From Mancunian racket to Californian slackers, here’s part two of the rundown of essential alternative music albums since 1980.
Part One: http://roundthelist.blogspot.com/2021/06/my-little-underground-30-essential.html?m=1
Part Three: http://roundthelist.blogspot.com/2021/07/my-little-underground-30-essential_11.html?m=1
HUSKER DU
Zen Arcade (1984)
In 1984, Husker Du, the darlings of the loud, fast, visceral US Hardcore scene, did the unthinkable and released a concept double album. As every frustrated teen growing up in Reagan’s America knew, grandiose rock operas were the preserve of the bloated corporate rock mainstream and complete anathema to a musical movement that prized brevity and power over grand overarching storytelling arcs. And yet, remarkably, Zen Arcade became a (relative) hit for indie label SST and still stands as the Minnesota trio’s finest hour and seven minutes. Ostensibly the bleak tale of a disaffected youth who leaves his broken home to find himself in the wider world before succumbing to disillusion and tragedy and ending up where he started, the album mixes throat-shredding punk rock (generally courtesy of Bob Mould) with acoustic strumming and several Grant Hart tracks that verge suspiciously on classic rock. The whole gloriously disorientating enterprise concludes with Reoccurring Dreams, a relentless fourteen minute psychedelic instrumental. Does it all work? God no, but the demented scale and ambition of it all contrive to make Zen Arcade an endlessly fascinating aural experience which was simultaneously Hardcore’s zenith and dizzying death knell.
19
THE FALL
This Nation’s Saving Grace (1985)
The Fall had already been in existence for seven rambunctious years when Laura ‘Brix’ Salenger came into Mark E. Smith’s orbit. Within three months of their meeting she’d joined the band, married the frontman and played on their 1983 album Perverted By Language. Her influence would most keenly be felt two years later, however, with the release of This Nation’s Saving Grace - the one long player in the Fall’s caterwaulingly singular archive that really hangs together as a cohesive document. Brix brought a polish and melodic savvy to the band, evident in the catchy near-instrumental sleaze of LA, the delightfully throwaway rockabilly of My New House and the monstrous guitar hooks of Barmy, that opened up new areas of stylistic invention and hitherto untapped commercial promise. Not that this was any slick corporate product; the primal call and response of What You Need and stop-start tape effects of Paintwork ensured that The Fall was still very much the plaything of the irascible, surrealist misanthrope that was Mark E. Smith.
18
GUIDED BY VOICES
Bee Thousand (1994)
The natural recording trajectory for a band is to lustily bash out their finest songs on demo tapes and then, if luck and talent are on their side, to upgrade to a studio to capture the full promise of their nascent sound. Ohio’s Guided By Voices, guided almost exclusively by fourth grade teacher and supreme pop craftsman Robert Pollard, went about things in reverse. Having utilised studio facilities for their previous albums, Pollard decided that he would rather replicate the raw sound of the band playing live so set up a 4-track in his garage and buffed up a host of songs that had been kicking about the GBV archives for years. The result, Bee Thousand (which may or may not be what you get when you say Pete Townshend whilst holding your tongue), is packed full of catchy pop hooks, soaring British Invasion melodies and wryly incomprehensible lyrical flourishes. That it also sounds like it was recorded in a fridge somehow only adds to it’s lo-fi charm and ensured that Pollard’s everyman troubadours were suddenly propelled to the front rank of the 90s alt-rock pantheon.
17
TALK TALK
Spirit of Eden (1988)
Coming off the back of 1986’s The Colour of Spring, Talk Talk appeared to have found their place in the landscape of smooth, accomplished commercial pop-rock. A mainstream hit that still retained artistic credibility, the album appeared to herald Dire Straits-type levels of ubiquity and global reach. And then Mark Hollis and Tim Friese Greene committed commercial suicide by producing a stately suite of just six songs (ranging between five and nine minutes) with intricate arrangements impossible to reproduce live and little acquaintance with propulsive beat or conventional choruses. Recorded in an almost pitch black studio with an oil projector and strobe lighting, the delicate, ethereal pieces that comprise Spirit of Eden have been labelled post-rock, such is their dislocation from any other music being made in 1988. Making unprecedented use of space and silence to highlight the most fleeting of musical tones, tracks like The Rainbow, Inheritance and I Believe In You take on an almost spiritual air redolent of the most sacred classical music. Not for everyone then, but a landmark piece of work whose maverick influence echoes down through the years.
16
XTC
Skylarking (1986)
Like a Wiltshire Kinks for the Thatcher age, XTC began their evolution from unfussy power-poppers to esoteric chroniclers of Albion with 1982’s English Settlement. After building on the textured sound and parochial themes of that album over the next few years, Skylarking arrived like a shaft of sunlight in the perpetual drizzle of 1986’s musical landscape. For all of the rustic charm of the orchestral Grass or toytown chime of The Meeting Place, the influence of The Beach Boys was unmistakable on the melodically dense Ballet for a Rainy Day or Season Cycle, thus seamlessly combining two guitar pop traditions into a shimmering transatlantic whole. Famously, the band’s complex leader Andy Partridge and rock royalty producer Todd Rundgren rubbed each other up the wrong way but the creative tension ensured that any potential descent into twee smugness was forestalled and elegantly wonky confections like Another Satellite and Dying tempered the straight ahead power pop thrills of That’s Really Super, Supergirl and Earn Enough for Us.
15
PAVEMENT
Slanted and Enchanted (1992)
With the world in thrall to the monolithic riffs and suburban ennui emanating from Seattle, the debut album from a bunch of quirky Californian slacker dudes could well have passed unremarked. But such was the irresistibly sprightly racket that Pavement created on Slanted and Enchanted that it swiftly became a milestone in the history of indie rock and a seminal work in the scrunchy, DIY lo-fi scene. Mixing the percussive anarchy of The Fall (Conduit for Sale is practically a carbon copy of New Face in Hell) and the gauche melodic amateurism of Beat Happening, Steve Malkmus and co. crafted off kilter pop songs like Trigger Cut that bent round unexpected corners as well as loping rockers such as Summer Babe. Best of all was Here, a sweetly nihilistic ballad with the beautifully fatalistic opening couplet ‘I was dressed for success/But success it never comes.’ The briefest of flirtations with the mainstream would follow courtesy of enjoyable follow-up Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain but the band never quite recaptured the slapdash genius of Slanted, bowing out in 2000 (bar the odd reunions) with their impeccable cult credentials intact.
14
MINUTEMEN
Double Nickels on the Dime (1984)
Much like buses, you wait years for a US Hardcore double album and then two come along at the same time. Deliberately delayed to gauge the public reaction to Zen Arcade, Minutemen’s sprawling 80 minute opus dispensed with the grandiose concept of Husker Du’s classic in favour of a left-wing, anti-sex, drugs and rock n roll smorgasbord of punk-funk workouts. With the majority of its 45 songs coming in at under two minutes, Double Nickels on the Dime’s skronky jazz stylings and deceptively heavyweight lyrical concerns are a distinctly slow burn but once you are attuned to its singular world the skill and concision of the musicianship really hits home. Everyone knows the lilting self-mythology of History Lesson Part 2 and the thinking man’s drinking song Corona but the righteous fire of This Ain’t No Picnic, Political Song for Michael Jackson and Untitled Song for Latin America rage in the grooviest way also. Singer and guitarist D. Boon’s tragic death in a car crash the following year robbed the alt-rock silo of a uniquely intelligent and quixotic musical figure.
13
NEW ORDER
Power, Corruption and Lies (1983)
If 1981’s Movement was the sound of a shell shocked band groping through the darkness of their recent past in search of fresh identity, then Power, Corruption and Lies was the moment the New Order chrysalis opened and a radiant synth pop butterfly soared into the indie firmament. Later albums, particularly Technique, would be more unequivocally upbeat affairs but what gives Power its enduringly invincible aura is its delicate balance of light and shade. There may be nothing as unremittingly bleak as in the Joy Division catalogue but the sinister fatalism and military imagery of We All Stand and the rhythmic fusillade of Ultraviolence act as chilly ballast to the irresistible ear worm bassline of Age of Consent and the giddy optimism of The Village. Emotional pull is provided by stately album closer Leave Me Alone and the breathtakingly gorgeous Your Silent Face, which eschews Bernard Sumner’s usual sixth form poetry for intriguing and enigmatic lyrics. The joyous sound of a band finding their feet and working in glorious synchronicity, Power, Corruption and Lies heralded an imperial phase for New Order like few others in alternative music.
12
REM
Murmur (1983)
The titans of Hardcore might have hogged all the headlines but there was a less abrasive side to the first wave of US alt-rock and its poster boys were Athens, Georgia’s REM. Rather than trying to sound revolutionary the quartet were more concerned that their music be classic and timeless and with their debut album Murmur they certainly succeeded. Filled with the warm, ringing tones of Peter Buck’s guitar and Mike Mills’ Rickenbacker bass, not to mention Michael Stipe’s distant, enigmatic vocals and poetic, ambiguous lyrics, REM reinvigorated a kind of melodic Southern Gothic much as The Band reinvented frontier Americana in the late 60s. Haunting ballads like Perfect Circle and the sumptuous, yearning Talk About the Passion were testament to an intricate songcraft and deployment of rich atmospherics alien to most other acts in the US underground, whilst the seminal Radio Free Europe - re-recorded from its original 1981 incarnation - delivered an articulate and intelligent college rock anthem for the ages. The band’s five album run on IRS constitutes one of the great purple patches in rock history but it is arguably on their very first long player that REM nailed that indelibly lush, evocative alchemy most perfectly of all.
11
RADIOHEAD
Ok Computer (1997)
Having brought a healthy dose of existential angst to the Britpop party with The Bends, Radiohead hammered the final nail in its Union Jack coffin with their next album, the chill dystopian thrum of OK Computer. Rather than the lazy amalgams of singles and filler that constituted many long players of the era, OK Computer was built around unifying themes of social alienation, suspicion of encroaching tech and distrust of politicians and other state authority figures - themes which make it feel all too prescient from the vantage point of the 21st century. Beginning with the agonised wail of invincibility that is Airbag, then careening through twitchy sci-fi, jerky agit-pop and the most exquisitely melodic suicide ballad you’re ever likely to hear, the album ranges across vistas of futuristic hell like an aural JG Ballard novel. The centrepiece is the restless, chameleon-like six minutes of Paranoid Android, whose stylistic shifts mark it out as indie rock’s very own Bohemian Rhapsody. Bridging the gap between the sophisticated guitar rock of their early years and the increasingly experimental sound of their 21st century work, OK Computer is a majestic, multilayered one-off.
Comments
Post a Comment