1990, The Year in Review, P5

There are plenty more good albums to round out my Year in Review playlist.  Check them out.

Other Notable Albums of 1990

As always, you can jump to the playlist at the bottom of each post to listen while you read.

Within each tier (Top 6, Next 6, etc.), all albums are listed roughly chronologically (all release dates from Wikipedia, unless otherwise noted).

Fugazi
Repeater

Released 1990/04/19

I’ve never been a huge fan of Fugazi, although I’ve always felt I should be. I seem to like the snide and snotty style of punk more than the serious and angry aesthetic, I guess. That said, I can like their stuff a lot without needing to love it.

Not being a devoted fan, I feel hesitant to offer grand opinions about this release compared to others, but it seems to me as good an album of theirs as any other. I seem to recall liking their 2001 comeback The Argument slightly better than the albums of their heyday, but Fugazi and punk purists would no doubt prefer their early stuff, which many sources tell me is well-represented by this fine disc (13 Songs seems to be another great option). The guitar attack is cutting and frenzied, the vocals are furious, and the attitude is in your face. Good stuff.

My Bloody Valentine
Glider EP

Released 1990/04/23

My Bloody Valentine’s debut album Isn’t Anything showed them forming their own style while still heavily indebted to their influences (Sonic Youth being the most evident, at least to me). But with the Glider EP, the band comes into its own. The songs drift is a droning wash of guitar haze, with the vocals lost in the mix.

Opener “Soon” rides a propulsive beat, the guitars stretching and bending in a morass of effects, the vocals functioning merely as another instrument. The title track pierces with amorphous discord, “Don’t Ask Why” flickers and spurts drowsily, and closer “Off Your Face” seems to combine all the elements of the previous three tracks. Never before had the world heard distortion done this way, as if drifting along on a cloud.

World Party
Goodbye Jumbo

Released 1990/04/24

I remember at least one good friend who was really into World Party’s Goodbye Jumbo in undergrad, but I was never too much into it myself. I remember listening to it and liking it, but also wondering what all the fuss was about.

Certainly, Goodbye Jumbo was a touch mainstream for my tastes—but with a catch: front man Karl Wallinger is working entirely within the box here, but he’s trying out enough different styles within that space, constantly dancing near the edges, and with enough cleverness in the arrangements that he’s snuggling up against the walls of convention, even if he never breaks through. He covers a good amount of ground within that metaphorical box.

So even though it will never blow you away, Goodbye Jumbo is very fine pop-rock album, highly accomplished, and with an engaging and satisfying mix of songs. It is certainly overrated in some circles (Q gave it Album of the Year—really?) but it’s still worthy. Very highly recommended for mainstream pop-rock listeners.

Mazzy Star
She Hangs Brightly

Released 1990/05/21

If I had heard Mazzy Star’s She Hangs Brightly first, it’s possible I might have loved it even more than their smash follow-up, So Tonight That I Might See (1993).

There’s something about Mazzy Star’s particular brand of drugged-out melancholy that really hooks me in, even though I don’t consider myself a very melancholy person, and I’m certainly not drugged out. Singer Hope Sandoval sounds so lost, it makes me want to invite her in from the cold to warm herself with a cup of hot cocoa and a fuzzy blanket—even though once inside she’d probably just ignore me completely and nod off on the couch.

The eerie organ whimpering and faint guitar cries of the title track are like nothing else in popular music, with Sandoval’s vocals seeping out from the mix as if emerging from the fog.

Blake Babies
Sunburn

Released 1990

Juliana Hatfield’s amateurish, girlish voice has a certain endearing charm, which makes her the ideal indie-rock sweetheart. Most know her for her solo work, but she got her start in Blake Babies. Sunburn, their final album before Hatfield left for an uneven solo career, is a real grower—I dismissed it first as lightweight, but the more I listened the more I fell for it. The band cultivate a back-to-basics, naïve, pop-rock sound that is immediately likeable, in a perfectly indie way.

Ride
Fall EP

Released 1990/09/17

Song for song, Ride’s Fall EP might be a better bet than their subsequent Nowhere full-length, often considered one of the seminal works of the shoegaze genre. Of course, the entire EP is included on the CD version of the Nowhere album, so I’m sure many listeners already consider it part of the package.

Highlights here include the shoulda-been title track “Nowhere” (which was omitted from the LP release of Nowhere) and its spacy, spooky swirl of noise; the catchy, tuneful “Taste,” one of their better-sung numbers; and the only track to make in on the original Nowhere release (and one of the best tracks on it), “Dreams Burn Down.”

The Flaming Lips
In a Priest Driven Ambulance

Released 1990/09/18

The Flaming Lips’ Wayne Coyne and Dinosaur Jr’s Jay Mascis might just share the crown for Greatest Alt-Rock, So-Bad-It’s-Good Voice. Even by rock and roll standards, Coyne’s voice is pretty god-awful—he sounds like Neil Young might if someone clamped his larynx in a vice—but at least he doesn’t sound lame (more on that later).

And, as with Mascis, Coyne’s voice fits the music just right, in an off-kilter kind of way. Spacey psychedelic guitar epics spiral into idle guitar strumming and back again, in a swirling morass of noise. This here is practically the alt-rock aesthetic defined, both vocally and musically (at least, the way it was defined before it was engulfed by the mainstream).

In a Priest Driven Ambulance isn’t the first Flaming Lips album, but it’s the first one most people pay much attention to. As a disclaimer, I should state that I haven’t listened at all to their first three albums, which precede this one.   Like many of my generation, my first Lips album was Transmissions From The Satellite Heart (1993), although I’d heard some of Hit To Death In The Future Head (1992) before picking that one up. And I’ve gotten plenty of others since, of course.

Ambulance has plenty of the awkward yet charming observations that characterize the Lips’ best work. Coyne finds his own personal relationship with religion on “Shine on Sweet Jesus.” On “Raining Babies,” he seems awestruck in the wonder of his own existence and the ideas that flow from within. “There You Are” reflects on the futility of life and the inevitability of death, before blissing out with some of the most peacefully beautiful music on the album.

The image of the title seems apt—the entire album has a kind of “walking wounded” feel, as if he’s beat-up and flattened, but his connection to a higher power is guiding him where he needs to go. “I was born the day they shot a hole in the Jesus egg,” says Coyne. I don’t know what he means, exactly, but I feel I can feel it.

The Charlatans
Some Friendly

Released 1990/10/08

See my comments in the 1990 Quick Takes.

Ween
GodWeenSatan: The Oneness

Released 1990/11/16

The ‘60s gave us the puerile, anti-establishment (and also anti-drug, hippie skeptic) Frank Zappa; the ‘70s gave us 10cc (who, if you only heard their radio hits would never know were such practical jokesters) and Sparks (who it seems no one heard at all); the ‘80s gave us They Might Be Giants, masters of good-natured absurdity. The ‘00s would later return us to relative normalcy with Flight of the Conchords. But first, the ‘90s gave us Ween—by far the sickest, most twisted fucks of the bunch.

My first exposure to the unique madness of Ween was their 1991 release The Pod. I’d seen something about it in SPIN and checked it out.   What a perverse thrill it was.

This one, their debut full-length album, I hadn’t heard until now. It has that same twisted sense of humor, the reckless genre-aping, the ruthless parodies, the same running gags throughout the album—straight out of the Monty Python playbook. (On The Pod, it was the stallion who kept reappearing; here every other song seems to have something about a weasel in it.)

In the hands of Gene and Dean Ween (not their real names, of course), everything is a joke. The standard gimme-some-loving, I’m-hot-and-wet trope becomes the whining plea of a cold and wet man for some soup, complete with cock-rock dual-guitar solo. “I’m in the Mood to Move” must be the most deliberately lame dance song ever. “Up On the Hill” uses an old-timey gospel vocal arrangement to tell the obscure tale of something smelly and a mystical being called the Boognish rising from the mist, only to shift musical gears into an electro-rocker. “Nan” takes the point of view of a jerk who embodies the most foul, immature male insecurities, after being snubbed my a girl.

No topic is sacred—these guys simply live to offend, in any way possible. God knows how they would be received nowadays—they couldn’t make it three seconds without being cancelled by half a million listeners. Of course, those aren’t the listeners they’re aiming for. You have to have a certain irreverence to appreciate Ween, in all their deviant glory.

Here’s the 1990: The Year in Review playlist for you—three tracks per album.

The playlist is sequenced chronologically according to release date (with a few concessions to playability), with the exception of the Sonic Youth album which opens the playlist and the KLF album which should close it (not currently available in Spotify).

Enjoy!

Playlist Notes: 

• I was not able to find the KLF’s Chill Out album on Spotify. 
• Neil Young’s discography is currently unavailable in Spotify, including Ragged Glory (1990).

More 1990, The Year in Review

More Years in Review of the 1990s…

Cover Art Citations:

• Repeater: By https://www.amazon.com/Repeater-Plus-3-Songs-Fugazi/dp/B000000JO7/ref=ntt_mus_ep_dpi_2, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=12920389
• Glider: By The cover art can be obtained from Creation Records (CRE073)., Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2071613
• Goodbye Jumbo: By The cover art can be obtained from Papillon., Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=13733947
• She Hangs Brightly: By Amazon, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=8267235
• Sunburn: By Derived from a scan of the album cover (creator of this digital version is irrelevant as the copyright in all equivalent images is still held by the same party) Copyright held by the record company or the artist. Claimed as fair use regardless., Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=33831398
• Fall: By Amazon.com, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3347931
• In a Priest Driven Ambulance: By May be found at the following website: http://static.rateyourmusic.com/album_images/648.jpg (used with permission), Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=11932676
• Some Friendly: Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3001787
• GodWeenSatan: The Oneness: By The cover art can be obtained from Twin/Tone Records., Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=69529113