Lithium Magazine

Second Motion Records

By Mike Bax

Rather than spill a few paragraphs about Tommy Keene and his 25 plus year career in crafting sublime power pop melodies and pretending I know a thing or two about a thing or two… how about this: How the hell have I gone through the past 25 years and NOT heard anything by Tommy Keene?

WTF?

I’m a total Paul Westerberg fan, and the similarities between Keene’s song writing compared to Mr. Westerberg’s on some of the material included on this 2 disc retrospective simply cannot be denied.

For the already initiated out there… the ones now reading this review and thinking less of me for being so out of the loop for the past quarter century… I’m sure they could easily school me on the included 41 tracks on this compilation as only scratching the surface of Keene’s career. If you are like me, and don’t have a thing by Keene, you can’t really go wrong with this double album of nuggets from a gentleman who can hold his own alongside The Replacements and Guided By Voices.

Again – I couldn’t really say what tracks on here are rare, and which ones were modest hits for Keene. I enjoyed ‘Kill Your Sons’ and ‘Call On Me’ very much. The acoustic ‘Black & White New York’ is also quite lovely, as is the 20/20 cover of ‘Leaving Your World Behind’.

Aside from the Replacements and Guided By Voices, fans of music by Pete Yorn, Jesse Malin and even REM should have zero problem getting right into this stellar double album of music.

www.tommykeene.com
www.secondmotionrecords.com