September 2nd, 2010
Siamese Dream
Gish was a formidable, if flawed, debut, coming as the unsung first shot in the ‘91 alternative rock revolution that gripped the mainstream with rough hands and the assorted sounds of punk, post-punk & the 80’s underground. Siamese Dream, however, not only far surpasses its predecessor, but it would be the Smashing Pumpkins’ first advantage-taking in alt-rock mania upon its hugely successful release in 1993, when it went straight away into the Top Ten of the Billboard Top 100. Its best songs, such as the visceral “Silverf*ck”, the ballads “Mayonnaise”, “Spaceboy” & “Disarm”, the misleading bright pop of “Today” (which accompanies rather suicidal lyrical implications, so far as Billy Corgan expressing the desire to eviscerate his heart and eyeballs) and the anthems “Cherub Rock” & “Rocket”, surpass any of the best songs on Gish no matter how great they were in their own right, and there’s no truly bad moments on Siamese Dream either. It pares down some of the more obvious psychedelic & heavy metal elements from its predecessor, instead heightening the dream pop & prog-rock, as evidenced by the length of the eight- minute “Silverf*ck” and the seven-minute “Hummer”, albeit not reaching quite the same levels of grandiosity as their main prog heroes Pink Floyd or, say, Yes or Hawkwind and fortunately not sinking to the ridiculously unnecessary pretentiousness of Emerson, Lake & Palmer. As usual, the overt punk rock influences, as well as the sense of immediacy of Nirvana are almost nowhere to be found, except perhaps a little bit on the driving “Geek USA” or the faster sections of “Silverf*ck”. Billy Corgan for the first time proved himself something of an anti-egotist egotist of sorts with the way he domineered his bandmates throughout the album’s prolonged recording and played almost every instrument himself when Jimmy Chamberlin, D’arcy Wretzky or James Iha, at any given time, didn’t play up to his high standards of excellence. At the same time, much of this was probably a psychological response to his unrelated mental, emotional & physical trauma at that point in time, during which he battled depression by almost living in the studio and developed obsessive-compulsive disorder thanks to both that depression and the associated drug use. It was that childhood trauma he revisited in the harrowing but lovely “Disarm”, where he laid bare his abuse at the hands of his parents (no, not his pro-life beliefs, as the BBC mistakenly believed as far as the metaphorical & allegorical line “Cut that little child”) and dealt with it eloquently & movingly for the public to see. And the public was willing to share in that journey with Billy & co.; Siamese Dream would only be surpassed by the massively monumental 1995 successor Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness, debuting in the Top Ten in July 1993 and holding onto the public’s imagination & listening ears well into late in 1994. And for good reason; it remains one of the best and most influential rock albums of the 1990’s.
- Release Date: 1993
- Rating:
TRACK PICKS: “Cherub Rock”; “Today”; “Rocket”; “Disarm”; “Silverf*ck”
Posted in Album-Oriented Rock, Alternative/Indie Rock, Art Rock, Grunge, Neo-Psychedelia, Progressive Rock, Psychedelic, Sam's Critique Corner | No Comments »
September 1st, 2010
Saturation
Urge Overkill’s 1993 major label debut is easily the band’s finest hour, perfecting their yin-yang brand of rock & roll that mixes the radio-ready, bright & overproduced sounds of mainstream album rock with a smart-ass punk sensibility, not to mention a much grungier, leaner sound than their AOR forefathers that has touches, in equal measure, of The Cars, Nirvana, Hüsker Dü & Pearl Jam. In other words, it’s a bunch of alt-rockers simultaneously paying tribute to mainstream hard rock of the past whilst also poking fun at its pretensions. That wasn’t exactly revolutionary, but that’s hardly the point; Saturation’s twelve songs are killer, from the absolutely born-for-radio hit “Sister Havana” to the pseudo-power ballad “Heaven 90210″. Not a single song is truly bad, it’s both fun to listen to and crafted expertly, not only from a lust for fame but also from a keen ear for the mixture of melodic accessibility & sarcasm, something the best of their 70’s, 80’s & contemporary heroes did in most every case. It’s hardly an underground rock classic of the 90’s, but it’s one of the very best mainstream breakthroughs from any alternative act in the post-Nirvana grunge boom, thanks to Urge Overkill’s unwavering effort, determination, wit and their successful cross-pollination of the mainstream and the underground.
- Release Date: 1993
- Rating:
TRACK PICKS: “Sister Havana”; “Positive Bleeding”; “Back On Me”
Posted in Album-Oriented Rock, Alternative/Indie Rock, American Trad Rock, Grunge, Hard Rock/Heavy Metal, Sam's Critique Corner | No Comments »
September 1st, 2010
Posted in Happy month! | No Comments »
August 31st, 2010
Staring at the Sea
Spanning 1978-1985, from the flatly produced, arty 1978 debut single “Killing an Arab” to the lush pop of 1985’s “Night Like This”, the 1986 singles comp Staring at the Sea (or, on vinyl, Standing on a Beach, with four less tracks than the CD edition) came at the most convenient & fitting time for The Cure, between the release of 1985’s The Head on the Door and their 1987 hit Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me, covering all their periods prior to megastardom & stadium touring that came with their 1987 double-LP, as well as the dark Disintegration. It may have a relatively low-fidelity, modest production on all the tracks, regardless whether or not it’s the restrained post-punk pop of “10:15 Saturday Night”, where you’d expect it, or even with their later synth-augmented singles like “In Between Days” or “Let’s Go to Bed”. However, you can trace the band’s evolution through these seventeen songs; in an hour (on the CD version), you will have heard the story of the band up until 1986, beginning with their jagged fusion of post-punk & pop-punk as heard on 1979’s Three Imaginary Boys or the US comp Boys Don’t Cry and moving into goth with the atmospheric “A Forest”, moving after the dramatic “Hanging Garden” five tracks later into their poppiest territory with the bright, bouncy & strangely sexy “Let’s Go to Bed”, which is basically the band’s early history condensed into seventeen songs. It’s pop-inflected post-punk, then to goth, then back to their poppier side with Lol Tolhurst taking over on keyboards in the second half. Not only is the collection a thrilling listen when listened to all the way through, but it’s also flip-through-able to the max, as all great singles compilations should be, with the best of these singles standing out in a way much unlike as usual on an official album. As such, it’s best listened to for its individual songs, rather than as a full album statement, but it plays like The Cure’s best and most utterly consistent collection of songs. It’s rightly the band’s best-selling release, with double-platinum sales thus far and containing the band’s best singles, and for one of the best bands of their time that makes for a brilliant, terrific collection. It’s accompanied by the VHS music video compilation that mimics the CD title, which is also worth owning for their famously quirky clips, and the album itself is a must-own even for hardcore fans who already have the albums, especially seeing as it contains non-album singles like “Let’s Go to Bed”, which is otherwise only available on the paltry Japanese Whispers comp that didn’t even last half an hour. If you want to get to know the band, however, this should be your first purchase, or download, or whatever way you obtain it.
- Release Date: 1986
- Rating:
TRACK PICKS: “Killing an Arab”; “Boys Don’t Cry”; “A Forest”; “Charlotte Sometimes”; “The Hanging Garden”; “Let’s Go to Bed”; “The Lovecats”; “In Between Days”; “Close to Me”
Posted in Alternative/Indie Rock, British Punk, College Rock, Gothic Rock, Post-Punk, Punk-Pop, Punk/New Wave, Sam's Critique Corner | No Comments »
August 30th, 2010
Talk Talk Talk
With its Byrds hooks, Roxy Music-esque production & all-around poppier production, Talk Talk Talk streamlines The Psychedelic Furs with a more mainstream production value courtesy of Steve Lillywhite and, through their Byrds fascination all throughout, a sound that for once justifies their otherwise misleading name with its mid-60’s jangle. “Pretty in Pink”, opening the album with a rousing jolt, is obviously its highlight above the other songs, with its utterly perfect meld of almost Elvis Costello-like lyrical complexities, pure guitar pop, punk & new wave, Berlin-era Bowie and Roxy Music stylishness setting the tone for a thoroughly great, if flawed, album, which is rightfully the one that garnered the most attention on the Furs in America in particular and is possibly their finest effort. Indeed, the band offers up two more pop gems with “No Tears” & “Into You Like a Train” and plenty more great moments, and there’s not one bad moment on the record, but its flaws are noticeable, especially with the droning “Dumb Waiters”, the uneven “So Run Down” and the over-long closer “All Of This and Nothing”. Despite them, and despite being just a shade under the brilliant classic it could’ve been, it’s still a great album, and a must hear if one wants to know what “Pretty in Pink” sounded like before it was even more heavily tarted up for its inclusion on the soundtrack to the John Hughes movie of the same name in 1986.
- Release Date: 1981
- Rating:
TRACK PICKS: “Pretty in Pink”; “No Tears”; “Into You Like a Train”
Posted in Alternative/Indie Rock, British Punk, College Rock, Dance-Rock, Jangle Pop, Post-Punk, Power Pop, Punk/New Wave, Sam's Critique Corner | No Comments »
August 29th, 2010
Siren
Simultaneously rejecting the amount of overt glam & heavy AOR rock that dominated the brilliant Country Life whilst not fully co-opting the Teutonic, disco-fied funk of “Love is the Drug” for a whole record in the same vein, Siren catches Roxy Music as a group that in just three years had become elder statesmen of sorts, already capable by 1975 after several killer records of doing just about anything they wanted, and it shows in its nine songs. Of course the irresistible “Love is the Drug”, which opens the album, ought not to be disregarded, being the crucial American hit that opened them up to a wider audience outside the UK, and its disco-like, jittery funk predated the sound of at least half the post-punk bands that would form circa 1978-79, not to mention that of electro around that same later date, but Siren has much more to offer than eight more songs that sound exactly like that; in fact, it proves it doesn’t need to go that route through the winding guitar rock of “Whirlwind”, the piano-driven balladry of “Sentimental Fool” (which would predate their late-career that culminated in the smooth finale Avalon seven years later), the driving “She Shells” & “Both Ends Burning”, the streaks of glam & the long-thought-extinguished ghost of Brian Eno’s synth wizardry still running through the music all throughout. Siren firmly established Roxy Music as one of the greatest bands of their era, and it’s one of their best albums as well.
- Release Date: 1975
- Rating:
TRACK PICKS: “Love is the Drug”; “She Shells”; “Both Ends Burning”
Posted in Album-Oriented Rock, Art Rock, Dance-Rock, Glam Rock, Pop/Rock, Proto-Punk, Sam's Critique Corner | No Comments »
August 28th, 2010
The Queen Is Dead
Opening with the epic title track, The Smiths’ 1986 magnum opus The Queen Is Dead immediately announces itself as a marked improvement over the muddied, notably flawed Meat Is Murder, getting rid of the failed protest that colored the melodramatic pro-vegetarian title track of that album, Morrissey’s occasional overwrought vocalizing, the pseudo-disco/funk of “Barbarism Begins at Home” and, most importantly, Morrissey’s reputation as a hapless sap with no sense of humor, as the hilarious “Frankly, Mr. Shankly” proves. And although the melodrama of “That Joke Isn’t Funny Anymore” is no longer present, he also turns in two of The Smiths’ finest songs on romantic despair & heartache with the ballads “I Know It’s Over” & “Never Had No One Ever”, where his sense of hopelessness & cruel societal distance is felt more deeply than in almost any other of his songs. In contrast, however, the frantic “Bigmouth Strikes Again” & “Vicar in a Tutu” prove that this is The Smiths’ most frantic, urgent & uniquely rocking (albeit not in a traditional sense) album, with Johnny Marr playing his jangly guitar with more immediacy & fast pace than ever before or afterward in his career. And that’s most certainly not all, as Morrissey renews his love for classic pop songwriting with the jangly lament “The Boy With the Thorn in His Side” & the bouncy, acoustic folk-pop of “Cemetry Gates”, and goes epic outside of the six-minute title track with the sweeping “There Is a Light That Never Goes Out”. The wry, witty & humorous “Some Girls are Bigger Than Others” caps off The Smiths’ masterpiece perfectly, fittingly for a perfect album, and The Queen Is Dead ultimately will remain Morrissey & Marr’s finest accomplishment, of the band and with regard to their later solo ventures. A must-hear with no doubt in the world.
- Release Date: 1986
- Rating:
TRACK PICKS: “The Queen Is Dead”; “Bigmouth Strikes Again”; “The Boy With the Thorn in His Side”; “There is a Light That Never Goes Out”
Posted in Alternative/Indie Rock, College Rock, Indie Pop, Jangle Pop, Sam's Critique Corner | No Comments »
August 28th, 2010
Throwing Muses (1986)
Not released in America officially outside of UK imports until the release of the 1998 comp In a Doghouse, Throwing Muses’ 1986 debut may be one of the most powerful, engaging & gripping of all the great, timeless albums that came out of alternative rock in the 80’s, but it’s also perhaps the most idiosyncratic, most impenetrable (yet still accessible) and bizarre album to come out of college rock’s heyday. Kristin Hersh’s lyrics were often personal, yet also cryptic & clever; “He won’t ride in cars anymore/It reminds him of blowjobs/That he’s a queer” sounds vaguely personal, but also utterly, utterly cryptic, not to mention absurdist in the vein of someone like Charles Bukowski or William Burroughs. It’s not quite a singer-songwriter confessional record or an album like one from, say, The Raincoats, instead falling somewhere in-between; “Call Me” makes it very clear from the outset that this is not going to be a very ’straight’ type of record at all, with its drastic change of tempo & David Narcizo’s unique drum rhythm setting the tone for most of the following nine songs. Tanya Donelly’s sole contribution “Green”, an almost sea shanty-like folky love song, is probably the prettiest & least-abrasive out of all the songs here, whilst the self-loathing yet not entirely downbeat “Hate My Way” is one of the darkest songs the band’s ever recorded, and “Soul Soldier” & especially “America (She Can’t Say No)” have a driving, hard rockabilly-like rhythm. One might put a happier song at the end of a dark record, as Bruce Springsteen did at the end of the nihilistic, bleak & brooding Nebraska with a version of “Reason to Believe”, but this one’s capped off with the absolute darkest, scariest song present, “Delicate Cutters”, in which Hersh wails, screams & growls about self-mutilation & self-hatred with a frightening & fittingly bizarre perception, where she makes the personal poetic through lines about a room full of ‘delicate cutters’ & collapsing walls around its protagonist. Its a powerful listening experience, more powerful than even the later, nearly as strong efforts by a very different, brighter version of the band in the 1990’s, and despite being one of the weirdest college rock classics it’s also one of the best alternative albums of the 80’s. It’s such a shame it’s become so hard to find in the US, even on In a Doghouse in some cases, and with that it’s an unjustly forgotten classic.
- Release Date: 1986
- Rating:
TRACK PICKS: “Call Me”; “Hate My Way”; “Soul Soldier”; “Delicate Cutters”
Posted in Adult Alternative/Indie Rock, Alternative/Indie Rock, American Underground, College Rock, Post-Punk, Sam's Critique Corner | No Comments »
August 27th, 2010
Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables
Arriving out of nowhere to help define American hardcore in the punk rock pantomime before the term became widespread, Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables is not only the San Francisco-based Dead Kennedys’ first and finest album, but it’s also undoubtedly one of the best punk albums in history. Opening with the incensed, inflammatory & rockabilly-trimmed “Kill the Poor”, it’s fourteen of Jello Biafra’s at once menacingly frightening and uproariously funny rants, East Bay Ray’s blazing, surf & rockabilly-informed guitar and Klaus Flouride’s rhythmic & equally surfy bass. Biafra shouts often unintelligibly about greedy landlords, depression, stealing people’s mail on Friday nights, chemical warfare, then-California governor Jerry Brown’s alleged ‘hippie fascism’, and he even does a hilarious Elvis Presley impersonation on the Kennedys’ closing cover of Presley’s classic “Viva Las Vegas” that still sounds totally convincing despite its humorous nature. In other words, it defines Californian punk of all stripes with its tales of tomfoolery, black humor, frothing contempt for conservative politics and greedy authority figures, and drunken antics, not to mention rising above much of the unfairly-derided but still less-than-constantly brilliant California punk scene with a better album than most of the others that came out of that scene with fiery singles like “California Über Alles”, “Holiday in Cambodia” & “Kill the Poor”, songs which remain a few of the finest examples of Biafra’s wildly confrontational yet still seemingly tongue-in-cheek anarchist politics, a rare example of a political punk album that’s simultaneously one of the most heatedly critical of conservative politics around, yet also one of the most hilarious & fun to listen to as well. It could in fact be the greatest Californian punk album ever released, and there’s fourteen great songs here to prove that possibility.
- Release Date: 1980
- Rating:
TRACK PICKS: “Kill the Poor”; “Let’s Lynch the Landlord”; “Chemical Warfare”; “California Über Alles”; “Holiday in Cambodia”
Posted in Alternative/Indie Rock, American Underground, California Punk, Hardcore Punk, Punk/New Wave, Sam's Critique Corner | No Comments »
August 27th, 2010
Elliott Smith
Elliott Smith’s 1995 self-titled effort is, in very contradictory terms, equally his most musically pleasant & lovely album as well as lyrically his most harrowing, dealing with depression, alienation and, primarily, drug addiction set ironically to some of calmest, loveliest & most low-key arrangements imaginable, consisting mostly of Smith’s whisper of a voice and finger-picked acoustic guitar (once described appropriately as a fusion of Beatlesque pop & Neil Young’s ominous sense of doom & despair) with the occasional addition of drums or a harmonica here & there. The lyric sheet reads like the most brutal of punk rock or heavy metal, but the music plays like the most lo-fi & calm of folk-rock. The wistful & dark “Needle in the Hay” may be about the loss of one’s soul and addiction, but it’s perhaps the loveliest song ever written with such despairing lyrical content, baring not only his despairing yet poetic & not entirely nihilistic soul, but also the undeniable influence of 70’s singer-songwriters, particularly Jackson Browne, Joni Mitchell, John Prine and of course the unsung & little-known cult hero Nick Drake. It’s true for the rest of the record as well; no matter how dark some of the lyrics can be, it’s not just for brooding, hurting, heartache & sadness. He clearly had far more moods, topics, tones & emotional hues in mind than ’sit ‘n’ brood’, as the utterly ridiculous label ’sadcore’ that gets attached to him wouldn’t suggest. With that, Smith’s sophomore effort managed to reach areas of doom, depression, numbness, addiction and the grim underside of human nature, but also somehow managed to simultaneously be accessible, diverse & all-around good enough not to be solely for late-night introspection or a bad mood. Not only is his self-titled effort the first of several exceptional song collections that would follow it until his 2003 death, but if one doesn’t care for the lushness of 1997’s Either/Or or 1998’s XO, it just might even be his best ever.
- Release Date: 1995
- Rating:
TRACK PICKS: “Needle in the Hay”; “Coming Up Roses”; “St. Ides Heaven”
Posted in Alternative/Anti-Folk, Alternative/Indie Rock, Contemporary Folk, Folk, Folk-Rock, Lo-Fi, Sam's Critique Corner, Singer-Songwriter | No Comments »