Marcy Playground Album Recommendations: "Shapeshifter"

Album Recommendations: Shapeshifter

The old five-point scale has been retired in favor of just rating stuff 1-10, which allows me a much more nuanced final rating. Still don't take it that seriously. Most of these come from my own collection, so the grades skew rather high. Your results may vary if you send me stuff to review.

Each album is given three Essential tracks, my personal favorites, regardless of how weird and inconsequential they are. The Quintessential pick is the one I think best represents the album as a whole, so you can try one song instead of a whole album of songs. Non-Essential picks range from merely disappointing to outright unlistenable.

Marcy Playground

[#] Shapeshifter (1999)

Folklore as alt-rock, simple and endlessly appealing.

Reviewed July 8, 2023

I believe the insatiable hunger for goofy, novel one-hit wonders in the 80s and 90s turned many promising bands into laughingstocks, and Marcy Playground were no exception. You got the trendy sound, the giggleworthy hook ("I smell sex and candy in here!"), the video (that, yes, features singer-guitarist John Wozniak bleeding out into a pool of white liquid), and that was the last anyone had heard of them. I guess they still got bigger than most of us will, but it does mean that terrific records like 1999's Shapeshifter got left on the table for lack of a "Sex and Candy". "Cammy, you're not about to make the case that Marcy Playground of all bands wrote one of the most underrated albums of the 90s, are you?" Yes. I very much am.

After a lackadaisical debut, Shapeshifter rocks. An emphasis on distorted riffs and new drummer Dan Rieser cause Marcy to sound more like a band and less like a singer-songwriter outfit, making the sillier tracks ("Secret Squirrel", "Pigeon Farm") all the more fun and giving the ballads ("All the Lights Went Out", "Never") serious muscle. Of course, even the more serious tracks have a nerdy lightness to them—see how "Wave Motion Gun" couches a drug intervention in Star Blazers references—and the album takes on a certain palate cleanser appeal as a result. Perhaps that's why Shapeshifter failed to take off; in a world where everyone wants to write grand epics, this album's lead single was about skipping school. That's a damn shame.