Jerry Springer sings: "Save the Terminal" (1973)

In 1973, long before he became a schlocky television talk-show host and shortly before he was arrested for soliciting a prostitute, Jerry Springer recorded a charming little protest record called "Save the Terminal." (The title is often mistakenly listed as "Save the Union Terminal.") 

The song was written and recorded as part of an effort to raise money to save the Cincinnati Union Terminal, an Art Deco railroad terminal that opened in 1933 and was the model for the great hall of the Justice League in the animated series Super Friends. (The effort to save the terminal continues to this day.)

Train service at the terminal ended in 1973, and the train concourse was demolished in 1974, but the fundraising efforts enabled most of the artistic mosaic panels from the structure to be moved to various locations around Cincinnati.

This single wasn't the end of Springer's recording career. In 1995 he recorded an album, Dr. Talk, which contains his renditions of country, pop, and folk songs in addition to the title track, a Springer original.

Here's "Save the Terminal" and its flip side, "Faded Photos Just Won't Do":

101 Strings CDs on Alshire: variations in early pressings

Same disc, different cover

I previously posted a discography of 101 Strings CDs on Alshire Records, but that discography doesn't tell the whole story. The earliest 101 Strings CDs were pressed and repressed over the years with different covers and other variations. If you collect these CDs, here are some things to look out for:

Made in Japan/Made in USA

Alshire's early 101 Strings CDs were manufactured in Japan. Later, Alshire started manufacturing all of its CDs in the United States, so when these early titles were repressed, the discs said "Made in U.S.A." instead of "Made in Japan." I haven't figured out yet when Alshire stopped manufacturing in Japan. 

Sometimes the discs were identical except for the "Made in Japan" or "Made in U.S.A." statements: 

ALCD 19 with "Made in U.S.A."

ALCD 19 with "Made in Japan"

Other times, although the discs were otherwise identical, the compact disc logo changed with the "Made in Wherever" statement:

ALCD 3 with different compact disc logos

Note: Discrepancies sometimes occurred between the discs and packaging. These discrepancies weren't variations from pressing to pressing—they were mistakes. For example, the ALCD 3 disc, pictured above, gives the title as Best of the '101 Strings', but the covers and tray cards for both pressings say The Best of the Best of 101 Strings. Also, the covers and tray cards for both pressings give the catalog number as ALCD 3, but the discs for both pressings say ALSCD-3. Alshire had trouble maintaining consistency with its catalog numbers. The catalog number that is printed on many of the Alshire discs includes a hyphen, even though the covers and tray cards do not include the hyphen. The Alshire catalog didn't include hyphens in the catalog numbers, so I omitted the hyphens when I wrote the discography.

With barcode/without barcode

Many of the early 101 Strings CDs were issued without barcodes on the tray card. When these titles were repressed, barcodes were added.

Sometimes the tray cards were identical except for the absence or presence of the barcode. In these cases, the front cover remained the same: 

ALCD 23 with and without barcode; both versions had "Made in U.S.A." discs

Other times the design changed when the barcode was added. In these cases, the cover art also changed. 

ALCD 3 with first- and second-edition tray cards

ALCD 10 with first- and second-edition tray cards

Cover changes

Alshire sometimes changed the covers of the 101 Strings CDs. Later pressings might have a completely different cover from the early pressings, even though the disc and tray card remain mostly the same. 
 

ALCD 3 with first- and second-edition covers

ALCD 10 with first- and second-edition covers

Eventually, I'll update the discography to show the variations that occurred within each catalog number. It's possible that examples exist in which three or more variations occurred for a single catalog number. For example, there could be a version that was made in Japan, an identical version that was made in the US, and then an updated made-in-the-US version that had different cover art, but I haven't found anything like that yet. So far, two variations per title appears to be the maximum.

Why didn't Van Johnson serve in World War II?

Van Johnson in Battleground (MGM, 1949)

A reader recently asked me why Van Johnson didn't serve in World War II, presumably because I previously wrote about Roy Rogers' and John Wayne's military service (or lack thereof). Van Johnson was mainly an actor but sang and danced in some musicals, most notably Brigadoon (1954) and The Music Man (the 1961 London cast—not the 1957 Broadway cast or the 1962 film). Johnson's studio, MGM, never attempted to turn him into a recording star, so he appeared on a few soundtrack albums and compilations of show tunes but no singles.

One of the reasons that Johnson didn't serve in World War II was that he was in a serious car accident in 1943 during the production of the film A Guy Named Joe. In the crash, Johnson was ejected from the car and thrown head first into a curb, receiving such severe injuries that he had to have a metal plate put in his head.

Afterward, he suffered from severe headaches, had to do exercises to strengthen his right arm, and wore heavy makeup to hide the scars on his face. 

As a result of the accident, Johnson was classified 4-F, which was a classification that usually was given for physical disorders like muscular and bone malformations and hearing problems. (Other actors who were classified 4-F for various physical conditions were Marlon Brando, Errol Flynn, Jackie Gleason, and Gary Cooper.)

It pained Johnson that he wasn't able to serve. In the book Van Johnson: MGM's Golden Boy, author Ronald L. Davis writes: 

Even though he was legitimately disqualified from the draft after his automobile accident, Van was sensitive about not serving in the armed forces, particularly since Jimmy Stewart, Tyrone Power, Gene Autry, Robert Taylor, and so many others were in uniform. Johnson tried to stay out of nightclubs, feeling that the guys overseas would resent his having fun while they were fighting and facing death in far off war zones. He also kept away from the Hollywood Canteen, sensing that servicemen there would not understand a big fellow like him not being in some branch of the military. To compensate, Van made frequent visits to military hospitals but invariably came away from them shaken. Seeing the injured boys there "makes you feel so helpless," he told friends.

Johnson's accident exempted him from service after 1943 but not from 1940-1943, during which many other stars began their service. Jimmy Stewart enlisted in 1941 (after trying to get in for a year but being turned away for not meeting the weight requirement), and Tyrone Power, Clark Gable, and Gene Autry enlisted in 1942. Why didn't Johnson enlist before his accident? 

I can only speculate. A possible reason is that his film career was just starting to take off in the early 1940s and he didn't want to jeopardize it. Johnson made his film debut in 1940; between his debut and A Guy Named Joe in 1943, when he suffered the injuries that kept him out of the war, he made about a dozen films and signed with MGM, making the leap from unnamed extra to an actor with prominent billing (although not yet star billing) and a contract with a major studio. By the time he was reasonably established in Hollywood and might have felt that he could step away from it and have something to return to, he was debilitated by the car crash.

In 1949 Johnson finally served in World War II—virtually speaking— when he appeared in the film Battleground, the first major World War II film to be made after the end of the war. 

Van Johnson as the Minstrel in Batman

Songs about S&H Green Stamps

A number of songs about green stamps were released around the same time in the late 1950s to mid 1960s for some reason, even though the S&H Green Stamps rewards program ran from the 1930s-1980s in the US. 

Customers collected green stamps at department stores, supermarkets, and gas stations and then redeemed them for items in the Sperry & Hutchinson catalog. A number of competing stamp programs existed from other companies, some of which had their own signature colors, such as Blue Chip Stamps and Gold Bond Stamps.

Here are a number of songs about—or songs that mention—green stamps, mostly from the early 1960s. The Wikipedia article on S&H Green Stamps has a section on green stamps in music, but it lists only the Allan Sherman and Pat Boone songs as examples. 


Allan Sherman – "Green Stamps" (Warner Bros. 1964)

Included on the album Allan in Wonderland.

The Goldcoast Singers – "Green Stamps" (World Pacific 1962)

Included on the album Here They Are!

Ben White & the Darchees – "Nation Wide Stamps" (Algon 1246, 1962)

This is the song that inspired this blog post. I heard it on the 1996 compilation CD Brooklyn's Doo-Wop Sound (Dee Jay Jamboree Records).

Freddie Flynn & The Flashes – "Green Stamps" (Lyric 107, 1959)

Jimmy Norman – "Green Stamps" (Josan 711, 1959)

This record was picked up by Dot Records and released nationally as Dot 16016.

T-Birds – "Green Stamps" (Chess U-10567, 1961)

Pat Boone – "Speedy Gonzales" (Dot 45-16368, 1962)

Mel Blanc, the voice of Speedy, mentions green stamps at the end.

Kingston Trio – "Them Poems" (Capitol 1964)

From the album Back in Town. The middle song in the medley, "Stamp Lickers," is about "lickin' them green stamps."

Archie Campbell – "Green Stamps" (Starday 1962)

This song is included in the 1962 album Make Friends with Archie Campbell and the 1966 various-artists album Stars of the Grand Ole Opry. The song begins at 18:00 in this video. 

Magnetic Fields – "The Desperate Things You Made Me Do" (Merge 1995)

From the album Get Lost, this song includes a line about "pilfered love and green stamps."

Unknown Artist – "S & H Green Stamps"

A radio ad for Sperry Huthison's S&H Green Stamps that was cut for WPTR in Albany New York. 

Green Shield Stamps were a thing in the UK, and a number of UK artists performed songs about them.

Robots of vaudeville: the "automatic" and mechanical minstrels of the 1900s

A Variety ad for Byron Monzello's Mechanical Minstrels

Vaudeville's so-called "automatic" or "mechanical" minstrels were dummy acts. The minstrel part of the dummies' act—the singing and joke telling—was provided by phonograph recordings. These automatic or mechanical minstrels, which appeared in vaudeville in the 1900s and possibly even earlier, were kind of like a low-tech precursor to the animatronic characters that later featured in places like Chuck E. Cheese, Showbiz Pizza, and Disneyland.

I first read about the automatic minstrels in the books of Joe Laurie Jr., a former vaudevillian who wrote or cowrote two histories of vaudeville in the mid-20th century: Show Biz: From Vaude to Video (1951) and Vaudeville: From the Honky-Tonks to the Palace (1953).

Gane's Manhattan Theatre

In these books, Laurie mentions a couple of automatic minstrel acts. In Show Biz: From Vaude to Video, he says that "William Gane introduced the first (and last) All-Automatic Minstrels at the Manhattan Theatre in 1908." Laurie describes the act thusly: "Outside of one live interlocutor, all the minstrels were dummies with gramophones concealed inside, telling jokes and singing songs upon cue."

In Vaudeville: From the Honky-Tonks to the Palace, Laurie elaborates a bit further on Gane's act: 

"The Automatic Minstrels ... played at Gane's Manhattan Theatre (where Macy's is now). This one had a live interlocutor; the rest were dummies, whose jokes and songs were done via phonographs. Didn't do so good."

In the same book, Laurie describes an additional automatic minstrel act, despite his previous book's claim that Gane's minstrels were the only one of their kind. This other act is identified as Monzello, "a minstrel show with dummies on the stage and the gags done via phonograph." Laurie added, "Kinda crude but a novelty."

Monzello was actually Byron Monzello. The 1908 ad for Monzello's Mechanichal [sic] Minstrels at the top of this page describes the act as "ten life size mechanical figures; three live principals and two assistants." The ad also describes the dummies: "They have false teeth, false hair, the mouth opens, and closes, they get up, sit down, bow, the heads turn, shake hands, make gestures." The ad claims that the dummies "talk any language." A photo of the minstrels is included, but it's too dark to reveal many details.

Also in 1908, Variety printed a letter from Byron (misspelled as "Bryon"), who wrote in reply to a review of Gane's act that Variety had published in a previous issue. Monzello's letter read:

I see in Variety (August 22) under "New Acts" a review on "William Gane's Automatic Minstrels'" at the Manhattan Theatre, New York. This is a direct steal of my act. I will furnish affidavits I originated "The Mechanical Minstrels" in September, 1904, at Indianapolis. Not then satisfied with results, I continued experimenting until September, 1906, when my act was completed, but other business matters prevented me placing it in vaudeville. 

Enclosed you will find correspondence from prominent managers showing the act has been played at Riverview Park, and in existence over one year.

Despite Monzello's claim of being the first to create a mechanical minstrel act, earlier mentions of similar acts can be found in late-19th century newspapers. The phonograph was invented in 1877, so it's possible that these early mechanical minstrel acts incorporated phonograph recordings too.

Even if it's true that Gane stole Monzello's act, vaudevillians stole each others acts, jokes, catchphrases, skits, and gimmicks constantly. In those days, a performer could steal another performer's act wholesale and take it to another part of the country without anyone easily finding out. In Vaudeville: From the Honky-Tonks to the Palace, Laurie gives a number of examples of well-know television and movie personalities of the post-vaudeville era who "borrowed" from earlier vaudeville performers. 

When was Victor Young born?

Victor Young with niece Bobbie Hill Fromberg

Wikipedia and many other sources report that Victor Young was born in 1900, and it appears that no amount of evidence to the contrary will change it. I've tried to correct the date on Wikipedia, but it always reverts to 1900.

Further adding to the misinformation is Young's grave marker, which shows his birth year as 1901.

Young was a composer, conductor, arranger, and violinist who won an Oscar in 1956 for his score of Around the World in 80 Days. Some of his well-known compositions include "When I Fall in Love," "Love Letters," "Stella By Starlight," "My Foolish Heart," "I Don't Stand a Ghost of a Chance with You," "Street of Dreams," "Sweet Sue, Just You," and "Johnny Guitar." In all instances, Young composed the music and various lyricists wrote the words. He received 22 Academy Award nominations in his lifetime and even charted several pop hits, the biggest of which was his Top 10 rendition of "The High and the Mighty" in 1954.

When I worked on the 2006 Victor Young CD Cinema Rhapsodies: The Musical Genius of Victor Young, I had the opportunity to talk to Young's niece, Bobbie Hill Fromberg. Young never had children of his own, so he and Bobbie were close.

Fromberg told me that she had researched her family's history and discovered from US Census records that Young falsified his birthdate in the early days of his career. He was born August 8, 1899, but gave his birth year as 1900, presumably to avoid the perception that he had been born in an earlier century. The liner notes of Cinema Rhapsodies set the record straight: "Albert Victor Young was born to a Polish family in a tenement district of Chicago on August 8, 1899, not 1900 as widely reported."

Six years later, in 2012, Albert Haim of the Bix Beiderbecke discussion forum Bixography, posted a message about Young's birth year, which continued to be a topic of speculation. Haim referenced the US Census data as well as Young's birth certificate: 

Birth Certificate - Cook County IL. Name: Victor Young; birth date Aug 8, 1899; birth place Chicago, Cook, IL

Fromberg herself weighed in on the topic on the Bixography forum and explained the incorrect date on Young's grave marker: 

I come from a family that never told the truth about their birth years. Victor was born on August 8, 1899 (I discovered from the 1900 Chicago census) 

My Mom made herself 6 years younger than she really was and both of their plaques [her mother's and Victor's] at Hollywood Forever Cemetery where they are buried facing each other in a mausoleum have incorrect years on them. 

So there you have it.

The #1 Elvis hit that Elvis hated

It was the last Top 10 pop hit that Elvis Presley had during his lifetime. Critics heralded it as Elvis's great return to rock 'n' roll. It became a #1 pop hit in Cash Box and a Top 40 country hit on the Billboard country chart. But Elvis hated it and disliked performing it. The song? The 1972 hit "Burning Love." 

Producer Felton Jarvis pushed Elvis to record "Burning Love," a song that recently had appeared as an album cut on an LP by R&B great Arthur Alexander. Elvis didn't like the song and didn't want to record it but cut it anyway at Jarvis's urging.

Mark P. Bernardo, in his book Elvis Presley: Memphis, says that Presley at that time was moving away from rock toward "bittersweet, melancholy ballads" because of his breakup with Priscilla, so he wasn't inclined to record rockers such as "Burning Love." But people close to Elvis said that Elvis's dislike of the song involved more than just its rock orientation.

For example, "Memphis Mafia" member Jerry Schilling said, "Elvis—who had close to a photographic memory when it came to books, scripts, lyrics—always insisted that he needed a lyric sheet to perform 'Burning Love.'"

"Elvis didn't want to record 'Burning Love,' didn't like it when he had recorded it, and sang it as rarely as possible afterwards," wrote Paul Simpson in The Rough Guide to Elvis.

Why was Elvis so unenthusiastic about this song that had revived his commercial fortunes? If you watch a lyric video of the song, I think it's pretty easy to see why. I like this song, but it sounds like it was written in five minutes. The lyrics have no logical order—you could rearrange the lines randomly without significantly altering the meaning, because most of them restate the same thought in different ways. The rhyme scheme is almost nonexistent, and it's hard to tell where the singer is supposed to put the stresses. In Elvis' version, you can hear on a few lines where he struggles to fit the line to the rhythm of the song. The song also weirdly repeats the word "flaming."

"Burning Love" was written by Nashville songwriter Dennis Linde, who recorded a version of it himself. Linde's voice, on his version, reminds me a bit of Loudon Wainwright, but some people think he sounds like John Fogerty. You might expect the songwriter's version to be definitive, but even Linde seems to struggle with where to place the stresses on some lines. (Listen to the "it's hard to breathe" line, for example.)

Whatever Elvis thought about the song, it was enthusiastically hailed by fans as a return to his rock 'n' roll sound, and the "hunk o' hunk o' burnin' love" refrain recalled Elvis's 1959 hit "A Big Hunk O' Love." And in this live performance, Elvis appears to perform the song in its entirety without lyric sheets or teleprompters.

"Roll Them Roly Boly Eyes": Eddie Leonard and the song that "started the decline of vaudeville"

"Roll Them Roly Boly Eyes" is the song that "started the decline of vaudeville," according to Joe Laurie Jr.'s 1953 book Vaudeville: From the Honky-Tonks to the Palace. This song is almost completely forgotten today but used to be very well known.

The Knickerbocker

The song was the title tune of John Cort's successful 1919 musical Roly Boly Eyes. The January 31, 1920, issue of The Independent described this musical as the "fascinating, tuneful, dancingest, altogether different musical comedy success" with a "snap, tuneful score and cast of New York favorites." It opened at Broadway's Knickerbocker Theatre on September 25, 1919, and ran through the end of the year, after which Cort took it on the road. 

"Roly Boly" is sometimes spelled "Roley Boley" (as it is throughout Laurie's book), possibly because the actress May Boley was in the cast of the show. But the sheet music and other materials from the original run of the show spell it "Roly Boly." The song title of "Roll Them Roly Boly Eyes" varies from source to source too; It is variously listed as "Roll Them Roly Boly Eyes," "Roll Dem Roly Boly Eyes," and "Roll Those Roly Boly Eyes."

Cort's musical was written to showcase the talents of Eddie Leonard, a blackface minstrel performer who composed the song "Roly Boly Eyes" as well as the most famous song in the show, "Ida Sweet as Apple Cider," the latter of which predated the show. "Ida" has been recorded by Eddie Cantor (who also performed in blackface in his vaudeville days), Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby, Bill Haley, and many other big-name artists.

Leonard's blackface act was considered old fashioned even in 1919, but he was so successful that he wore a diamond-studded belt that was adorned with real diamonds and looked after by a guard.

The video at the bottom of this article contains the only audio recording of Leonard I've found. In it, he sings "Ida" in dialect with frequent interjections of "wa-wa-wa" and "oh-oh-oh" and "doodly doo." 

Leonard's oddball vocal style was frequently imitated by other performers. Al Schacht, the "Clown Prince of Baseball," did a vaudeville act with fellow baseball player Nick Altrock that is said to be the first act to feature "baseball clowning," and their grand finale was an impression of Leonard singing "Roly Boly Eyes." Billy Jones and Ernest Hare cut a record for Brunswick in 1922, "Eddie Leonard Blues," that references "Ida" and "Roly Boly Eyes" and imitates Leonard's vocal stylings. The California Ramblers recorded "Eddie Leonard Blues" for Vocalion. Ray Bolger (the scarecrow from The Wizard of Oz) did a brief impression of Leonard in this 1953 television performance. (The Leonard part begins at 2:06.) Bolger adds Leonard's trademark "wa-wa-wa."

Roly Boly Eyes was the apex of Leonard's career. Critics hailed it as one of his finest performances, and the songs lived on for decades. Leonard reprised "Roly Boly" and "Ida" in his starring role in the 1929 film Melody Lane, but the film was so poorly received that it ruined his prospects for a post-vaudeville life in Hollywood. Author Richard Barrios, in his book A Song in the Dark: The Birth of the Musical Film, described Melody Lane as "a fiasco, the first mammy picture to engender outright hostility from audiences as well as critics." Afterward, Leonard appeared in only one more film, playing himself (in blackface) in the 1940 Bing Crosby movie If I Had My Way.

Blackface minstrelsy endured, in a diminishing capacity, in Hollywood films until the early 1950s, particularly in the films of Al Jolson. In 1952, Teresa Brewer had a pop hit with a non-novelty remake of "Roll Them Roly Boly Eyes" that doesn't make any reference to Leonard's vocal mannerisms. By the time Brewer recorded her version of the song, things had come full circle; nostalgia for old songs and styles led to fads for honky-tonk piano albums and albums of "songs mom and dad used to sing."

I started reading about Leonard because I wanted to find out why Laurie called "Roll Them Roly Boly Eyes" the song that "started the decline of vaudeville," and I didn't find the answer. Very little has been written about Leonard. The Wikipedia article about him is unusually brief. Even Laurie, who mentions Leonard in passing a couple of times in his history of vaudeville, completely omits Leonard from the chapter on blackface performers. Leonard published a memoir in 1934, What a Life: I'm Telling You, that probably would be a good source of information, but it's long out of print and expensive to buy from rare-book dealers. I can speculate on why Laurie wrote what he wrote, though.

I'm guessing that Leonard was one of the last high-profile purveyors of old-style blackface minstrelsy and that his gimmicky performance of "Roll Them Roly Boly Eyes" was easy to imitate and mock. History, generally speaking, does not pay much respect to novelty songs. When Leonard's 1929 film Melody Lane flopped miserably, minstrelsy was already in decline, and Leonard—unlike Jolson—was strongly associated with vaudeville, not Hollywood. It's not hard to imagine that this goofy song, performed in a goofy way by a comical vaudeville performer with an antiquated style, could become a symbol of the decline of vaudeville. It's probably unfair of Laurie to say that "Roll Them Roly Boly Eyes" started the decline of vaudeville, but it was certainly a prominent emblem of vaudeville in its dying days.

An etymological note: "Roly boly" isn't a nonsense phrase. It comes from the Dutch word rollebol (roll + ball), which was absorbed into English as a name for a bowling-type ball game called "roly boly" or "roily bolly." 

Music Weird's best albums of 2015

This must have been a good year for music, because I easily could have made a Top 50. 

These rankings don't mean much past the top 3. On any given day, I'd rank them differently. I wanted to say more about the albums, but I realized that this post would never happen if I put it off any longer. 

1. Parks, Squares and Alleys – Against Illusions and Reality

A band from Moscow that has that Captured Tracks sound that Captured Tracks bands don't have anymore. It's 100% good, so check out any track.









2. Tall Tales and the Silver Lining – Tightropes

If you had told me at the beginning of the year that one of my favorite albums would come from a Tom Petty-worshipping band from L.A., I probably wouldn't have believed it. This is one of the rare albums that everyone in my household could agree on. Check out "Let It Go." 






3. Petite League – Slugger


The new band by the guy from Spark Alaska. Spark Alaska made acoustic bedroom pop, but Petite League is scrappy, kinda like Cloud Nothings back when they still wrote lo-fi pop songs. Check out "Not Always Happy." 

4. The Sweet Serenades – Animals


Their previous album, Help Me, was one of my faves of 2012.

5. Boyscott – Goose Bumps

Check out "Blonde Blood."

6. Rima Kato – Faintly Lit

Faintly Lit is delicate Japanese twee pop that got an undeserved 6.9 review in Pitchfork. The Pitchfork reviewer complained of "groan-worthy" songs and songs that "meander," and concluded that "Kato's world is ... a little too intimate for extended stays," none of which is true. 

7. Ashtray Boy – Painted with the Mouth

I loved the first three Ashtray Boy albums and saw the band live at a house party years ago, but I had fallen out of touch with them after their albums stopped being domestically released. This new one is just as good as any of their albums. Funny lyrics.

8. Shoreline Is – Watch It All Go

The second album by German dream-pop band Shoreline Is. It even has a great instrumental cut, "Till You Run Off."

9. The Future Dead – Feelings

A second great album from Belgium's the Future Dead on Gnar Tapes. Reminds me of the old Flying Nun sound. Really short songs.

10. The Memories – Home Style

The prolific and dependable Memories deliver another winner. Some of these songs have appeared elsewhere, but many were new to me, including the excellent and funny "See Me Through."

11. Jay Som – Untitled

Check out "Peach Boy."

12. Drug Cabin – Wiggle Room

I appreciate their craftsmanship. Listen to "Handsome," for example.

13. Funeral Advantage – Body Is Dead

Reminds me a bit of fellow Brooklynites Neighbors (now defunct, sadly) but with more guitars. Sample "Cemetery Kiss."

14. Soda Shop – Soda Shop

Dreamy, minimalist pop, like Confetti or a less metronomic Young Marble Giants. Here's "Melancholia." 

15. The Go! Team – The Scene Between

This might be as good as their debut. Listen to "What d'You Say?"

16. Brothertiger – Out of Touch

The best Brothertiger album yet. Here's "Beyond the Infinite." 

17. MyKey – Oh Rabbit Heart

Acoustic Swedish pop a bit like last year's faves Featherweights but with occasionally sexually explicit lyrics, like fellow Swedes Strip Squad. This album was released on Dec. 30, 2014, so I counted it as a 2015 release. I like "The Nipple Song."

18. The Coneheads – 14 Year Old High School PC-Fascist Hype Lords Rip Off Devo for the Sake of Extorting $$$ From Helpless Impressionable Midwestern Internet Peoplepunks L.P.

The Coneheads make me proud to be from Indiana. Their version of the Talking Heads' "Psycho Killer" really smokes. They're like Devo if Devo had been more into hardcore than New Wave and were fronted by one of the Coneheads from the SNL skit. 

19. Part Time – Virgo's Maze

Odds-and-ends double album from Part Time on Burger Records. Contains one of my favorite songs of the year: "Honey Lips." 

20. Giorgio Moroder – Déjà Vu

The first new album in years from the Italian bubblegum-turned-disco maestro. The poor reviews that this album received are inexplicable. The only really questionable move on the album is Britney Spears' unnecessary remake of "Tom's Diner." I was happy to see Spears on the album, but I wish she had been given a different song. The title track features Sia and went to #1 on Billboard's US dance chart. "La Disco" is cool, as is "Wildstar" (featuring Foxes). 

Honorable Mentions

Justin Bieber's Purpose is surprisingly similar, in my mind, to a Heavenly Beat album. His singing is great but he needs to lose the lame raps. I liked the Legends' It's Love, which is airy and slick, like latter-day Acid House Kings. South Korea's Say Sue Me (We've Sobered Up) is worth watching. La Futur Pompiste awesomely recreated Stereolab's sound on their self-titled album. Summer Heart's Thinkin of U EP is as good as their debut, which was great. I could go on and on with runner-ups, but that's enough for now.