1992, The Year in Review

1992 feels like a big year for world events, for good and bad. In Johannesburg, the South African government, in negotiations with the African National Congress (ANC), agrees to end apartheid; a new constitution will be drafted in 1993 and free elections held in 1994. The breakup of Yugoslavia from June 1991 through April 1992 will later result in a three-year war between Serbs, Croats, and Muslims.

Closer to home, President Bush signs NAFTA, a free trade agreement that eliminates most trade restrictions and tariffs between the U.S., Canada, and Mexico. This prompts Texas businessman Ross Perot to enter the upcoming Presidential race as an independent, his most memorable line coming when discussing the “giant sucking sound” of American jobs moving south to Mexico.

Perot is often cited as a spoiler in the race, but research shows he pilfered as many Democratic voters as he did Republicans. Regardless, Arkansas Democrat Bill Clinton is elected president.

In less consequential news, the Cartoon Network makes its debut, Euro Disney opens in France, and the largest mall in America—aptly named the Mall of America—opens its many doors to the public. Can’t stop the wheels of progress….

While crowds flock to the nation’s cinemas to see Aladdin, The Bodyguard, and Home Alone 2, more serious moviegoers are checking out The Unforgiven, Scent of a Woman, and A River Runs Through It. Edgier film buffs ponder The Crying Game, Reservoir Dogs, Glengarry Glen Ross, the Mexican Like Water for Chocolate, and a quirky French film called Delicatessen.

Early 20^th Century British novels get their due in Howards End and Enchanted April, The Player skewers Hollywood, Wayne’s World provides some Canadian-style yuks, and Sharon Stone thrills the world with a quick view of her carpeting in Basic Instinct. And the Seattle grunge scene gets its props in Singles.

In music, 1991 had been when the Seattle grunge rock scene broke alternative rock into the mainstream. I get the sense that nowadays young folks seem to think of alt-rock as simply, “anything that sounds like Nirvana.” But the grunge rock that emerged from Seattle and the Pacific Northwest was only one piece of the multi-faceted alt-rock puzzle. Anything that nowadays the kids call indie-rock, for example, was—by definition, being outside the mainstream—also alternative rock. So was music that blended rock with electronics, rock with rap, rock with whatever.

Way back in late-1970s England, the punk movement had flashed and immediately fizzled, with abrasive post-punk angst progressively giving way to smooth synth-cool overproduction. But in the U.S., the smaller punk rock scene never made much of an initial dent in the national psyche. Instead, it remained underground, where it shifted and morphed in a variety of directions. By the late ‘80s, there was an enormous wealth of innovative music brewing and bubbling beneath the surface of mainstream conformity, just waiting for an audience. Grunge broke down the barriers, and a flood of other bands would surge through in its wake.

So the key alt-rock releases of 1992 aren’t Seattle grunge rock; grunge still had some key releases yet to come, of course, but as a collective musical wave, its initial impact had subsided. The multifaceted rear guard of alt-rock was coming to the fore, and it was varied, ragtag, and disparate assortment of different groups of artists, from Brooklyn hipster slackers to Midwestern retro-70s alt-power pop obsessives, to West-coast neo-psychedelic grunge offshoots. Even a small-town Englishwoman pushed her way into the moment with her savage guitar and urgent voice.

Grunge may have already seen its brightest of its days in the sun, but the alt-rock era was just getting started.

My Top 6 Albums of 1992

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). Note: Entries for this post may have been written alongside the Artist Spotlight posts for the respective artists and might therefore contain some similar material.

PJ Harvey
Dry

Released 1992/03/30

I know PJ Harvey would later learn to be more artistically calculating in her ability to craft each of her albums into a cohesive musical statement. I know her later works would become more musically adventurous, her lyrics more sophisticated. And I’m aware that the peak of her early “guitar” phase is usually considered the more frenzied, abrasive, emotionally raw Rid of Me.

But I still insist that track-per-track, PJ Harvey’s debut Dry is hands-down her best album, gut-wrenching and powerful from start to finish. No tracks below five stars (okay, maybe none below four and a half), one of the best albums of the decade, and for me, one of the key albums of the alt-rock era.

Album opener “Oh My Lover”—in which Harvey pleads with her man not to leave her, no matter the cost—showcases her unforgettable, desperate pleading, a deliberate overshare that leaves the listener uncomfortable yet wanting more. She seems a little unbalanced, honestly, yet she earns your empathy. (She would go even further with this kind of confession for her next album, but it’s more compelling here, I feel, striking just the right balance.)

“Dress” continues in the same vein, as the narrator obsesses over her outfit, enduring its discomfort, only to be dismissed by the object of her desire. With the phenomenal “Sheela Na Gig” (by my reckoning one of the essential tracks of the decade) the narrator begins to fight back; she tries to attract a man by showing off her figure, only to be told she’s an exhibitionist, so she pushes him away in anger.

In “O Stella,” she seeks strength in a powerful female figure (my research tells me it’s the Virgin Mary, which I’d never considered, not being particularly religious). In the quietly unsettling “Plants and Rags,” with its compelling string arrangement, Harvey imagines easing herself “into a body bag.” The roar of guitar that overwhelms the chorus of “Joe” feels like an apocalyptic swell – it’s a phenomenal guitar song, alternating jagged, agitated riffs with overwhelming release. Just that one song (one that hardly gets any mention) lifts this album into the stratosphere. Brilliant.

Listen to more PJ Harvey.

Pavement
Slanted and Enchanted

Released 1992/04/20

SPIN magazine—pretty much the best source of musical information I knew of from the latter end of the ‘80s through the ‘90s—somewhat infamously bungled their top pick for 1991, choosing the merely pretty good Bandwagonesque. But they got it right in 1992: Pavement’s Slanted and Enchanted. (Actually, let’s call it a two-way tie for best album of 1992, between Slanted and Enchanted and Dry.)

I don’t remember now where I first heard about Pavement’s Slanted and Enchanted, but I do remember searching for quite a while before I at last found it. I shelled out top dollar (at 1992 prices) for a new CD, when I generally only bought used or sale copies. All that without having heard a single note of it.

It’s an experience today’s youngsters are deprived of, although they are probably better off—sometimes those types of searches proved fruitless.  But not with Slanted and Enchanted. When I finally heard it, I wasn’t disappointed.

Slanted and Enchanted proved even better than the fanfare suggested—the album captivated me absolutely. It has some of the distorted guitar fuzz I loved in Sonic Youth, plus a slightly Lou Reed-ish vocal delivery that oozes lackadaisical cool, and other elements I couldn’t relegate to a single influence but add some charm to the mix. (I later heard the Fall was a big source of inspiration, but I didn’t know them at the time.) It’s a captivating brew that—despite a few clear influences—still sounds completely unique.

Every song here feels like a classic, from the slow-grinding abrasion and mellow hooks of opener “Summer Babe” and the catchy alt-power-pop of “Trigger Cut” to the harsh guitar fuzz and vocal hooks of “Loretta’s Scars” and “Perfume-V.” “In The Mouth A Desert” alternates between guitar screech and scrape, shambling ooh-ooh-ooh vocal refrains, and spare passages in which the distortion drops out completely.  The awkwardly gentle musings of “Here” are a clear high point, a quiet, affecting gem surrounded by seas of noise.  “Our Singer” staggers self-deprecatingly to a slackly dramatic finale. 

Stephen Malkmus doesn’t sing “well,” technically, yet he fronts the band with more personality and flair than an entire bus full of contemporaneous shoegaze and Madchester singers. And Slanted and Enchanted stands as one of the essential releases of the alt-rock era, the perfect embodiment of the slacker ethos, a generation raised with ultra-high ambitions and standards, yet directionless, plagued by uncertainty, lacking the confidence and initiative and persistence to achieve. And yet, from such muddled, aimless confusion comes a masterpiece.

Listen to more Pavement.

Tom Waits
Bone Machine

Released 1992/09/08

Those who thought Tom Waits had gone over the edge back in 1983 with the brilliant, bizarre Swordfishtrombones had better stay as far away from Bone Machine as possible.

A glimpse of a few Waits album covers tells the tale pretty well. Comparing the relatively straightforward barroom-noir ambience of Blue Valentine (1978) with the strangeness of Swordfishtrombones, which shows Waits pale and oddly posed alongside a couple of oddballs, and you get a sense of what lies within. And compared to the eccentricity of Swordfishtrombones, the cover of Bone Machine seems the picture of absolute madness.

Which is what it manages to be, much of the time. Never has Waits sounded so macabre and unhinged. Far from an alt-rocker, Waits nevertheless seems to have captured some of the rebellious and noisy spirit of the times.

Clattering percussion opens the album in “Earth Died Screaming,” with Waits describing the impending apocalypse in a grizzled voice. Moaning jazz and Waits’ eerie rasping croon grace “Dirt in the Ground.” Indeed, Waits pushes his voice to theatrical extremes throughout.  His guttural bark is fiercer than ever on “Goin’ Out West”; he rasps like a deviant circus barker on “In the Coloseum” and creeps through “Murder in the Red Barn” with muffled brassiness.  Waits gets in touch with his inner Ramone with the abrasive yet catchy “I Don’t Wanna Grow Up.”

Not everything is noise, however.  The luxuriant, spellbinding “Black Wings” conjures up some sympathy for a haunting figure who bears some supernatural resemblance to the fallen angel from down below.  “A Little Rain” paints a tale of a small-town girl setting out to explore the world; Waits masterfully balances sorrow with hope, despite the suggestion that the tale doesn’t end well. And “Who Are You” must be one of the most powerful kiss-offs to an ex- I’ve ever heard; almost every line is a well-aimed jab, sung with deceptively aching melodicism.

Grotesque and eerie, Bone Machine is Tom Waits’ darkest moment, and easily one of his finest achievements.

Listen to more Tom Waits.

Screaming Trees
Sweet Oblivion

Released 1992/09/08

Woefully underappreciated, the Screaming Trees may be associated with the Pacific Northwest’s grunge scene—they were based there and hung out with that crowd. But their music wasn’t the metal-meets-punk that characterized the Seattle grunge gang. The Screaming Trees played something more akin to neo-psychedelic rock with an epic sweep, pairing swirling waves of guitar with Mark Lanegan’s husky vocals. The result was pure magic, and Sweet Oblivion is the best place to get to know them.

“Nearly Lost You” was the hit, and it’s a terrific song, a perfect combination of their charged, lush rock and roll sound, highlighted by Lanegan’s aching vocal lines and guitarist Gary Lee Connor’s intriguingly distorted guitar embellishments. And the rest of the album is filled with should-have-been classics, from the guilt-soaked “Dollar Bill” and the soaring “Butterfly” to the brooding “Troubled Times” and the apocalyptically cathartic album closer “Julie Paradise.” There’s very little filler here—I could have chosen almost any three songs from the album to represent it.

Indeed, there is no alt-rock album from the Pacific Northwest not led by a member of the Cobain/Love household that is as good start-to-finish as the Screaming Trees’ Sweet Oblivion. Sure, Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, Alice in Chains and others may have had more commercial success, but nothing they put out can top the best output of the Screaming Trees.

Listen to more Screaming Trees and Mark Lanegan.

Urge Overkill
Stull EP

Released 1992/10/10

The Stull EP was my first exposure to Urge Overkill. I picked it up when I saw it on SPIN magazine’s end of the year list and loved it. Very soon thereafter I picked up The Supersonic Storybook (1991), which was also terrific.

Everyone loves the Neil Diamond cover on Stull, which was used a couple years later in the Pulp Fiction soundtrack. I certainly appreciate it. I must admit that I felt a little ashamed to be actually liking a Neil Diamond song—I spent much of my teenage years trying to shed myself of the influences of pap like “Girl, You’ll Be a Woman Soon.” Hats off to Urge Overkill for making the song seem almost cool.

But it’s on the four originals on the disc where Urge Overkill really shines. “Stull, Part 1” feels like a subtle guitar masterpiece, from the delicate riffs that open the song to the glorious guitar chaos at the song’s climax. In a nice contrast with the mostly easygoing music, the lyrics give off a Charles Manson-on-a-road-trip-to-Hell vibe. Crisp power chords and hiccupping beats propel the oddly infectious “What’s This Generation Coming To?” and “(Now That’s) The Barclords.”

The echoing chime of guitar that opens “Goodbye to Guyville” gives the song an earth-shattering epic feel, and the rest of the song lives up to that promise in spades (in under five minutes). A partly sincere, partly hypocritical (either knowingly or unwittingly) I’ll-be-better-to-you-than-all-those-other-guys promises, the song is not only a terrific album closer, but it also inspired half of the title of one of the decade’s finest albums (coming soon, in 1993).

The musicianship on Stull feels just spot-on to me, throughout.  Co-vocalists and co-guitarists Nash Kato and Eddie “King” Roeser prove able to deliver exactly what each song needs, without being overly flashy about it—whether it’s the crisp, crunchy power chords of the uptempo numbers, the lazily delicate noodling of the title track, or the apocalyptic grind of “Guyville.” Ditto for Blackie Onassis’ drums, which can stutter and start when the song needs to crank—or even comfortably disappear as needed to let the guitars work their magic. 

Collectively, Urge Overkill infuse a herky-jerky and off-kilter yet charming air to their otherwise quite palatable take on rock and roll. Loved it at the time. Still do. Of course, they would blow up with their next, more produced disc, Saturation (1993), which was very good but never felt as magical to me as their earlier two discs.

Listen to more Urge Overkill.

Bettie Serveert
Palomine

Released 1992/11/02 (Netherlands); 1993/01/07 (U.S.)

Bettie Serveert seems to be mostly forgotten these days, which comes as a bit of a surprise to me. I listened to their debut Palomine a ton, and I had the sense that there was a huge critical push for it at the time. I remember plenty of attention paid to their sophomore release, too. But the excellent Palomine seems by and large relegated to the history book footnotes. (Only “Bubbling under” on Acclaimed Music’s best albums list?)

Perhaps the fact that they never were able to improve on their debut has made the band lose some critical cache. But the history of rock is littered with bands with great first albums and little else of note—so what gives? Bettie Serveert must not have had the same impact all over, I guess. Maybe no one pays them any attention simply because they’re Dutch.

But who says the Dutch can’t rock? Palomine shows that for one album, at least, they rock as well as they build dikes, cultivate tulips, and ride their bicycles. Guitarist Peter Visser masterfully channels the spirit of Neil Young in his arcing guitar solos, and Carol Van Dijk’s awkwardly endearing singing retains a sweetness that contrasts nicely with the guitar grind.

Album opener “Leg” starts delicately but eventually builds to a steady rocking groove, as Van Dijk describes a bitter moment when she’s left stranded, waiting in the rain and reflecting on the red flags that announced themselves in the relationship from the start. I love how the song’s title comes buried offhand within a verse: “Of course it didn’t take you long / To figure out a way to pull my leg.” The two versions of “Palomine” that bookend the remainder of the album offer some hope despite life’s inevitable missteps. The Sebadoh cover “Healthy Sick” is another high point, perhaps the best guitar-noise track on the album; and Lou Barlow’s lyrics fit in well among all the other tales of love’s uncertainty.

Two of the songs here rank among the best of the era. Clamoring guitar and an active bass line propel “Kid’s Alright,” as Van Dijk tells a tale of her rambunctious youth. And on “Tom Boy,” Van Dijk embraces her tomboy image with a mixture of pride and hesitation.

Throughout Palomine, the band conjures up a charming contemporary take on Neil-Young style American rock. They would have many other good albums; if I’ve earlier suggested that none of their other albums are worthwhile, I’ve given the wrong impression. Yet surely all their subsequent work lives at least partially in the shadow of Palomine.

Listen to more Bettie Serveert.

Here’s the 1992: The Year in Review playlist for you—three tracks per album.

I’ll be building the playlist as I go, adding to it as I complete different tiers of commentary. By the time I finish all Year in Review posts for the year, the playlist will be complete!

Enjoy!

More 1992, The Year in Review

More Years in Review of the 1990s…

Cover Art Citations:

• Dry: By Derived from a digital capture (photo/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=14885392
• Slanted and Enchanted: By The cover art can be obtained from Matador Records., Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=851032
• Bone Machine: By Derived from a digital capture (photo/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=2257914
• Sweet Oblivion: By [1], Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1785863
• Stull: By https://www.discogs.com/Urge-Overkill-Stull-EP/release/2215782, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=53887549
  
• Palomine: By The cover art can be obtained from Guernica (GU 2) [Europe]; Matador [US]; Brinkman Records (BRCD 004) [reissue]., Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=13755073