My Rival song

Here's the Alex Chilton song I alluded to in my earlier post.

Alex Chilton - My Rival (5.17 MB mp3: right-click and Save As to download; play using the handy little embedded player below)

Chilton was a member of the 60s teenage supergroup The Box Tops, and then the enduring power-pop supergroup Big Star in the 70s. He went on to make one of the most drug-fucked solo albums in the history of music, 1979's Like Flies On Sherbert; My Rival is one of the highlights on the album. Sloppy and disorganised, and containing one of the most innappropriately twittering analogue-synthesiser solos in the history of rock; yet its insouchiant swagger redeems every flaw as it stumbles drunkenly out of the bar and into the carpark...

David Cleary at allmusic.com completely just doesn't get the whole album at all, and consequently produced one of the funniest album reviews I've ever seen. It's so great I'm going to reproduce it in full right here (Yes, I'm that desperate for content):

On the strength of his Big Star releases from the early 1970s and a host of live performances he gave during the latter half of the 1970s, Alex Chilton had rightly become a rock connoisseur's darling and an inspiration to independent-label bands throughout the United States. Despite all this favorable attention, he would not return to the studio until 1980. Sadly, this release is a dreadful disappointment. Production values are among the worst this reviewer has ever heard: sound quality is terrible, instrumental balances are careless and haphazard, and some selections even begin with recording start-up sound. Chilton's false-start vocal on "Boogie Shoes" is simply left in without correction. Many of the songs here stop dead or fall apart rather than ending properly. Instrumental playing is universally slipshod and boorish, and vocals are sloppy and lackluster. A cover of the Lonnie Mack hit "I've Had It" contains vocals that, without exaggeration, sound like a group of tavern inebriates trying to sing. An attempt to burlesque Elvis Presley's vocal excesses in "Girl after Girl" misfires badly. A few of Chilton's songs here, such as "My Rival" and "Hook or Crook," aren't bad in their own right and would have been listenable had they been performed and produced better. Regrettably, this album cannot be recomended under any circumstances.

Mate, that's just all the more grist for my mill.