Loud Family - Music: What Happened?

1991
by Scott Miller

"International Bright Young Thing" - Jesus Jones
Before Nirvana hit, the sound of the nineties had a strange false start as a not unworthy British phenomenon—an era of amped-up shuffle-beat dance club tracks (the movie "Twenty-Four Hour Party People" captures this to some extent, though the Happy Mondays were never a focus band for me). In 1991, I had a London record biz acquaintance named Stuart Batsford, and he made me one of the most memorable and vista-expanding mix tapes I've had, containing mostly new British sounds, including my first exposure to Teenage Fanclub and My Bloody Valentine. In the mists of memory I've forgotten whether Jesus Jones were actually on there, but they illustrate the most public aspects of that era of Brit sound—they were staples of D.J. clubs I'd find myself in at the time, like SF's DNA Lounge. Remember "club reel" projection graphics, with the cutting between op art and 50s educational films?

"Someone To Love" - Roger McGuinn
The Back From Rio album was a pretty little thing I only knew about because of my wife's mother Trudi's remarkable record collection (same for Roy Harper). It's as good as any Byrds record, and also contains "You Bowed Down," one of the originals of the Costello collaborations that ended up on All This Useless Beauty.

"Jungle Fever" - Stevie Wonder
This theme song from the Spike Lee movie was even better on the screen; on the home stereo, the whole bass register comes off too unison. Still, Little Stevie Wonder the 41-year-old Genius sounds as great as ever, it's a top-quality singalong, and there are enough nice touches to keep the ears awake.

"Alec Eiffel" - Pixies
As with "Debaser," "Alec Eiffel" is a somewhat dramatized free-form American mental riffing on some point of continental culture, where by "riffing," I pretty much mean going nuts. The singer persona focuses on "Little Eiffel" as a hero of putting inspiration across despite public displeasure, echoing the Pixies' continuing unwillingness to water down their melodic complexity, rawness, and, I guess the right word is: silliness. Inspired.

"Colour Me" - The Blue Aeroplanes
The beautiful folk guitar here is the main selling point, but Gerard Langley holds interest with an almost-spoken-verse contemplation of fate of artistic lost souls of Dylan Thomas stripe. Illustration of their having "made a mess of their lives": "They could be played by Tom Waits." A nice little real-life conversation touch. Thanks Mark Staples for alerting me to this.

"Oh No, Won't Do" - Cud
From the Batsford tape. Sung from the point of view of a presumably allegorical agent of global malevolence ("folks round here call me private enterprise"), this is one of the more peculiarly British varieties of tight, propulsive grooves a la mode. A hard, hot guitar-riff based mix—and what has to be a keen wit that I don't get 100% of the time, but enough. The logo has udder teats under the "u." Best-of album title: Rich and Strange (from "The Tempest" I presume).

"For Love" - Lush
Also from the Batsford tape. This is much more ethereal than the others, reflecting a touch of the Cocteau Twins, but also some shoe-gazer overlap with other one-word acts like Ride and Blur. The lyrics give the initial impression of being throwaway rhymes about "lies" and "tries," but they're actually pretty great: "Doesn't recognise the lies Pouring from her lips...This is so real/It's what I feel/I look in your eyes and lose myself."

"I Feel So Good" - Richard Thompson
Here's one of my favorite Thompson cuts. A very nice little Irish musical theme is the soundtrack for a guy getting out of jail and ready to live high at the expense of anyone who gets close enough: "I feel so good I'm going to break somebody's heart tonight." "Now I've got a suitcase full of fifty pound notes/And a half-naked woman..." (No spoilers!)

"Breadcrumb Trail" - Slint
Slint's Spiderland was one of the many benchmark releases on the innovative and putatively artist-friendly Touch And Go Records. It embodied some of the buzzwords like "post-rock"—shared with the Drag City contingent—in a particularly entertaining incarnation. The popular favorite from the album is the intense, higher-profile "Good Morning, Captain," but I gravitate to the jauntier "Breadcrumb Trail" with its ten-dollar time signatures and the coolest fuzz feedback sound ever on the chorus guitar lead.

"Blind Willie McTell" - Bob Dylan
This was apparently left off Infidels to the consternation of some. I'm just grateful we got it. I'm always conflicted about whether to place delayed releases at the time of creation or release, but for this year-CD project I usually settle on release time, and this case is an easy choice because Dylan seems to have intended the delay. It's one of his prettier tunes--and he's good at pretty tunes—with one of his most serious lyrical observations: that the judgment for slavery still hangs over the new world. I love the incredible succinctness of, "I traveled through East Texas where many martyrs fell."

"Evangeline" - Matthew Sweet
American artists like Matthew Sweet didn't have quite the impact on me of the likes of My Bloody Valentine, but they did one amazing thing: started delivering mixes as razor-sharp as anything out of 1966 EMI. In the end, I have to account holding the same note on the bass through the verses as a tactical error, but of a piece with a boldness that elevates the album as a whole.

"There's No Other Way" - Blur
This was the most perfect of those British dance club targeted tracks. Big, updated funk drums and bass led by a great rhythm guitar riff, and the hookiest chorus around.

"Oh Catherine" - Pere Ubu
I recall someone in Pere Ubu saying at the time that they didn't ordinarily produce melodic pop because "nobody ever asked us." They were good at it! I liked the sort-of-comeback Tenement Year okay, Cloudland even better, and at least the song "Oh Catherine" a whole lot. There was another good one called "I Hear They Smoke the Barbecue" (you can't lose with the line "I hear they love old Yogi Bear").

"The Freed Pig" - Sebadoh
This most forward-looking of early nineties songs is so effortlessly right it took people a while to know what to think about it. You started to hear Lou Barlow's name connected with "low-fi" by 1994, which isn't quite it; this is an uncommonly crisp and hot recording, a la the new American '90s mixes, with a guitar riff as high-class as they come. It's a hilariously ironic lyric—someone admitting that a standard litany of kneejerk lovers' quarrel accusations are true: "Right, I was obsessed to bring you down... Playing a little-boy game," and my favorite, "Tapping till I drive you insane."

"Glorious Delusion" - Chris Stamey
Marching as always to his own drummer, this piece of meticulous craftsmanship from the Fireworks collaboration with Pete Buck, Anton Fier, Mitch Easter, and others inhabits the posh realm of Peter Gabriel or maybe even Moody Blues sonics more than those of anyone you'd expect to be playing Maxwell's. The cathedral-size production delivers surprising intimacy: "Now I'm a party to your glorious delusion."

"When You Sleep" - My Bloody Valentine
One of two jewels in the crown of the Batsford tape was My Bloody Valentine. Loveless wasn't out at the time; what he included was "Honey Power" off the Tremolo E.P. "Come In Alone" is probably the flagship for the sound of Loveless, but "When You Sleep" is classically tuneful as well. But what a sound. MBV probably take the all-time prize for making you go, "How are they doing that?" It's loud—live, apparently very loud—rock, but with a strange, aquatic drift to it, that Kevin Shields explains in rather inauspicious terms like interplay between similarly-tuned guitar strings, but stories I've heard about the sessions indicate a lot of magic went on that occurred too late at night, over too long a period, and, er, et cetera, for anyone to have kept scrupulous mental track of. For what seemed like a label-killing train wreck of a project at the time of release, this really does sound like the third of a million bucks it apparently cost, and has grown uninterruptedly in critical reputation ever since.

"Tongue Long" - Metal Flake Mother
This blazing fireball of lyrical incomprehensibility is the sort of confusing but full-tilt rock one could apparently expect from Jim Mathus before fronting the Squirrel Nut Zippers. My favorite Lou Giordano production (or tied with Christmas's In Excelsior Dayglo) is just too wild and untamed to try to describe further (actually, here's one fine line: "oh, to be nailed to the wall that you built"), but obviously, placed as it is between My Bloody Valentine and Nirvana, I'm dead serious about its quality.

"In Bloom" - Nirvana
The rise of Nirvana was a once-per-generation crowd phenomenon as unsettling to Kurt Cobain as it was thrilling to participants. Joe Becker had one of those music biz jobs where he heard all releases, and he had it playing in his car. "Polly" was the first thing I heard; that's a tough first impression. The singer persona is committing some species of alarming abuse, and I wonder if it's possible to object that the tone of disapproval is under quota. Certainly the media and fan frenzy didn't have much to do with "here's a band that's really sensitive to abuse," it was "these guys aren't faux low-lifes, they're the real thing!" Or at its least unflattering, the more "intense," the better. I first started hearing "Smells Like Teen Spirit" in dance clubs—not college radio type channels which is where I'd heard Sub Pop stuff like the Screaming Trees—the same DJs who played Jesus Jones would play Nine Inch Nails' "Head Like a Hole" (which I didn't like at all) and "Teen Spirit," which I thought was quite good, and the title very funny, but do I dare say there's some slight but noticeable under-musical aspect to that repeated riff? After about a month of gathering buzz I heard "In Bloom," which I thought was spectacular in every way. The drums are amazing; the kick is immense but still punchy and contained as anything, the whole kit has a great, spacious bark to it—but that all hinges on Butch Vig's most special and important miking technique: making sure they're pointing at a guy named Dave Grohl. I don't want to get into comparisons that could be seen as unkind to Nirvana's previous drummers, but I have to say that Grohl's modesty about his effect on Nirvana is not easy to explain.

"Alcoholiday" - Teenage Fanclub
After "In Bloom," it's awfully obvious that "Alcoholiday," um, doesn't have Dave Grohl. Or Butch Vig. But it's subtly better. Teenage Fanclub were, with Pavement, probably equally important pioneers of the nineties slacker aesthetic. The 1990 release A Catholic Education was about as sludgy as serious record releases get, and the brilliantly titled and packaged Bandwagonesque cleaned things up just enough to let the band's formidable pop capabilities shine without compromising the impression that these are people who don't always get out of bed every day. Stuart Batsford put "The Concept" on my tape, and it's good enough, although wearing denim and listening to the Status Quo must have some significance in Britain that bespeaks great cultural ineptitude—or something I'm not getting. Me, I'm fine with denim. "Alcoholiday" is a wonder. It's probably the most beautiful melody of the decade, it's the first instance of it being clear how great a singer Norman Blake really is, and it's not one of the best lyric sets, but it's just right, in a Big Star Third kind of way: "There are things I want to do/But I don't know if they will be with you." If that doesn't look like much on the printed page (so to speak), try it with Norman's heart-rending high notes on "they will be."