Despite a fun Beatles cover (Everybody's Got Something to Hide Except Me and My Monkey), it's really Velvet Underground and Lou Reed who the Feelies brought to mind with their first album, released in 1980. Minimalist to the point of being seriously lo-fi, the Crazy Rhythms from this quartet of spotty students from Hoboken, New Jersey had a style that was rather ahead of its time, with its scrappy guitars (think the Velvet Underground's Moe Tucker) and vocals that are almost spoken… This confident amateurism forged a Feelies style which would continue across another three albums, The Good Earth (1986), Only Life (1988) and Time For Witness (1991). It's surely in the soil of Crazy Rhythms that the indie rock of the following decade took root, from Pavement to Yo La Tengo, and even the Strokes… © Marc Zisman/Qobuz