Feudalist Tarts - Alex Chilton (1985)
Chilton was the still-teenaged singer in 60s blue-eyed soul outfit The Box Tops. He later ended up making some seminal power pop with Big Star. If he did nothing else, he’d probably be a footnote.
But he kept on recording his oddball soul and R&B visions, even when nobody was particularly interested.
By the mid-80s, he might not have been a … um… big star, but he had an audience and a vision for fun, quirky tunes that were out of step with the times but sounded pretty damn good.
As with Big Star, there seems to be no canonical track order or even a set of which tracks are “supposed” to be on this record vs several others. Either he didn’t care or he had a habit of letting the label make decisions for him.
Tracks I Liked
Tee Ni Nee Ni Noo / Tip On In - loose adaptations of a couple of Slim Harpo tunes
Lost My Job - a rockin’ workout
No Sex - A candid and weirdly humorous tale from the height of the AIDS epidemic
Underclass - another rocker
