365 Days of Songs (1998)

First of all, ignore Spotify. Somebody mixed up the titles. (On Amazon Music, this ended up getting “Porkey’s Prey”, so who knows what happened?)

Full disclosure: Baby Ray was an excellent band I was friends with in the late 1990s in Boston (actually, Cambridge, Somerville, and Medford too). My band Slippy Keane shared a rehearsal space with them, and occasional a show as well. Calling them the weird love child of XTC and Guided by Voices really doesn’t come anywhere near capturing how great they were, but hopefully it’s at least intriguing enough to prompt you to dig into their other releases (The EP Do I Love America? and their final full length, Low Rises).

This is the almost-closer to the album. It starts with a sunrise and ends with a nuclear blast (sonically speaking). A fantastic song by a great band more people should know about.