My Top 1000 Songs #592: Pleaser

[I've been writing up my Top 1000 songs on a daily basis--you can see them all in descending order by hitting the All My Favorite Songs tag.]

Here's our second selection from tragically overlooked Athens, GA indie rockers The Glands. And like the aesthetically similar, previously-covered "When I Laugh," "Pleaser" is a master-class in combining the slack 90s indie sound of Pavement, Modest Mouse, and Built To Spill with a classic rock-informed radio-friendly hook. It's a song so instantly familiar and catchy that it's kind of a shock that it's so damn fringe--a song recorded for a possible third album sometime in the new millennium, eventually captured on 2018's Double Coda, a posthumous collection of leftovers released after frontman Ross Shapiro's passing.

In an alternative universe, this could've been the next big single from Tom Petty or The Cars; instead, it's a little-known obscurity awaiting discovery.