Consumer Guide Album

Alex Chilton: Feudalist Tarts [Big Time, 1985]
After ten years of falling-down flakedom only a cultist could love or even appreciate, Chilton looks around and straightens up. The bottlenecked "Lost My Job" comes close to such beacons of his lost decade as "Bangkok" and "Take Me Home and Make Me Like It." The precocious Memphis soul singer and the prescient American pop eccentric both get their chops into the Carla Thomas and Slim Harpo covers. And when he slips into Willie Turbinton's amazing "Thank You John"--that name is upper-cased and lower-cased simultaneously--he remembers that it isn't only too-much-too-soon white boys who get twisted around in this world. A−