This band’s 1991 studio album Play doesn’t get much attention at all for some reason, nestled between the perky but low-selling Frank from 1989 and the moody and also-forgotten Some Fantastic Place from 1993. Not that it’s bad, of course. It’s more likely that it dropped right in the middle of a huge wave of American Grunge and UK Britpop. If you were a fan, you loved it, but if you were a passive one, well…
“Satisfied” was the first single off the album to be released in the US, and to many listeners’ surprise, they sounded and looked slick. They were pared down to a quartet (Jools Holland having chosen not to return, most likely due to his ongoing TV projects) so the album sounds less expansive and more cozy, but extremely well-produced. There’s a dreamlike quality to this song, meandering along at its own pace with sighing guitars and keys, and a simple (and very Difford/Tilbrook) set of lyrics about the simplicity and peacefulness of mutual love.
Interestingly, I equate this song with one of the lowest points of my time in college. My long-term/long-distance relationship was coming to a close, I’d lost contact with several of my friends both near and far, I was creatively frustrated and barely scraping by academically. I really felt as though my life had become a long series of ill-advised decisions made more out of desperation rather than inspiration. This was a song I’d hoped would lift my spirits but instead reminded me of just how far I’d fallen from my wishes and dreams of the future.
That said, it’s a banger of a tune and one of my favorites of the second phase of the band’s career. They were now a band that might not show up in the charts as much as they used to, but they didn’t seem too bothered by that. I can hear this song now without the doom and gloom, instead focusing on the wonder of that simple lyric.
Another thing that showed up in early 90s electronic music was the seemingly misplaced vocal sample that somehow fit perfectly in the song. I used to love those, partly because I enjoyed the game of ‘hey I know that bit!’ and how creative they slid it into the track.
Like “Papua New Guinea” by The Future Sound of London, whose main vocal line was lifted from Dead Can Dance’s “Dawn of the Iconoclast” (a track off my favorite DCD album, 1987’s Within the Realm of a Dying Sun). Several of my classmates at Emerson loved this track, and they’d play it all the time at the clubs on Landsdowne Street.
….or Utah Saints’ “Something Good”, which made liberal use of Kate Bush’s “Cloudbusting”. I loved cranking this one up in the car when it came on the radio.
Then there’s Apotheosis with “O Fortuna”, lifting the famous choral movement from Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana. This one I remember well because they’d lifted the sample from a classical recording and hadn’t gotten clearance, making the single hard to find.
And then there’s just the downright silly “Sesame’s Treet” by Smart E’s. Somehow they made this work despite how ridiculous it is. Peak Gen-X retromania here, mixing our present and past into one.
Much later in the decade, a friend of mine introduced me to the equally silly “Speed” by Alpha Team, and I literally had a coworker at the record store writhing on the floor in laughter when I played him the breakdown part of the Hardcore Mix (about 3:30 in).
I suppose this is partly why I eventually latched onto electronic music in the 90s, because it wasn’t always about the scene or the vibe. It wasn’t always serious. Sometimes it was just about having fun being creative with the technology you had, even if the output was more for laughs than anything else.
As mentioned a few weeks back, I’ve been catching up on Orbital, an electronic duo that I passively listened to in the 90s. I was vaguely familiar with a lot of their earlier singles like “Halcyon + On + On”, “Chime” and “Lush 3”, but it was 1996’s “The Box” off their album In Sides that caught my attention, especially with its otherworldly and unsettling music video featuring the always intriguing Tilda Swinton as a time-traveling alien visiting the grimier parts of East London. It’s one of my all-time favorite videos of the 90s and was one of the many influences for the Bridgetown Trilogy.
While listening to them, it got me thinking about my experience with electronic music in the 90s. Even then it had all sorts of different genres and names: techno, house, EBM, electronica, chillwave, trip-hop, and everything in between. If I had to pinpoint when I first started paying attention to this kind of stuff, it was hearing “Chime” on the techno show on WFNX during my freshman year in college. It intrigued me, because it wasn’t exactly the melodic synthpop of the 80s that I was so used to, but nor was it the vaguely creative club music that producers like Stock-Aitken-Waterman were churning out on the regular. To me it was somewhere in between: creative enough that you could groove to it at the clubs, but you could also chill out to it in the comfort of your own home. [Mind you, this was also during the height of rave culture so you could do both while completely blissed out, heh.]
Another track that stood out for me, of course, was Moby’s “Go” with its use of Laura Palmer’s Theme from Twin Peaks as the music bed. Creepy and weird yet somehow hypnotic and groovy. This was well before his huge breakthrough with 1997’s Play.
Trip-hop didn’t quite gel with me right away, as it didn’t get a lot of play on the local alternative stations in Boston at the time other than Massive Attack’s “Unfinished Sympathy”, which also got a lot of attention for its hybrid of dance, soul, and heavy vibe. It wasn’t just about the lyrics or the melody, it was also about the mood, and that kind of thing always captured my attention. It also helped that its one-continuous-take video was so simple yet so cinematic. A lot of the best electronic music in the 90s strived to capture that.
I could go on, of course, but this is merely an overview, so perhaps it’s time for me to do another WiS series!
…has given me a hankering to listen to some tunes from the HMV years when I wrote The Phoenix Effect. I’ve mentioned numerous times before that a lot of the music I listened to around that time heavily influenced and/or inspired many of its scenes. But it was also when I had a lot of positive things going on in my life for the first time in ages.
So now the trick is to find some current tunage that can take its place as the writing soundtrack for MU4….I do have a few in mind that have been on frequent rotation here in Spare Oom!
…but tomorrow we’ll be heading across The Bridge to Mill Valley to see The Verve Pipe! I’m really looking forward to this as they’ve been one of my favorite bands for ages, and Villains is one of my top favorite albums of the 90s. (And no, not just because of That Hit Song.)
I think the last time I saw them was in 1997 when they played in Boston with Tonic opening up (remember them as well?). They put on a great show then and I’ve heard their current tour is a lot of great fun too. They’ve mellowed out somewhat but Brian Vander Ark is still one of my favorite songwriters. I’m looking forward to this show!
KEXP played Nine Inch Nails’ “March of the Pigs” earlier today and it occurred to me that I have not listened to The Downward Spiral in ages. Which is surprising, considering I used to play the hell out of my taped copy (and later the cd) of it in the mid-90s during my last couple of years in Boston. It was even part of my Belfry writing session playlist for a significant time. I’m sure the main reason I’ve been avoiding it is that it reminds me a little too much of a not-so-happy time in my life. Very broke, very depressed, and very desperate.
I mean, “Closer” was everywhere on MTV and the alternative radio stations for months after it came out. [And I’m 99% sure it was because us Gen Xers were proud of the fact we could get a song with “I want to f*** you like an animal” as a lyric on commercial radio. When in doubt and you want to shock, might as well go all the way, right?] Mind you, it’s actually a step back from NIN’s previous EPs from 1992 (Broken and Fixed), though not by much. All three were extremely nihilistic and pissed off, but Downward Spiral seemed to step back just a little bit from the brink to be just this side of listenable.
I remember having a conversation with my then-girlfriend (the one I co-wrote True Faith with) about this album, how deliberate its production and construction was. It started with unbridled anger and violence with “Mr. Self Destruct” and only going…well, downard from there. The album does have a sense of resolution by its finish, however dire. By the self-titled song (the next to last track) the main focus is desperation and nihilism laid bare…followed by the damaged ascendance of “Hurt” as its final track. We’re not sure if the main character (so to speak) has reached the point of suicide or relief — or both — but it’s certain that the pain has finally gone away, one way or another.
I never got around to seeing Nine Inch Nails live except that one time, back in late 1989 when I won tickets to see them on Landsdowne Street in Boston, before their fame skyrocketed to arenas and music festivals. But by the mid-90s I was far too broke to go see any bands other than the free shows on the Hatch Shell anyway, so I made do with the music I could get cheaply. I followed the band’s progress through the years as I could, but I don’t think I quite connected with them as closely as I did with Pretty Hate Machine and The Downward Spiral.
I don’t remember the last time I actively gave this album a full spin, to tell the truth. I remember playing it in the stock room at HMV and in the Belfry when I was deep in writing The Phoenix Effect, but I rarely played it after that. It just struck a little too close to home.
I keep meaning to give it another play one of these days, now that time and age have intervened and the traumas of those years has faded, no longer equating those songs with personal and emotional hells. I can appreciate it as a fan and a listener and audiophile and not just a low chapter in my life.
This one’s a long one…a three-taper made in late Spring 1998 in the middle of my stint at HMV Records. This was kind of a transitional time for me — purging old personal drama, starting a brand new science fiction novel and writing more songs and poems, working down in the Belfry at night, going on long road trips, learning how to get rid of all that negativity from the first half of the decade. I stopped hiding and started living again, especially now that I could once again afford to do so.
This mixtape got a lot of play in my first car — a 1992 Chevy Cavalier I’d named the Mach V, in which I’d recently had a tape deck installed — and contains a mix from two sources: the current playlist of WFNX which I’d listened to constantly to and from work, and the extreme expansion of promotional copies of cds that I’d begun to acquire at work. Some songs are alt-rock radio standards today (Flagpole Sitta, The Way) while others are loved deep cuts (Playboys, Fall On Tears), Belfry regulars (God Lives Underwater, Superdrag) and soundtrack songs (mostly from Great Expectations, which I listened to on the regular).
Out of most of the multi-tape mixes, I think this one holds up as one of the best. It’s consistent with only one or two filler tracks, and it contains quite a few of my favorite late 90s tracks.
[Only one track missing and not available on Spotify: Foo Fighters’ cover of Gerry Rafferty’s “Baker Street”, placed between Goldfinger’s “This Lonely Place” and Tonic’s “If You Could Only See”.]
As I’ve mentioned before, I spent most of my college days in the early 90s skimming over the sounds of grunge, instead focusing on Britpop instead. And one band that very rarely gets its due is the Manchester band New Fast Automatic Daffodils. They were never directly a part of the Madchester scene, as their sound veered more towards guitar-driven post-punk than the psychedelic grindy-organ sounds of bands like Inspiral Carpets or the Charlatans, and Andy Spearpoint’s loud, growly vocal delivery was quite similar to The Wedding Present’s David Gedge. [In fact, Grian Chatten from Fontaines DC sounds quite a bit like Spearpoint now, come to think of it.] They were just as groovy and noisy as the rest of them, however, and had their own loyal following.
Their second album Body Exit Mind dropped in October of 1992, just as I was starting my senior year at Emerson and I had somehow landed the position of music director at our AM station, WECB. Our airwave reach was laughable, but that wasn’t going to stop me from pretending that the entirety of the campus (and anyone nearby) was listening in. I latched onto this record super quick and I put multiple tracks into rotation over the course of that year.
They first popped up on WFNX’s playlist in September with the single “Stockholm”, which surprisingly hit the Top 30 on Billboard’s Modern Rock chart in the US. It’s slow and stark, but it’s groovy as hell with a lot of great memorable lyrics (“No monster me, sadly no saint either”) that get stuck into your head.
Our station also acquired the Bong EP that came out soon after the album, and its title track also became a station favorite. Yes, partly because of the title (har har) but the “Ha-why-why-why-whyyyy” chorus would get stuck in your head every time you heard it. And it’s the perfect lead-off track to the album.
The teaser single “It’s Not What You Know”, set the tone for the entire album: this isn’t a blissed-out groove band, this is a band with thoughts and opinions about life. This was a band that had dropped the Madchester rave of their first album Pigeonhole and got serious. The album focuses a lot about the irritations of Not Being Where You Want to Be, which in the early 90s was exactly how we all felt at the time.
Things speed up with the odd and skittering “I Take You to Sleep”, about a man caught between mental stagnation and religious awakening and the ensuing problems deciding between one or the other. It’s a man looking for inspiration yet falling prey to ignorance instead.
My absolute favorite song on this album, however, has to be “Beatlemania”: not only because it starts off with a great bass riff, not that its title references my favorite band, but also because it’s just so freaking driven from start to finish. It starts fast and STAYS fast, even during the quiet verses held up only by the drums and bass and the occasional strum of the guitar. It’s a slow-build song that gets stronger and louder as it goes and by the end of it, you’re left breathless. It’s a song that is meant to be played loud.
Even the deep cuts like “American Money” (a growly screed about tourism delivered in a very Wedding Present-like way) and “Patchwork Lives” (a meandering Blur-like dive into suburban decay), Body Exit Mind goes out of its way to be not just topical but experimental, often sliding into minute-long segues (some no more than a few clunky treated noises, others wild and noisy jams). It’s a trip from start to finish.
This is also one of the few albums from post-college Boston days that I still listen to, to any significant degree. While some albums are great but now feel dated, and others were so overplayed that I lost interest after awhile, this album never strayed all that far from my cd player. In fact, this is most likely one of the first albums that became a staple in my Writing Session soundtracks, often giving it a spin in my shoebox apartment as I worked on what eventually ended up being the Bridgetown Trilogy. It’s not one I play incessantly, but when I do play it, I still enjoy the hell out of it.
I can easily divide up the 90s on a musical and personal note: the college/post-college years (Jan 1990 – Sept 1996) and the HMV years (Sept 1996 – Sept 2000). And I often do, because I approached my listening habits according to how much money (or more accurately, how little) I had in my coffers at the time. The former was filled with mix tapes of things recorded off the radio, dollar bin raids at the various used record shops I frequented, dubs from friends, and the occasional splurge when I really should have been paying a bill. [I’ll totally own up to that. But they were of course few and far between.] The latter was filled with meticulously crafted mix tapes of things bought at a discount from my store, freebies, even more dollar bin raids, and, erm, maybe a few dubs surreptitiously made in the back room of the store? The music of the post-HMV years, aka the Yankee Candle years, would be informed almost entirely by Newbury Comics. I’m pretty sure I singlehandedly kept them in business then. But that’s another post.
Personally, I would say the personal delineation is around the same time, and surprising no one, was informed by financial reasons; I was finally able to pay off overdue bills and stop deferring my student loans. I would also posit that it was also the time I got my shit together and started my writing career on a much more serious level. Whatever worked to dislodge myself from the spiral I’d found myself in. And once I found myself in a better mental and emotional state, there was no looking back.
I couldn’t listen to those early 90s years without feeling a sense of failure. I could have been such a better student. I could have applied myself better. I could have done this, I could have done that. Giving into my moodiness and lack of self-esteem far too often. So it’s with no surprise that I avoided obsessing over that era here at Walk in Silence for quite a number of years. The HMV years were much more positive, not to mention directly tied in with my Belfry years writing The Phoenix Effect and the Bridgetown Trilogy.
So why now? Why am I picking up these pieces? Well, it’s been three decades on, and I’m in a much better place. It’s time for a bit of closure on a lot of things related to that time. Make peace with what I couldn’t achieve, and celebrate everything else I’ve done since. I’m listening to these albums and singles the way I’d wanted to in the first place: without all the extra baggage. Experience them as the creative endeavors they are, and if I’m lucky, learn to appreciate them a hell of a lot more.
I’m ridiculously picky when it comes to updating my mp3 players. I currently have three, which I’ve acqured over the years: a Creative Zen Mozaic, an older SanDisk Sansa Clip, and a newer SanDisk Sport Plus. Do I use all three? Yes, of course I do! Normally I tend to have them filled up with specific themes or sounds; the Zen is usually reserved for new and recent releases plus the Beatles discography (because come on…do you know me?) while the Sansa Clip has older favorites.
Now that I work in an office again (grumble grumble), I’ve been putting all three to good use throughout the day. I don’t have direct access to my music library unless I use up a significant amount of phone data via our Plex server, so I make do with the old-school travel-sized players.
Lately I’ve been playing around with a new possible writing project (no promises yet) in which I sort of decided its soundtrack would be the music of the early 90s up to the early 00s. Why? Good question, but I won’t go into detail just yet. Suffice it to say, I’m going to start listening to these albums for first time without equating them to the Bridgetown Trilogy. I’m not doing it on purpose, it just happened that way. But in the process, I’m getting to revisit these songs with fresh ears and no prior influence.
But more importantly, I get to revisit these songs without the emotional attachment I’ve long had with most of them. I’ve written so many blog posts about those lean post-college years, and about the music I listened to during that time, but this time out I’m finally giving them a spin without getting caught up in all the personal drama. I’m listening to them in the context of what was going on in the world during the time of their release. [I suppose in a way you could say I’m purposely not making it all about me this time. Heh.]
Also, it’s kind of fun to revisit some of these songs and albums that I know pretty well but haven’t visited in ages. In particular, I’ve been making it a point to revisit some of the mainstream pop albums I enjoyed — the downside to being so into alt-rock is a habitual avoidance of all things pop — and getting something new out of them. It’s to the point that I’ve been tempted to do another visit to Amoeba Records’ dollar bin to find more of those albums that passed me by.
And who knows — maybe I’ll rediscover a few tracks that flew under my radar!
Walk In Silence 