very pleased to say that Green's eponymous album from 1986 is finally out. Some things are just hard for me to understand. I bought this album on vinyl when it originally came out based on a Christgau review in the Village Voice. Why this has not been available sooner is a complete mystery to me. As far as I know this Chicago band has only been out on CD in the Netherlands and that was many years ago.
This album is an indie pop tour de force, with tons of youthful enthusiasm, giant hooks, fantastic melodies--almost every song is excellent on this cd. Other albums followed this with great reviews, but this is my favorite. Some critics take too much stock in "production values" and use this as a way of being dismissive of this album at least in comparison to Elaine MacKenzie and White Soul lps. These songs are terrific in any form.
Gotta Get A Record Out is an over the top pop song which reminds me of being in a band and dreaming of fame and glory--it reminds me of that scene in "That Thing You Do" where the band and the big elf girl hear their song on the radio for the first time. (I still can't believe Liv Tyler gave up her immortality to go on tour with that one-hit band.)
She's Not A Little Girl Anymore is a classic pop song which sounds like it should have come out in the 1960's. The melody is just perfect. Curry Your Favor and She, Probably are also gems, two aching yearning ballads. For You is probably one of my favorite ballads, period. In descriptive shorthand the band could be stylistically described as a pop oriented Replacements, though certainly there are a lot of other influences going on here (Beatles, Kinks, Byrds).
Other Notable songs are the rave-ups Baby Why?, the excellent Better Way, Big In Japan, I'm Not Going Down (Anymore), If You Love Me, & I Don't Wanna Say No. Also included are 7 bonus tracks including their 1st ep.
I found out about this recently because they were advertising this on the website Parasol records and that was the first place that I had seen this release. And this Lion Productions LLC release has a copyright of 2009 on it. I'm kind of surprised that more hasn't been made of this, reviews in music magazines. Jeff Lescher and the rest of the band really made a terrific album here and people who love pop music will really love this release. Hopefully other Green releases will eventually follow.
Actually, it seems Green recently released their first new album in many years entitled The Planets. I don't have it, but it may be something well worth looking into also.
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