Sound off | page 1, 2, 3
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Geoff Edgers
(In no particular order.)
Various Artists, "'Rushmore' Original Soundtrack" (Atlantic)
Most soundtracks don't stray from the proven formula, either "Big Chill"-nostalgia or alternastar throwaways. But director Wes Anderson and Randall Poster understand how to make a movie sing. "Rushmore's" soundtrack -- packed with lesser known songs from the Kinks, the Who and Creation -- is as naughty and brilliant as the brat wonder at the center of the film.
Benny Goodman, "Benny Goodman at Carnegie Hall -- 1938: Complete" (Columbia/Legacy)
Delayed for more than a year, Legacy's improved version of the great concert includes several minutes of restored jam and a pair of previously unreleased songs. Benny's bogus stage announcements, recorded 12 years after the show, are stuffed at the end. Best of all, the murky, noise-reduced mix of the first-generation CD is gone.
Gary Cherone exits Van Halen
The set-up is as obvious as Diamond Dave's weave: Clinton got the Mac for his victory dance; President Bradley gets the original Van Halen.
Dusty Springfield, "Dusty in Memphis" (Rhino)
Coffin cash-in or just coincidence, I'm glad Rhino delivered "Memphis" and Polydor put out six of Springfield's '60s albums to remind us just who we had been ignoring for the past 25 years.
George Carlin,"You Are All Diseased" (Atlantic)
Ever try and listen to an old comedy record, say that Bob Newhart or Steve Martin record that was all the rage, and wondered what the fuss was all about? Carlin's one of the few stand-ups whose act has actually aged well. That's because he's gotten meaner. His who-cares-about-the-world routine might be schtick, but Carlin backs his dirty talk with intellectual musings on religion, sex and language like no other comic.
William Shatner with Ben Folds on "Conan O'Brien"
Piano-player Ben Folds coaxed T.J. Hooker out of retirement. The significance of Shatner's guest appearance on the Folds side project Fear of Pop should be obvious to those familiar with Captain Kirk's 1968 talking album, "The Transformed Man." On "Conan," the girthy thespian delivered each line like the ghost of Olivier.
Rahsaan Roland Kirk, "Left Hook, Right Cross" (32 Jazz)
A highlight of 32 Jazz's campaign to reissue important material deemed less marketable than Miles, Mingus, Monk or Coltrane by the increasingly Starbuckian record company elite. As always, 32 Jazz packs the discs with music and sells them for less.
Flat Duo Jets, at Humble Pie restaurant in Raleigh, N.C.,
Dexter Romweber, weirdo punkabilly king, strides on stage in his best Rodney Dangerfield golf shirt, plugs in and plays two hours without saying a single word to the audience. It feels more like therapy than a gig, the electric guitar delivering a shot into Romweber sharper than any junkie's needle.
Joe Strummer and the Mescaleros, "Rock Art and the X-Ray Style" (Epitaph)
Virtually ignored by new punks and overshadowed by the live Clash record, Strummer is doing everything he should have been doing for the last 15 years: punk, dub, funk and that croaky rebel voice. If only a few Blink 182 fans would stop grabbing teenage mosh booty long enough to discover the original anarchist.
Beach Boys bungling
It should have been the year Capitol reissued the B-Boys' '70s catalog. Instead, we got two more greatest hits volumes and a Wilsonless fight over the table scraps. Carl and Dennis are dead, Brian's getting produced by a former professional wrestler and the year ends with Brother Records, the band's corporation, suing Al Jardine for using the Beach Boys name. Don't fear -- Brother did license Mike Love's touring sham.
Deserving mention, but not written about because every other Top 10 lists will include:
Beck, "Midnite Vultures" (Interscope); Magnetic Fields, "69 Love Songs" (Merge Records); The Clash, "From Here to Eternity Live" (Epic).
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Jon Dolan
1. Magnetic Fields, "69 Love Songs" (Merge Records)
Ecstasy and irony side by side on a piano keyboard tickled by a drolly swooning gay cynic moaning his way through a three-hour torch song at the end of time. Goodbye 20th century! The folks who coined the word countrypolitan didn't have genderfucks like "Papa Was a Rodeo" in mind. Cole Porter never flipped rhymes like those in "The Death of Ferdinand de Saussure." And I'm pretty sure Stephen Merritt could write synth-pop nuggets like "I Don't Want To Get Over You" until he's 75, even if he never learns how to sing 'em in tune. Mix me another martini and hit me over the head with a shovel honey, I think I'm in love.
2. John Prine, "In Spite of Ourselves" (Oh Boy Records)
Folk music's great dystopian sentimentalist returns from a tussle with neck cancer for a relaxed, tender set of duets with 35 years worth of the most memorable female voices in roots music: Melba Montgomery, Emmylou Harris, Lucinda Williams, Iris DeMent. Nothin' too groundbreaking. Just heaven.
3. Prince Paul, "A Prince Among Thieves" (Tommy Boy)
The best American opera since Hüsker Dü's "Zen Arcade."
4. Sleater-Kinney, "The Hot Rock" (Kill Rock Stars)
Depth replaces speed, textures replace jags, voices soar and converse where they used to yowl, and the band we all pull for follows up their first two shots to the heart -- "Call the Doctor" and "Dig Me Out" -- with one of the most exhilarating couch sessions in punk history.
5. Krust, featuring Saul Williams, "Coded Language" (Talkin Loud)
If jungle lover Roni Size is the vaunted Reprazent crew's great communicator, his pal Krust is its great incinerator. And this single is two-step nihilism at its most apocalyptically cathartic. Krust machine guns the "um-Bash!/um-Bash" boogie while N.Y. shit-talker Saul Williams drops a laundry list of heroes, villains, bad history, Baudrillardian bullshit and brutal beat theories. You realize you're listening to drum 'n' bass' "We Didn't Start the Fire" recast as "Blow That Motherfucker Sky High!"
6. Randy Newman, "Bad Love" (Dreamworks)
Older, meaner, tighter, more direct, and more touching than anything he's done in 25 years. Proof that two decades of variations-on-a-theme Reaganomics and a waning dick will do wonders for an embittered liberal's misanthropy.
7. Various Artists, "The Funky Precedent" (Loose Groove)
The indie rap revolution produced some thrilling critique in 1999, but while the meta-hop militants were arguing ideology, the cross-cultural communalists on this West Coast hippie-hop sampler were stoking a whole new cosmology. The incredible Jurassic 5 dropped playground pastoralism; Cut Chemist spun out turntablism; Ozomatli delivered cumbia-funkism; and a slew of new schoolers dropped half a dozen hazy shades of futurism. You've heard of the Dirty South? Welcome to the Furry West.
8. The Grateful Dead, "So Many Roads 1965-1995" (Arista)
They couldn't sing their way out of the shower. They couldn't play. They were soppy and dippy. Yes, yes, yes. Heard it all before. But I love the Dead for the same reason I love punk rock, and like punk-rock heroes from the Clash to Mary J. Blige, the Dead made beautiful music by working against, through and with their limitations. That's why they chose interplay over virtuosity, that's why they seemed like such sweet people and that's why discs 2 through 5 of this live box contain some of nicest organic soundscaping you'll ever hear.
9. Basement Jaxx, "Red Alert"; Super Collider, "Darn (Cold Way O' Lovin')"; Brenda Fassie "Vuli Ndlela"
Three singles and three ways of looking at the international house music renascence. "Red Alert" was disco-house at its most evangelically euphoric and universally humanistic, the height of mainstream dance music. (Sorry, Cher.) The yin to the Jaxx yang, big beaters Super Collider are the absurdist mutants every cultural moment needs to keep it looking over its shoulder. And in a dancehall far, far away we have sweet little Brenda Fassie rebuilding the house from the dusty dancefloor up. Her "Vuli Ndlela" spreads a rhapsodic mbaqanga harmony thick like butta over a township-jiving hip-house groove, rocking out '90s disco the way third world countries have been rocking appropriated first world trends for decades. (See also Arthur's "Oy! Oy!," also on "South African Rhythm Riot: The Indestructible Beat of Soweto Volume 6.")
10. Pavement "Spit on a Stranger"
A personal fave. Singer/guitarist Steve Malkmus could 4-track his grandma taking a dump and I'd think it was "Rubber Soul." Here, on his best anthem since "Summer Babe" he takes his politics of personal division straight to the chapel of love, where we he and his slacker-cynic sweetie pie do the electric snide 'til the broad daylight. Very moving.
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Andy Battaglia
Jim O'Rourke "Eureka" (Drag City)
1. You should have seen O'Rourke's googily eyes when, during an interview, I told him that one of his album's sax parts sounds like the closing music on "Saturday Night Live." He couldn't have been happier. But he's an earnest ironist, and while his in-jokes have their grounding in heady music theory, they're rendered too deliciously to be restrained by their deconstructive duties. In another time, "Eureka" could have been as big as Fleetwood Mac's "Rumors."
2. Olivia Tremor Control "Black Foliage: Animation Music, Volume One" (Flydaddy)
This psychedelic troupe from Athens, Ga., wields an influence out of proportion with its devoted but modest following. They wrote the manifesto for indie-rock's appropriation of Brian Wilson's "pocket symphonies," and their '60s-indebted but proprietary vocal style even floated its way onto Beck's "Midnite Vultures." (They toured with the guy on the West Coast.) Their second album, "Black Foliage," showed the Olivias soaring well beyond their means. A home-constructed epic poem to sound, the record spins its way out of an electronic frogs' bog and into the center of a bubblegum parade.
3. TLC, "Fanmail" (Arista)
My irrational crush on Left Eye aside, TLC's "Fanmail" out misdemeanor-ed Missy Elliott's own "Da Real World." Which was no small feat. Convincingly futuristic with its fingersnap-and-neck-snaking front in the face of progress, "Fanmail" secured TLC's place as true diva-haters' divas.
4. Boredoms, live at CBGB's, New York
Japan's finest export despite stiff competition from wasabi and Pokemon, the Boredoms pushed out CBGB's 20 years of punk history with sheer, cigarette-filters-in-your-ears volume. The noise-smiths pounded out a staggering sound with three drummers and the supremely possessed vocalist Yamatsuka Eye, who reached for the sun and pulled it down with his screams.
5. Eminem "The Slim Shady LP" (Aftermath)
Plying English like it's his and his only, Eminem deserves an O. Henry Award for creating Slim Shady, one of the year's best-articulated characters. The record is full of excessively tasteless comedy, which doesn't come much better than the line about getting dope-addled and hitting trees "harder than Sonny Bono ... oh no." It's like Mr. Bill hanging himself on a news peg.
6. Cooper-Moore, "The Hokey Pokey," live at the Vision Festival, New York
One of New York's most effusive but reclusive musical geniuses, Cooper-Moore tossed off a fractured piano version of this song at the Vision jazz festival that drove home the fact that sometimes the hokiest, pokiest songs can be the most affecting. Cooper-Moore was a one-man New Orleans jazz funeral flailing like the Grambling State marching band across a vaudeville stage.
7. Authechre, "EP7" (Warp)
The most agile of electro-architects, Britain's Autechre draft rhythmic blueprints that are filled in by their measured ways with nuance. "EP7" is like a Bauhaus home that's warm and cozy despite itself.
8. Music Tapes, "1ST Imaginary Symphony for Nomad" (Merge Records)
The Roald Dahl of the celebrated Elephant 6 indie enclave, Music Tapes' Julien Koster created a world where TVs conspire against Earth, saws sing and bouncing balls serve as percussion. Captured partly on an 1897 Thomas Edison wax-cylinder recorder and 1940s radio wire, this "Imaginary Symphony" is a roughly hewn fable patched together by an angelic charmer who plays with sound like a kid in a sandbox -- and builds flying buttresses with all the grains.
9. Aluminum Group "Pedals" (Drag City)
Thanks in part to producer Jim O'Rourke's handiness with '70s-AOR atmosphere, the Aluminum Group took pedestrian pop songcraft and wrapped it in comely red velvet. "Pedals" showed that something good could come of the lounge revival by leaving novelty home to nurse its cocktail.
10. Magnetic Fields "69 Love Songs" (Merge Records)
Someone forgot to tell Stephin Merritt that Cole Porter and Irving Berlin are dead, and the notion of the timeless love song is all the better for it. Funny and fleeting while dark and ponderous, this three-CD set amounts to a torrid affair with love itself.
salon.com | Dec. 14, 1999
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