MUSIC
Best Records from the 90's
(Pitchforkmedia.com)
Beck
Odelay
[DGC; 1996]
Before he wanted to have a rocking chair and a sweet tea conversation with you on his front porch, before he wanted to sex you up (and your sister, too), and before he wanted you to break his heart and leave him for dead, Beck just wanted to rock you. Of course, he wanted to do it in his own folksy, blues-infected, psychedelic, hip-hop, fragmented-sense-of-self sort of way, but... was that so much to ask? On a rare record that received as much underground attention as it did critical and commercial acclaim, the Dust Brothers were released from the chains of The Beastie Boys' old basement to help map Beck's every-angle approach. His salvation-army nation buckled at the knees to "Where It's At", learned how to get up to get down for "The New Pollution", and bobbed along blissfully to "Devil's Haircut". I blasted in with "Novocaine" on every mixtape I made for a year. And despite all the jagged ends and dissociated means, the end result was as cohesive as an album this multi-faceted could dare to be. Hell, it won the man a Grammy-- but more importantly, it won everyone that listened some cool. And for that we will be forever indebted.
Smashing Pumpkins
Siamese Dream
[Virgin; 1993]
Little did any of us initially realize that "Today", Smashing Pumpkins' red carpet to the glorified frat houses of alternative rock radio, took part in something much greater: sophomore release Siamese Dream was borne out of the band's intense personal and interpersonal turmoil-- so much so that Billy Corgan was left in the studio to play most of parts by himself. Nominally, Siamese Dream implies some duality: the album title reflects at once its confidence and its vulnerability, its anger and its broken-heartedness, its honesty and, however therapeutic, its self-deceit. Avoiding the sparse, punchy grunge tropes of the time, Corgan opted instead for personal and melodramatic epics told within grandiose walls of sound that seemed to function as the music's own consolation. The fanged opening moments of "Rocket" speak to this effect, and comprise some of the most potent moments in 90s rock. Smashing Pumpkins never again achieved this degree of sincerity-- compare the poignant yelp of "let me out" in opener "Cherub Rock" to the nasally embarrassment of "God is empty just like me" in Mellon Collie's "Zero"-- but then, shouldn't one decade-defining album be enough?
Nirvana
In Utero
[DGC; 1993]
In Utero could have been a complacent, cookie-cutter follow-up to an album that set the bar impossibly high; instead, it seethes with visceral rage and purpose. Listening to Kurt Cobain rip his heart out and hold it up for all to see is just as bracing now as it was ten years ago, but the thing that strikes me most these days is just how much Cobain's sarcastic humor creeps into his music. "If you ever need anything/ Please don't hesitate to ask someone else first/ I'm too busy acting like I'm not naive," he shouts on "Very Ape", over guitars honed like razors by recordists Steve Albini and Bob Weston. He's making a joke, but in the process, revealing what was perhaps his most tragic flaw. Cobain's naivete and idealism ultimately made the cynical world of corporations and media limelight too much for him to bear, but he left us with a beautiful swansong and perhaps even a bit of closure in "All Apologies". Nirvana were an important gateway to the underground for thousands of kids in an era when new sounds were much further than a single mouse-click away, and a lot of us were never the same after they were gone.
Bonnie "Prince" Billy
I See a Darkness
[Palace; 1999]
My beleaguered "generation" and I may attempt to protect ourselves from emotional harm (and our grim inheritance) by stockpiling absurdities, but we will probably still go prostrate during a moment of disarming simplicity, pathetic mortality, or genuine romance. I See a Darkness is rife with such moments (though the exultant finale of "Nomadic Revelry" defies categorization). Will Oldham's latest moniker is his canniest since back when he went by variations on Pushkin, and under this banner, his work has retained the bawdiness, hybridity, and compassion that characterized the Russian poet. In this guise Oldham exploits a salty freedom and an epicurean brio; on this album, his least "country," he was a bulimic Falstaff milking medieval dread/mirth. Sung sans-warble, these non-sequiturial folk anthems, seasoned with Robotussin Skynyrd licks, confirmed that Oldham is indie's detached and brilliant DeNiro. (After all, the Bonnie Prince Charlie of history was called "The Young Pretender.") A masterpiece of comic negation, "Death to Everyone" invokes a holocaust, "coming kids," "hosing," and how "balls burn." That the late Johnny Cash rendered I See a Darkness' title track as a sobriety hymn only deepens the song's mystery, as well as the album's sense of play.
Pavement
Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain
[Matador; 1994]
Given the mean age of Pitchfork staffers, this list should be absolutely dripping with My First Indie Album teary-eyed recollections. Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain is the one album guaranteed to start me a-blubberin', as I remember how discovering "Cut Your Hair" through The Countdown to The Headbangers' Ball was my gentle push down the greasy slope of elitism. Which is why I'll forever treasure it as the essential Pavement album. What's remarkable about the album is not its shoestring budget technique, but how friggin' epic the material sounds despite (or possibly because of) being crammed into such humble surroundings. From the Skynyrd-coda of "Stop Breathing" to the California Adventure of "Unfair" to the Quadrophenia mods vs. rockers battle of "Fillmore Jive", Crooked Rain is an album recorded in basement Cinemascope. The twangy monolith at the center, though, is "Range Life", paradoxically featuring some of Stephen Malkmus' most evocative imagery alongside some of his most petty, albeit hilarious and OTM, whining. It's the score to the inevitable slow-motion retrospectives of Pavement's career, and the most moving song of their tenure-- even if you can't really bang your head to it.
DJ Shadow
...Endtroducing
[Mo'Wax; 1996]
Sampling was by no means 1996's innovation, and certainly wasn't anything new to hip-hop by the middle of the decade; one could state accurately, in fact, that sampling lies at the core of the genre's very musical foundation. But that's just the thing about ...Endtroducing: Though Shadow still insists otherwise-- to the point that he is said to have made a habit of moving this very record from the "electronic" section of his local record store to the "hip-hop" section-- the album is effectively genreless. It may rely on hip-hop technique, but Shadow mined the dankest of this nation's record bins to unearth for himself an entire sonic spectrum that melded jazz and funk loops with forgotten horror movie samples with layers of ambient noise, to create one of the most dark, foreboding, and original musical statements ever. To date, the album still sounds like no other. Across the board, tracks like "The Number Song", "Organ Donor", and "Midnight in a Perfect World" became curious points of intersection for listeners of otherwise disparate music, and one can't help but think ...Endtroducing brought the possibility of hip-hop to die-hard rockcentrics. "Organic" is an understatement; ...Endtroducing is living, breathing Weltgeist, its form self-determined and unusually cohesive, given its vast breadth and bottomless well of innovation. With DJ Shadow's debut, other hip-hop in 1996-- no, other music period-- couldn't help but "suck."
Nirvana
Nevermind
[DGC; 1991]
For a while, it seemed there were nothing but grunge bands: Pearl Jam, Alice in Chains, Soundgarden, Mudhoney, Green River, Screaming Trees-- and virtually all of them hailed from Seattle. On the surface, it makes sense that Nirvana, with their flannel overshirts and ripped jeans and greasy hair, would be lumped in with the movement. Yet I can't think of a single Nirvana-influenced band that ever got airplay in the 90s, or a single Nirvana song that carried all the actual attributes of true grunge music. Grunge, as we came to know it through MTV and commercial alternative radio, consisted of craggy and/or heavily reverbed, jangly guitars, mumbling ponytailed vocalists, and giant stadium drums not all that far removed from the hair-rock whose cultural relevance the genre supplanted. Grunge begat Collective Soul, Creed, and Nickelback. Where do Nirvana fit into this legacy? Well, maybe they don't. With all the facts laid out, Nirvana begins to look much more like a plain old punk band that happened to exist at the heart of a cultural movement they wanted nothing to do with. Their influences-- not the classic rock roots of their Seattle brethren, but 70s post-punk and 80s college rock-- spoke to this categorization. Approximating Nirvana's sound with the time-honored [band] + [band] = [band] equation leads you to such dazzling dream-sums as Buzzcocks meets Sonic Youth, Vaselines meets Melvins, or Pixies meets Raincoats. Sure, there will always be those who insist that Nevermind was more of cultural import than musical, but they will also be full of shit: Nirvana are, a decade later, still regarded as the greatest and most legendary band of the 1990s. This band proved to a whole new generation that technical prowess has no bearing on quality, inspired their fans to seek out the music that slipped beneath the commercial radar, and then had the balls to be ridiculously, unthinkably fucking brilliant. Anyone who hates this record today is just trying to be cool, and needs to be trying harder.
Pavement
Slanted & Enchanted
[Matador; 1992]
During one of his manias, rock writer Camden Joy protested a Macintosh-sponsored New York Music Festival via posters adorned with lyrics from Bob Dylan's "Desolation Row", the Sex Pistols' "God Save the Queen", and... two songs from this album. One poster cited the "minions and slaves" passage from "Here", the album's only concession to reverb. The other poster read, "WHY A MUSIC FESTIVAL $???$$ ZURICH IS $TAINED", easily taking a slice of Slanted's random wordplay and imbuing it with a polemical passion. In comparison with the dead art foisted on the proletariat by any number of status quo cadres disguised as rock bands, Slanted is a radical, liberating document. Even the most reductive version of this album's genesis can't sully it: sports-loving stoner brats in oversized t-shirts got conscripted to a burnout drummer and recorded a slapdash do-it-yourselfer that blew up like the proverbial Gremlin in the microwave, increased the market share of both Matador and Drag City, proved that lo-fi could go grandiose, and briefly gave us yanks a band as inscrutable as the best undergrounders of Britain and Germany. Pavement's most danceable and puzzling album contains segments of sassily oblique spoken-word, patches that go down like prog played at 78rpm, and jams that crucify humorless punk on a whittled Slinky. Meanwhile, frontboy Stephen Malkmus made the preemptive Stroke: a cute diva who could scream as if he suffered from womb envy, his meticulous apathy "paved" the way for Julian Casablancas' blase ferocity. The crenellated toss-offs on this disc blended intense love for noise with unorthodox pop instincts, answering Achtung Baby with slack-toned gravy, and saunter-stumbled into rock history with a graffiti ethic that denies the listener a murkless horizon. The eternal students in this band would probably joke that "magnum opus" sounds like the name of a defendant in a Nordic date-rape trial, but damn if they didn't helm one. Fertilized by fellow obsessive record collectors Sonic Youth, Slanted sounds, somehow, like a manifesto after all them years, from when "Two States" proclaims, "There's no culture!" to the opening of "In the Mouth a Desert": Yup, Steve, we can treat the planet like an oil well.
Neutral Milk Hotel
In the Aeroplane Over the Sea
[Merge; 1998]
There are very few albums that resist categorization quite so effortlessly as In the Aeroplane Over the Sea. For forty staggering minutes, Jeff Mangum short-circuits all conventional modes of expression, forging a private language that is endlessly intriguing and haunting in the truest sense of the word. Mangum sings as if possessed, painfully conveying fractured and moving tales with the imagistic skill of a brilliant novelist. He gnashes his teeth at the fabric of time, then wraps himself in it like a blanket, channeling the violence of his personal past through a claustrophobic frustration with his dejected present. His band, whose contributions to Aeroplane remain criminally underappreciated, elevate Mangum's songs from chilling sketches into vibrant opuses, fully realizing the antique otherworldliness of Mangum's storytelling. Opening with the achingly gorgeous nostalgia of "The King of Carrot Flowers Pt. 1", Aeroplane immediately plays upon a potent conflation of cultural and personal past. The world of Aeroplane is haunted by Anne Frank-- the specter of childhood's unimpeachable innocence amidst the unfathomable horror of the holocaust. In the feverish "Oh Comely", Mangum longs to save her in "some sort of time machine." By "Two-Headed Boy Pt. 2", the album's indelible and heartbreaking closing track, he seems to have resigned himself to loving a ghost, singing with a thoroughly unnerving blend of heartbreak and exhaustion: "In my dreams you're alive, and you're crying/ As your mouth moves in mine, soft and sweet." The way people have been affected by Aeroplane is ample proof of its power and uniqueness. Like all classic art, it is widely misunderstood; yet to some, In the Aeroplane Over the Sea has become a riddle the likes of The Wasteland-- an impossibly rich text that begs to be deciphered, yet continually evades any singular interpretation.
The Flaming Lips
The Soft Bulletin
[Warner Bros; 1999]
As an aging, sarcastic man, The Flaming Lips remain my favorite contemporary group because they demolish two short-sighted contemporary rock 'n' roll notions: you have to be young and serious. Wayne's salt-and-pepper beard, pea coat and bullhorn raised the bar for any musician pushing forty. Another debatable myth dispelled by The Soft Bulletin is that heroin destroys. Steven Drozd's addiction to the horse was hard and heavy right through the production of Yoshimi, and his addition to the band clearly took them to their current creative level. Aside from Keith Richards, has anyone produced such godlike music while mired in the junk, that it almost seems like an endorsement for the drug? Remarkably, the band's music maintains a general air of feel-goodness while their lyrics concern sobering subjects as bleeding, bites, and mortality. Death seeps from within every sweeping disco-ball light bath of a song, deep down to the drummer's gums. A year after The Soft Bulletin's release a spider nailed my calf, corroding the skin. When detailing the infection I was constantly comforted by a poorly (perfectly?) sung refrain of, "When you got that spider bite on your leg!" That's cultural impact. The Flaming Lips: the official soundtrack of near-fatal insect bites.
My Bloody Valentine
Loveless
[Creation; 1991]
Is there anything new that can possibly be said about Loveless? Any stone as yet unturned? So much has been written about this album, and so much of it reads the same: "It's about tension, noise vs. melody, ugliness vs. beauty... It's a return to the womb... It foregrounds the background and favors texture over development... Kevin Shields is Brian Wilson... Smart went crazy..." It's all true, of course. There's no arguing with any of that, just as there's little reason to talk about this album which so many people love. When it comes to Loveless, we understand each other so well that we nod and grunt like we're standing in front of Hank Hill's house. For me, it's been that way for some time: Seeing the letters "M", "B" and "V" next to each other in a review of another band's album is enough to get said record on my "music to check out" list. I suspect I'm not alone. Now that Kevin Shields is in better health and is slowly returning to the scene, he's explained that Loveless was something of an albatross for him, that he never could find a proper way to follow it. He should be comforted by the fact that no one else has been able to follow it, either. I've long dreamt of an album that was "Like Loveless, but more," but I haven't found it. And so many hundreds of albums have tried. Perhaps this is the sound of a single idea perfected. We should move on and continue to explore the vast spectrum of sound and feeling music provides, but we'll always return to Loveless for what it alone can deliver.
Radiohead
OK Computer
[Capitol; 1997]
The end of the 90s will be seen as the end of the album. The rise of MP3 technology and file downloading returned pop music consumption to collective pre-Beatles mindset, where songs are judged as singles. Radiohead's Kid A and Amnesiac were shallowly criticized as B-side collections because they were downloaded and assembled as such on home computers. "Treefingers" and "Hunting Bears" were torn apart, not a piece of a 60 minute or so record, but as worthwhile 34-minute download times (this, remember, was right before DSL/Cable). The resurgence, and arguable final entrenchment, of manufactured Pop Stars by their handlers over supposedly more artistic fare-- and more importantly the acceptance of such common pleasures by critics-- razed the significance of the complete album. Which is why OK Computer, and it's Best Albums Ever companion Loveless, eternally top these polls: somehow we doubt we'll ever see their like again. Modern thinking has led to debates and revisionism over the effect of tracks like "Electioneering" and "Fitter Happier" on OK Computer's importance, as if removing "Turd on the Run" and "Pet Sounds" would somehow make Exile on Main Street and Pet Sounds five-and-a-half-star albums. What's interesting in the case of "Electioneering" is that, at the time, it stood as the one track most similar to the beautiful guitar rackets of "Just", "Creep", and "My Iron Lung". The band even performed the song on The Tonight Show upon the album's release. Beyond its political intent, the song could have fit easily on Radiohead's two previous albums.
Regardless, any arguing or defending of the record seems pointless and redundant. Which is why it's here at the peak. It should be reiterated, however, just how much better OK Computer is than Loveless, and why people somehow forget this. Loveless, a masterpiece of form and noise, impresses the brain like stylized photography. Surely, it is breathtaking. It provides the senses with a romantic, heightened ideal of music, experienced through an unbreakable medium. The sound overwhelms to such an extent that multiple listens are unnecessary and taxing. OK Computer, in contrast, sounds crystalline and liveable-- a true, enterable aural landscape packaged with press-delivered mythology describing its creation (Thom Yorke singing on his back staring at Dr. Quinn Medicine Woman's castle ceiling).
Those overly familiar with this album's details doubt its brilliance only in the way a Loveless-like beauty sitting across the restaurant from your mate questions your life commitment. You haven't seen the armpit stubble, shower drain residue, high-school poetry, morning dental state, and Disney-induced tears of Loveless. Psychologically, one needs those fantastic diversions, but there has to be something real to return to again and again. OK Computer simply is the anxious, self-important, uncertain, technologically overwhelmed 1990s.
