Bringing up Girls

Thin Lizzy found their trademark twin-guitar sound on 1975's Fighting, but it was on its 1976 successor, Jailbreak, where the band truly took flight. Unlike the leap between Night Life and Fighting, there is not a great distance between Jailbreak and its predecessor. If anything, the album was more of a culmination of everything that came before, as Phil Lynott hit a peak as a songwriter just as guitarists Scott Gorham and Brian Robertson pioneered an intertwined, dual-lead guitar interplay that was one of the most distinctive sounds of '70s rock, and one of the most influential. Lynott no longer let Gorham and Robertson contribute individual songs – they co-wrote, but had no individual credits – which helps tighten up the album, giving it a cohesive personality, namely Lynott's rough rebel with a heart of a poet.

When the post-punk revival of early-aughts Manhattan (think bands with “The” in their name) yielded to the Brooklyn DIY scene later that decade, Vivian Girls were leading the charge, expertly blending scrappy lo-fi punk with ’60s girl-group harmonies. The all-female trio was also on the front lines of the cesspool that was music blog comment sections, and not incidentally, the group disbanded after their third record. But with Memory, their first record in eight years, they pick up where they left off—namely, rough-around-the-edges garage and surf-rock jams that spiral off into dreamy tangents (perfected on songs like the echoing, reverb-drenched “Lonely Girl”). And they do it all ever so coolly, as if all three rolled out of bed one day and decided to make a comeback album for the hell of it.