33 rebellions per minute
BEST MUSIC OF 1999
1. Blur, 13
This _is_ an album I can explain the structural logic of. "Tender" and "Coffee and TV", aside from being the radio singles, are the direct examinations of Damon Albarn's romantic unhappiness at the album's beginning; "No Distance Left To Run" is the gentle well-wishing at the end; the eruptions and disintegrations and elusive respites in between are the howl that's being explained. To understand 13, though, would require understanding the howl itself, and it's probably far better to settle for the awe of being roughly buffeted by it. I suspect that the progress of human civilization has depended on us being able to tune such sounds as these out of our range of notice. Their re-creation en masse under shrinkwrap is either a triumphant crowning irony, or a careless rip in the gauze between our dimension and a much nastier one. Just in case it's the latter, I'll get the maximum positive benefit from the music until then as I can.
2. Veda Hille, YOU DO NOT LIVE IN THIS WORLD ALONE
Very much of this earth; steeped in folk myth and toyed-with superstitions, pondering accidents and sex and destiny and love and declarations of independence with the heavy wisdom of one who doesn't regard human beings as anything miraculous, but assumes from experience that communication and interaction are slightly less frightening than solipsism. It took me six months to review my first exposure to Veda, SPINE, and two hours before I wrote that essay (one I'm quite happy with) I wouldn't have pretended to understand it; so don't expect an explanation this time until April. If we buy the beliefs of the extreme evolutionists, my "mind", including my "memory", is nothing more than the sum of the current locations of each of my neurons, and their current firing status. How can I then judge what it must have been like for me, before I knew that a tenor guitar stuck in first gear, and some graffiti sprayed on the soundwaves of the 20 to 100 Hz range, were as vivid a form of music as anything Dream Theatre might conjure at ten times the speed? What was it like to not answer a pointless survey question on "what is your favorite sound?" with "Veda Hille's singing voice", knowing that a powerful multi-octave voice is supposed to sound ragged and haunted? I can still recall, I think, when I wouldn't have described an album containing the promise "I'll kill your father and sister tonight" as "unexpectedly warm and open-hearted" just because death threats were outnumbered by love songs. But then, an exposed forehead peeping out of a trench is a statement of colossal trust if you've been trained to think someone will shoot at it. Yet truces can't be made if everyone hides.
3. Sisterhood of Convoluted Thinkers, S/T
It takes a few steps beyond Veda hesitantly admitting the possibility of "maybe, maybe, maybe" feeling great and murmuring "we can fuck in the kitchen" as if she isn't sure she wants to be heard, but sometimes partnerships move beyond security and into magic, at least once they've established that security itself can have more secular explanations. SISTERHOOD OF CONVOLUTED THINKERS is the courtship diary of Rob Christiansen and Jeannine Durfee, who married in large part, it seems, for the convenience of being able to sketch an alternate physics together at the kitchen table after dinner, because what else could be more fun? Jimi Hendrix and nursery rhymes and video arcades and 4th-grade flute recitals and the drum circles of stoned sequencers veer in straight lines at each other and intersect repeatedly, and there's no point telling them that's impossible. If I ever meet a woman I can make music like this with, I'll marry her myself.
4. Amy X Neuberg + Men, SPORTS! CHIPS! BOOTY!
Amy X Neuberg and Herb Heinz, though, have been a couple for 13 years, and at some point the challenge became less one of constant surprises for each other and their friends, and more of aging with grace. Neuberg + Men albums, once reserved and experimental, have settled neatly into an avant-Broadway comedy routine, sparkling with intricately witty vocal harmonies, amused social commentary, bellowed melodic twists, and the raucous support of a grinning array of hi-tech gadgets. No album this year entertained me more, or made growing up seem like such a worthwhile ambition.
5. XTC, APPLE VENUS VOL. 1
XTC, on the other hand, spent their maturity in a 7-year strike, hiding all evidence of their creativity from the men they'd contracted their musical existences to. Finally freed, they gave a final resounding kiss-off to the impudent, hiccupy, atonal rabble rousers they'd once been, and made a stately, graceful, literary, beautiful album in which grand orchestration and inquisitive bassoon squiggles formed a tapestry for a generously melodic reinterpretation of Pop.
6. Bonaduces, THE DEMOCRACY OF SLEEP
A long-established view of pop, in which guitars chug and race through essential chords, giving off just enough shrapnel to disrupt momentary breath, but not enough to harm. The subject matter, though, spewed in the nasal bratty voice of punk-pop tradition, was caring, loss, and requiem, and the Bonaduces' word-crammed take on it is as insightful and moving as I've seen in any medium.
7. Bis, SOCIAL DANCING
-- Smash Mouth, ASTRO LOUNGE
Two albums from which I triumphantly managed to learn almost nothing. Far from unintelligent, both bands hone their music around catchy synthesizer hooks, firm beats, fast-moving half-spoken vocals, and well-learned dramatic pauses, and both albums, despite being my first purchases from the bands, sounded exactly like I hoped they would. Any interesting self-examinations on the relationship between commerce, message, and the individual life of the commercial messengers involved, are sheer bonus.
8. Nine Inch Nails, THE FRAGILE (left disc)
-- Nine Inch Nails, THE FRAGILE (right disc)
The year's two most disappointing albums, for me, but only as long as I accepted the premise that because Trent Reznor is in a miserable mood and makes huge noises, I ought to find him scary. There is, I then discovered, great comfort in being wrapped in his exquisite trap-door-filled caverns of sound, ducking neatly between the steadily tempoed falling boulders, and thanking the Lord that I don't feel the endless yammering hostility of the brilliant, sad aggressor I've chosen to deal with.
9. Nathan Mahl, THE CLEVER USE OF SHADOWS
-- Profusion, S/T
If anything, I feel a secure personal inclination towards the labyrinthine musical logics of solitary madmen. I make far less room for the kind of unique vision that emerges unauthored when four brilliant musicians, each too prickly for rote conformity, are packed in a room together. Mahl bring back the glory days of the early 1970's when all-star bands glittered like Yes, abraded like King Crimson, beautified like Eloy or Barclay James Harvest; only Mahl prefer to do all at once. Profusion are classical jazz-metal ska-pop or something, but they're sure as heck doing something worth enjoying 7-minute tracks over, so let's not overanalyze.
10.Julia Darling, FIGURE 8
-- Kenickie, GET IN
On the other hand, my immediate, unconsidered answer to "what kind of music do you like?" is "pop songs", and there's always room for people who, with intense care to the details of mainstream production and winding melody, create something gemlike. Kenickie are smarter and nicer songwriters than Julia, at least so far, but I was a little more intrigued to learn what JAGGED LITTLE PILL would have sounded like if anyone had cared much about Alanis's backing than what "Be My Baby" and disco would sound like under 30 years of popular and technical refinement, so they come out even.
Best songs
1. Sisterhood of Convoluted Thinkers, "Sable"
Rock has seen groups called the Impalas and Flash Cadillac, the Accelerators and Ferrari and Royal Trux and of course the Cars, and been oohed over for songs from "Roadrunner" and "Back of a Car" to "Paradise By The Dashboard Light" and anything by Bruce Springsteen. It took until 1999 for rock to mature enough to tell the true story, complete with troubled repairs: "I bought a car, so I could go to work, so I could get more money, to pay for my car. I got a job, so I could make money, so I could pay for my car, so I could go back to work". Whimsical but concerned, "Sable" is more broadly an artful commentary on how people become trapped by their conveniences, and more narrowly a tale of a huge subplot of my own life. With the best 2-second guitar squeal of the year, and the best flute hook since 1979.
2. XTC, "River of Orchids"
Still, to go beyond a challenge to cars on their own terms (convenience, freedom, fun) and to a broadly romantic attack of their impact on the human environment, one apparently needs to move beyond rock altogether. A layered and flowing assemblage of found sound, orchestral instrumentation, and interlocking vocal phrases, and the 2nd-most hypnotic song ever recorded.
3. Ani DiFranco, "Tis of Thee"
Politics de-romanticized. Ani and her acoustic guitar in a one-song condensation of Carter USM's I BLAME THE GOVERNMENT, in which untreated evils become so disgusting that, even while she does know that "why don't we go ahead and turn off the sun/ cuz we'll never live long enough to make up for everything they've done/ to you" is a colossal failure of utilitarian logic, she can't, for a few minutes, forgive herself in advance for trying to remember why.
4. dEUS, "the Ideal Crash"
The urgent, eloquent, tormentedly not-fully-decided breakup song that would conventionally have occupied "Tis of Thee"'s desolate strum was instead turned, by dEUS, into a poignant, but smoothly functioning and hummably ingenious, assemblage of flutes, guitar, dance beats, unexpected chord changes, and the most heart-rendingly manchildlike singing voice in the business.
5. Profusion, "Free"
-- glenn mcdonald, "Port Marie"
The singers on both of these songs would be important and valued in my life if they'd never recorded a note, but as far as I can tell, that isn't what's shaping my adoration for these songs. "Free" hints that Deep Purple's symphonic-metal flourishes might've tightened up considerably and thrillingly if only they'd had Gwen Stefani writing for them, but that she wouldn't have been able to clarify for them the line between ska and polka. "Port Marie" hints that maybe the problem with Game Theory's tumbling fey-pop wasn't that they hadn't yet turned into the Loud Family, but that they'd never even considered becoming Wire.
6. Super Furry Animals, "Wherever I Lay My Phone"
-- Basement Jaxx, "Rendez-Vu"
-- Underworld, "Moaner"
The exact opposite of a pre-existing emotional attachment: three songs for the whirling chemically-altered processing of the dance floor. Repetitious, grounded in mantra, surviving only by the joyous celebration of pure nonsensical sound. Not my kind of thing, and no less inventive or wonderful for it.
7. Amy X Neuberg + Men, "Big Barbecue"
A vegetarian anthem, a giddy subversion of machismo, and two of the year's most singable choruses popping glad-handedly from under an arty gauze.
8. XTC, "I'd Like That"
-- Kenickie, "I Would Fix You"
The year's best, as well as prettiest, love songs. The one about romance portrays it as a grand collaborative project full of terrific little things to do; the one about friendship offers recovery assistance for a few unwanted things-to-do too many; and either song could be converted to the other category with a few selective editings.
9. Ben Folds Five, "Your Redneck Past"
-- Fountains of Wayne, "Amity Gardens"
Two theatrically melodic takes on the need to respect tradition. Folds's support for tradition is modern and rueful, the best New Wave XTC-style song of the year emerging from its weighing of show tune against rhythm-destroying blasts of squealy little space-synth noises. FoW's support for tradition is only implicit. "If you knew now what you knew then, you wouldn't want to go back", they insist, but "back" is to a suburb thrown up (verb ambiguity intentional) a couple of decades ago for the aid of people who wanted to flee the city at any costs. Sometimes the only way to celebrate tradition is to vaguely wonder what it might've been like to have some.
10.Pledge Drive, "Down Among The Dead Men"
-- Pledge Drive, "Julian of Norwich"
On the other hand, sometimes the way to celebrate tradition is to revive songs that were played 300 years ago and turn them into something fluffy and accessible in their archaism, making what once was fun, fun. Leader Tim Walters writes excellent songs on his own; but when you reserve yourself a nation's history as a stumping ground for material, it is no embarrassment to find something to top your own efforts. Glorify it, and the world will be steadier and stronger.
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