Half-amusing musings on my music collection - Part 12: Side B of the 90s

Side B of the 90s (the second half of the decade, that is) is not very different to side A .  Much like an album.  More of the same, only not quite as good. 

I blame Britpop.  As much as it was probably the last great movement in British pop music culture, it spawned a glut of bands who struggled to extend their cheeky lad and ladette guitar-based indie sing-alongs across a whole album.  Blur are the epitome of this flattering to deceive summation.  Had downloads and then streaming usurped CDs before "Parklife" was released, then far fewer people would have bought the whole album.  As it was, everyone who "loved a bit" of it, had to put up with all of it, fairground jingles and irritating moments of musical dicking about included.  

Blur, then, were not one of the Britpop lot to trouble my geeky top ten lists of albums from each year of the mid to late 90s.  Nor were Sleeper, despite my efforts to love them more - efforts prompted partly by their propensity for a catchy single and mostly by my infatuation with lead singer, Louise Wener.

The best albums by bands who could be said to at least loosely fall under this same umbrella would include the following:

"The Sound of McAlmont and Butler" (8/10 1995), which was purchased not just out of loyalty, but because it turned out to be a great album assembled from a series of original EPs; and because it might just kick off with the most explosively celebratory expression of joy ever unleashed in a pop song - "Yes".

Pulp's "Different Class" (8/10 1995) pre-dated the TV series 'Shameless' by a few years, but it managed to put the essence of that show to (extraordinarily catchy) music in its endearing portrayal of council estate romance, dry wit and perversion.

Demonstrating a far more middle-class, culturally intellectual obsession for sex - a classical music and literary tinged Beatlesesque pop version of the 'Carry On...' films - was Neil Hammond, aka The Divine Comedy. "Casanova" (7/10 1996) introduced us to 'Something for the Weekend' with its references to Stella Gibbons' 'Cold Comfort Farm' (something in the woodshed); "A Short Album about Love" (8/10 1997) contained the ultimate declaration of love with 'If you were a horse, I'd clean the crap out of your stable'; and "Fin de Siecle" (7/10 1998) painted images of journeys on National Express coaches with huge bottomed women.

Not quite fitting the sunny side of the Britpop template was Radiohead.  Before sinking into an abyss of experimental, morose dirge, they weren't quite too pretentious enough to forego a memorable guitar hook or ten within the bars of "The Bends" (8/10 1995) and "OK Computer" (8/10 1997).  And Oasis and Supergrass squeeze themselves onto the lists as well, to complete what on reflection is actually a fairly healthy representation for Britpop.

Not Britpop, but sitting comfortably alongside them are these CDs from indie/alternative artists: "Bring it On" (9/10 1998) by Gomez, "Beautiful Freak" (9/10 1996) by eels, "White Ladder" (8/10 1998) by David Gray,  "I'm with Stupid" (6/10 1995) by Aimee Mann and "Big Calm" (6/10 1998) by Morcheeba.  James also continued to plough a furrow through the 90s of half decent albums sprinkled with some great songs, the best being "Millionaires" (7/10) in 1999.

Less likely to find themselves featured in between topless photo-shoots on the pages of 90s lads' magazine, "Loaded" or invited to be interviewed on "The Word" by one of the decade's most iconic arseholes, Terry Christian, would be the inevitable folk and country rock performers sitting on my CD and record racks.  This includes Natalie Merchant, who moved on from 10,000 Maniacs, to produce several beautiful solo albums.  Beautiful AND interesting that is.  I stress that, because people often use that ubiquitous adjective to describe soft, gentle and VERY dull and bland ballads, which is not what Natalie Merchant did, not at first anyway. She did, later on, spend a few years on a self-indulgent project to put a double album's worth of Edwardian poetry for children to music, which I also witnessed in performance in probably the most tediously fucking boring concert I have ever attended.  At her best she can be heard on "Tigerlily" (8/10 1995), "Ophelia" (7/10 1998) and "Motherland" (8/10 2001).

Willie Nelson, Sheryl Crow, Robyn Hitchcock, Lucinda Williams and Gillian Welch get on the scoreboards, but standing out is another folky favourite of mine, bearded this time, as you'd expect,  Richard Thompson.  "You? Me? Us?" (7/10 1996) pulls off the experiment of one disc of acoustic tracks and one disc of electric versions without it seeming like a gimmick.  In 1999, he unleashed a classic in my mind, one of only two perfect scores in this half of the decade, "Mock Tudor" (10/10).  The other ten is "Time Out of Mind" (1997), Dylan's resurrection #3, that proved to be a turning point rather than a blip, a return to form that he continued to build on for the next 14 years.

An even more unexpected comeback at this time (1999), given that their last studio album was 14 years previously, was Madness.  The LP title "Wonderful" (6/10) described some of the tracks on that album, not all, but its the odd song that stacks up against their classics that showed they could still write great pop tunes; and they went on to do this again, irregularly, over the time since.

Finally, also proving that they weren't washed up either, were David Bowie ("Earthling" 6/10 1997 and "Hours" 5/10 1999) and Paul McCartney ("Flaming Pie" 7/10 1997).

So, lots of great albums, but a downward trajectory.  You'd expect this would continue in the 2000s, as clearly I was getting older, more set in my ways, more narrow minded and rose tinted in my view of the good old days.  But you'd be wrong.  Strangely.

Half-amusing musings on my music collection - Part 11: Side A of the 90s

"Side A" of the 90s will focus on the years in the first half of a decade in which CDs fully replaced vinyl records, thus making the concept of a side A or B completely redundant, and adding just enough irony to my blog post title to compensate for the lacklustre humour hereafter.

Unfulfilled Promise

The best album of the decade came from The Sundays - 1990's "Reading, Writing and Arithmetic" (10/10).  Imagine The Smiths, but with a lead singer that you want to snog and marry rather than kill, because she sings about her finest hour "finding a pound on the underground" and elsewhere confesses to getting sick on her cardigan.  Although it happens quite regularly in music, it always seems implausible that an artist capable of creating one amazing album should be incapable of doing it again.  I love Harriet Wheeler's voice and the distinctiveness of the band's sound, so I enjoy their two follow-ups, but neither 1992's "Blind" (6/10) nor 1997's "Static and Silence" (7/10) contains a song you'd swap for anything on their faultless debut LP.

Much more notable in their fall from precocious perfection was The Stone Roses, who spent the early 90s not following up their iconic debut due to a record contract dispute and thus building up an unassuaged level of expectation and suspense over their 1994 sophomore LP, named with suitable irony, "The Second Coming" (7/10).

The House of Love were a third band from this era, who teasingly released an LP (9/10) that (to steal one of their own lyrics) "sucked the marrow out of bones" and then failed to follow it up.  Like The Stone Roses and The Sundays, they are emblematic of halcyon university days, when I constantly listened to them, saw each in concert and anticipated subsequent albums with all the relish of a fox who'd snuck into a battery farm full of hens.  Unlike The Stone Roses and The Sundays, the House of Love's follow up was more than just relatively disappointing, it was as shockingly stark a contrast as being served a dog poo for dessert in a Michelin star restaurant.  It remained the worst CD in my collection until I finally recovered from the shock, gained closure on the death of any vain hopes of being eventually persuaded of its worth and threw the bloody thing in the bin.

Bob Dylan's inclusion in this 'unfulfilled promise' section might seem crazy, 30 years into his career, but he's here on the back of ending an artistic and commercial slump in the 80s with a promising return to top form, only to follow it with slump number 2.  This starts with 1990's "Under the Red Sky" (6/10), an over-produced LP packed with average tracks and star names like George Harrison, Elton John, Slash and Stevie Ray Vaughan sitting in as musicians, all responding to Bob's genius as you might the Emperor's new clothes, while he sings "Wiggle wiggle wiggle like a swarm of bees, wiggle on your hands and knees."  Bob learned from this experience never again to allow a producer (Don Was in this case) to roll his songs in glitter, but he then forgot how to write songs at all.  His next albums are stripped back, solo acoustic, containing only covers of traditional folk blues songs.  "Good as I been to You" (1992 6/10) is the harder listen.  "World Gone Wrong" (1993 7/10) is better, but neither did anything to suggest that Dylan's song-writing days weren't well behind him.  Or so I thought in the mid-90s.

One band managed to do a similar trick halfway through their album.  Crash Test Dummies frontloaded "God shuffled his feet" (1993 7/10) with enough great songs to earn a 10/10; but what would have been side 2 if it wasn't the CD age pulled the average down and yet again the follow up album was a million miles off that early promise.

The early 90s were awash with bands destined not to sustain their early promise.  The Cranberries' first two albums (both 7/10) are a case in point.  Suede, whose self-titled debut (9/10) in 1993 proved difficult to match on LP #2 and even harder after co-song-writer and guitarist Bernard Butler left the band. Portishead's "Dummy" (1994 8/10) led to nothing of interest thereafter.  And "Mama Said" (8/10) saw Lenny Kravitz reach a creative peak that proved an anomaly.

Meanwhile, U2 turned a corner in their career.  They followed their last good album, 1993's "Achtung, Baby!" with the average "Zooropa" and then transformed themselves into a blueprint for tediously self-satisfying, terminally dull purveyors of smug, over-earnest elevator music, like fucking Coldplay.  Paul Weller pulled off a similar trick, but without stirring up such passionate hatred as Bono and co.  He seemed to have found his groove as a solo artist on "Wild Wood" (7/10 1993) and "Stanley Road" (7/10 1995), but thereafter he's manged to stir up nothing passionate or emotion-inducing at all, just charmlessly competent Ocean Colour Scene copies.

So, did anyone maintain any momentum in the early 90's like bands used to years before?

Yes.  Fulfilling their promise, one album after another, was The Beautiful South.  No band has pulled off such an ironic juxtaposition  (there's that poncey word again) between upbeat melodies and dark, twisted lyrics, as if they'd based their whole career on Maxwell's Silver Hammer by The Beatles.  Songs with titles like "I Love You but you're boring" that take a wry look at relationships and romance for some reason appeal very much to the cynic in me.  From 1990's "Choke"(9/10) to "0898 Beautiful South" (7/10) in '92 and "Miaow" (7/10) in '94, Paul Heaton and co proved possibly the most consistently great pop band of the decade.  

Fulfilling their promise from the late 80s, at least commercially (as I prefer those earlier albums) are REM.  "Out of Time" (8/10 1991), "Automatic for the People" (8/10 1992) and "Monster" (7/10 1994) are perhaps only flawed or inconsistent, because they contain some classic songs that shine a bit too brightly for anything else to keep with. Reaching their commercial AND artistic zenith were Crowded House, who released "Woodface" (9/10 1991) and "Together Alone" (10/10 1993) and then disbanded for a decade rather than inevitably let us all down trying to follow such inimitable work.

Neil Young has spent decades alternating between between sumptuousness folk or country LPs and heavy grunge outings, and he pairs two of his best since the early 70s here.  1990's "Ragged Glory" (7/10) and 1992's "Harvest Moon" (10/10).  At the time of writing and at the age of 75, he's about to release his 20th studio album in the 29 years since then, most of which score even better than "Ragged Glory" in my mind. Having released 40 studio albums in total (of which I have 30 and rate them on average 7.5), it's fair to say that he HAS fulfilled his promise.

Hellos and Goodbyes

1994 gave us the start of Oasis's career, which was to deliver many, many fine songs, but no LP as consistently great as their debut, "Definitely Maybe" (9/10).  It gave us a new 2nd career for Johnny Cash, whose first in the "American Recordings" (8/10) series was released this year.  It gave us the complete career (until a recent equally accomplished comeback) of Belly, with the superb "Star" (7/10) in '93 and easily loveable "King" (9/10) two years later.

And it was goodbye to Jethro Tull, after 91's "Catfish Rising" (7/10) and '95's "Roots to Branches" (6/10) - a strong finish to a consistently great 30 year career, which they then spoilt with one album too many, their worst of all time, "J-Tull dot com" (which doesn't make the top ten, even in a year as bad as 1999, given its rating of 2/10).  It has a shit title and album cover too, so Tull's ship had well and truly sailed by this point.

And the saddest of goodbyes, of course, was to Freddie Mercury in 1991, marked fittingly with a final Queen album, "Innuendo" (7/10), which along with "The Works" in '83 was their best since the 70's.