Understanding what happened to New Jersey cum New York group the Feelies necessitates a firm understanding of its first album, Crazy Rhythms.

As implicit in its title as it might be, the Feelies were able to solder together punk’s aggression, American music’s sense of rhythm snatched from the Velvet Underground and pretty much any sixties’ rock act and the repetitive – yet simple and alluring – compositions of Rhys Chatham. This group, though, isn’t some take on no wave. And while the Feelies would ebb and flow in and out of musical oddities over the twenty years following its first album, issued in 1980, there were always hints at where the band could have gone.

Subsequent to its surprising initial embrace by the surrounding media outlets, the Feelies splintered into at least three separate ensembles. It might be worth while to investigate some, if not all of those groups (Yung Wu, the Trypes and the Willies), but that’s not what this is about. This about the odd progression of a group and an increasingly gleeful embrace of pop music.

The hallmarks of melody are splattered all over the group’s opening salvo – there’s even a Beatles’ cover. Waiting six years to issue it’s second full length, though, found the band (mostly) transformed from a nervy, overtly electric band to something that might have gone over well in an acoustic setting as was certainly capacious of hitting college markets and enthralling the R.E.M. loving masses.

Peter Buck, of the massively overrated, previously mentioned Athens, Georgia band handled production duties on The Good Earth, the Feelies second disc. What’s immediate and a sign of the times, to a certain extent, is that the band sought to maintain it’s frantic rhythms – portions of “Two Rooms” and “Slipping (Into Something)” – but incorporated a huge dose of traditional, radio ready pop song constructions leaving the energy elsewhere. We’d all like to blame Buck, but clearly the band grew up in those intervening six years and wanted to display its maturity.

Its next album, Only Life, was received favorably and attempted to ratchet up the Velvet’s thing by including a cover of “What Goes On.” But on the 1991 disc, Time for a Witness, the opening track harkens back to those days of crazy rhythms. There’s a punky flair inherent in everything about “Waiting.” The track’s guitar solo, complementing it’s revved up opening counts as the most nasty work since The Good Earth. Beyond that, though, closing out it’s career with a Stooges cover seemed like a proper conclsion.

“Real Cool Time,” this cover or the original, is so full of exceptional emotional content – the sound of joyful abandonment – that its surprising to hear a band which was obviously concerned with moving forward chose to include a track that looked so far back.

For all intents and purposes, the Feelies called it a day after that 1991 effort. There have been a few one off reunions. But the mounting appreciation for the group’s earliest effort could very well become powerful enough to warrant a proper reunion. Here’s hoping…