August 5: Elastica, Massive Attack, Maxwell, Megadeth, Moby, Supergrass, Teenage Fanclub

As we move through the decades on 1001, we come to the 1990s. As I grew up in the 90s – I was 7 at the start of 1990, and 17 at the end of 1999 – a lot of my favourite music comes from the decade. Super Furries, Gorky’s, KLF, Pulp, Blur, Bikini Kill and others. My immediate mental shorthand for the decade is Britpop and the Spice Girls, but of course as with any decade, the breadth of music created in the era is a bit more diverse than that. Here’s seven that I never came to at the time.

Elastica, ‘Elastica’

Justine and the gang are best known for two urgent singles, ‘Connection’ and ‘Waking Up’ which sound so familiar that lawsuits were raised against both (by Wire and the Stranglers respectively, both of whom had a point). I took a while coming to this album because I wondered whether you needed to bother if it was so derivative. Turns out that you do. Sprinting through 15 songs in 38 minutes, the nonchalant cool in which they dispatch these songs suggests they could have knocked out another 15 hook-heavy, angular new-wave cuts and topped them with young cool cat lyrics without breaking a sweat. Turned out of course that they couldn’t – their second album took half a decade and its messy, hit-and-miss, sprawl isn’t for everyone – “I work very hard but I’m lazy/I’ve got a lot of songs but they’re all in my head” indeed. Anyway, this sounds a lot better than I was expecting.

Massive Attack, ‘Protection’

The last of two visits to Massive’s output (no ‘Mezzanine’ or anything after), this opens with the title track, which is probably the best thing I’ve heard Tracey Thorn do. When the very next track is ‘Karmacoma’, it feels like the album is limbering up for a home run. For whatever reason, though, the trio’s take on trip hop is hard to pigeonhole but also less beguiling than contemporaries like Portishead, and the album meanders a bit in its second half. It ends on a peculiar note, with a weird live version of ‘Light My Fire’.

Maxwell, ‘Urban Hang Suite’

Maxwell was a suave R&B singer and multi-instrumentalist whose songs often sound like a smoother take on the sort of sound that late-90s boybands tried to emulate, and which Du Jour lampoon in ‘Josie and the Pussycats’. Like D’Angelo or Anita Baker, Musze is soundtracking a grown-up seduction, tapping into Marvin Gaye’s ‘Let’s Get It On’ era. Like them, it’s very sophisticated but not really to my taste.

Megadeth, ‘Rust in Peace’

It’s with reluctance that I’ve come back to Megadeth, not necessarily because of any shortcomings in their own competency but because I don’t find thrash especially thrilling as a genre. ‘Rust in Peace’, released at the very start of the 90s, still has some trappings of the 80s in the whiny pitch of some of the vocals, and the monochromatic arrangements make it difficult to tell where one song starts and another ends. They blast through the songs at a rapid pace though, and have the good manners to stop before outstaying their welcome. There’s also some suggestions as to where metal can go in the 90s: ‘Tornado of Souls’ has a vaguely RATM flavour in its breakdown (but not in its soloing), while the bass-and-drums only arrangement of ‘Dawn Patrol’ sees Dave Mustaine shift his vocal into a low-register growl that sounds like Marilyn Manson.

Moby, ‘Play’

Songs from this album were licensed so frequently for adverts that I didn’t really feel like I needed to hear 1999’s ‘Play’ in full: I could just turn on a TV or radio and I’d be bound to hear a cut from it at some point. 20 years removed, though, it’s easier to see how this combination of electronica and ye olde blues samples sounded fresh at the time, and the hooks on ‘Natural Blues’, ‘Why Does My Heart Feel So Bad?’ and the ‘Jealous Guy’ echoing ‘Porcelain’ do sound pretty good. Inevitably it’s too long – 18 tracks, 63 minutes – but often sounds good. What it doesn’t sound like, of course, is techno, making Eminem’s homophobic dissing on ‘Without Me’ sound even more pathetic.

Supergrass, ‘In It For The Money’

Seeing two Supergrass albums on the 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die astonished me when I looked at the list but whisper it: they’re there on merit. They’re slicing up influences from before they were born, of course: the 60s organ on ‘Going Out’, the T-Rex thrusts of the title track. Yet the sound is definably theirs, and it’s surprisingly solid throughout acoustic downbeat cuts like ‘Late in the Day’ or gritty rockers like ‘Richard III’. Recording was tense, apparently, with Danny constantly pissing off to record the Lodger record, but they sound like a solid unit.

Teenage Fanclub, ‘Bandwagonesque’

The Fannies are kind of forgotten these days, but at the time this album was a massive hit, and Kurt Cobain regarded them as one of his favourite bands. As with many bands of the early 90s, they’re into loud distorted guitars and trebly production: sort of a noisy combination of Big Star, The Byrds and Orange Juice. Gerard Love especially sounds like Alex Chilton on, say, ‘December’. Some drab lyrics and lead guitar let the side down, though, and I didn’t feel especially inspired by this one.

Next week: we’re getting the Millennium bug as we wrap up our journey through the decades with the 2000s.

Status update: 938 listened to (93%), 63 remain.

July 16: Ryan Adams, Frank Black, Blue Nile, Deep Purple, Massive Attack,Orange Juice, REM

This week, we’ll be looking at one of our flimsiest categories yet, as this week’s septet are included because either the band name or album name features a colour! What will be joining Black Sabbath, Pink Floyd, ‘Kind of Blue’ and the White Stripes in the 1001 canon? Read on.

Ryan Adams, ‘Gold’

This album’s title confuses the heck out of music shop staff, as this album and Cat Power’s ‘The Greatest’ are frequently found lumped in with Best Of collections. In fact, it’s just Adams’s second solo album after leaving Whiskeytown. It’s a bewilderingly uninspiring 70 minutes of country rock, the sound of someone aiming to be nominated for multiple Grammys, taking his cues from Bruce Springsteen and Neil Young yet learning nothing about their urgency or intensity. Gillian Welch and David Rawlings, whose own work is arranged starkly, turn up for a brace of writing credits, but even their songs are smothered in uninspiring full band line-ups. The album’s highlight is CC White’s ‘Gimme Shelter’ impression on ‘Tina Toledo’s Street Walking Blues’, but it’s just an album.

Frank Black, ‘Teenager of the Year’

The former Pixie and one-time Teenager of the Year clearly had a lot to say on his second solo album, flexing his songwriting muscles over a whopping 22 songs in 62 minutes. With former Beefheart/Pere Ubu bassist Eric Drew Feldman at the helm, the songs are more sonically diverse than Pixies, with synths and pianos prominent and one song pausing for a dub reggae breakdown. The album’s fine, but some editorial control would have helped: it felt as though I was listening to one of Spotify’s extended editions.

Blue Nile, ‘A Walk Across the Rooftops’

Recorded in the 80s and put out on a record label owned by drum machine manufacturers Linn, ‘A Walk Across the Rooftops’ is sophisti-pop in a Scotch brogue, mostly based around piano and synth, topped lightly with ‘Baba O’Riley’ ARP drizzle, but lacking essential ingredients like melody or hook. Too often, the album receded into the background, partially due to its gentle subtlety, but generally due to meandering instrumental sections with no obvious value. This was not very good.

Deep Purple, ‘Deep Purple in Rock’

Our second visit to the organ-driven hard-rockers is a lot like the first: heavy riffs, lengthy solos, falsetto, and the tempo-shifting quasi-prog ‘Child in Time’. Ritchie Blackmore and Jon Lord give the band its distinctive flavour: the former adding screeching histronics whenever he lets loose, the latter plugging his organ into whatever amplifier was available, with unique results. An album which codified hard rock early, and feels like it has all the essential components of Purple’s style. Beware though: contains drum solo.

Massive Attack, ‘Blue Lines’

Like Harlow’s theory of bonding in developmental child psychology, I think there was probably a crucial period in which I could have got into Massive Attack, but once that had passed, I’d never be able to do it. The end of that period was probably 1999, after which their context and significance receded into the past. ‘Blue Lines’ came out in 1991, a bit before I got into music, and by the time I caught up, all its parts had been looted for other works: trip-hop, Warp electronica, Bjork, BBC muzak. At the time, though, this downtempo collection’s fusion of Herbie Hancock, Lee Perry, house music and hip-hop must have sounded astonishing. To the modern listener, it’s mostly better when Shara Nelson is on vocals, rather than the boys rapping inexactly and doing Topol impressions. This does, of course, have the immaculate ‘Unfinished Sympathy’, which turns up mid-album but just about avoids overshadowing everything else on it.

Orange Juice, ‘Rip It Up’

The band are best remembered for the title track here, a Franz Ferdinand template which also named Simon Reynolds’s exhaustive post-punk study. The band’s second album in less than 12 months, the line-up only retained Edwyn Collins and bassist David McClymont from the first, adding Zimbabwean drummer Zeke Manyika and songwriting guitarist Malcolm Ross here. The diversity of the sound kind of positions them as a Scottish Talking Heads: most of the tracks sound distinct from one another, from African rhythms to reggae to Wedding Present-ish lo-fi indie, while maintaining a coherency. Pretty good.

REM, ‘Green’

There are a few more REM albums on the list, and I already did ‘Automatic for the People‘, so this is probably their best-known album on the list. It bounces between jangly, if introverted, 80s guitar pop and acoustic, mandolin-heavy numbers, with Mike Mills occasionally contributing keyboards as well as bass. The album’s biggest song is also consistent with this week’s theme: ‘Orange Crush’. It’s very listenable, but I suspect the albums of REM’s I’m most interested in are not on the list (‘Out of Time’, ‘Monster’, ‘New Adventures in Hi-Fi’).

Next week: we’ll be bringing the beat back with another rap week!

Status update: 569 listened to (57%), 432 remaining