June 20 - June 27, 1 9 9 6

More songs for a summer's day

In our June 7 issue, our music critics shared their summer-soundtrack favorites and invited you to send in your own lists of five songs or albums that mean "summer" to you. As we head into the season, we'll be publishing some of those responses. Here's the contribution of Samuel Jeffries:

R.E.M., Green (Warner Bros., 1989). It's late spring, 1989, and you're lying in your upstairs bedroom, drifting off to sleep, hearing for the first time the tape that would stay at your side that summer and for years to come. Unlike most music, which merely takes on personal resonance as you link it with a certain time in your life, at least one song on Green is specifically about nostalgia: "You Are the Everything" captures more eloquently than memory itself that moment when fireflies appear, the night is warm and heavy, and the crickets pipe up. And that, my friend, is art. But what's more, the entire album bristles with the vibe that colonized the summer of '89: the giddiness of "Stand" and "Get Up," the ominous blare of "Orange Crush," and the melancholy, backyard-evening strains of "Hairshirt." Play the final, untitled track with the lights off at midnight at the height of July and feel what happens when music meets emotion and produces magic.

Bob Dylan, Planet Waves (Columbia, 1974). Like indie-rockers born 20 years before their time, Dylan and the Band mischievously skew country, rock, folk, and backwoods hillbilly with a loose-limbed genius that can't be copped. There's not a wink of '90s-chic irony here, merely the boys' playful, outrageous love for the styles they shake up. Plus, the album just sounds like August: its exhilaratingly sloppy numbers congeal into pure back-porch heat, demanding that you get up from in front of the fan, smear the sweat off your face, and howl along like a Kentucky moonshiner.

Sleepyhead, Communist Love Songs (Homestead, 1996). A road trip back to the glory days of '70s radio rock, fueled with a youthful chirp that Rod Stewart probably never had. We're talking sunny, spirited love rock made for ragtop-car stereos.

Air Miami, Me. Me. Me. (4AD, 1995). Modern-day beach disco, with guitars spiky as volleyballs and shimmery as the surf. Think flamingos, Ferraris, and introspective sex on the beach.

Superchunk, "Shallow End," Incidental Music 1991-95 (Merge, 1995). Because a more rousing indie-romp anthem hath never been penned. And because when I moved into my new place at the end of last summer, the first thing I did was hook up my stereo. Guess what song I played.

-- Samuel Jeffries
Providence, Rhode Island