As the Crow Flies 12.11.09: Skunk Anansie's Paranoid & Sunburnt

Posted by Chris Crowing on 12.11.2009

On the second week of Christmas, Chris Crowing gives to you, the best album you forgot you'd heard...and wonders whatever happened to alternative rock?




With the return to prominence of more than a few nineties bands this year, I've dug into my CD collection to recommend a record which has been important to my life and I think would be a gift to you.

Skunk Anansie - Paranoid & Sunburnt

Skunk Anansie were never more awesome than on their 1995 debut record, in a classic case of an edgy alternative rock band getting all their best anger and angst out in the first heady rush of recorded passion (see also Rage Against The Machine, ) - it also managed to be their highest charting record in the UK.

While Stoosh has the mega-hit "Hedonism" and quality songs like "Yes, It's Fucking Political" and the sublime "Pickin' On Me", Paranoid & Sunburnt was just that much more raw...



With intelligent political and social commentary coming on the back of some of the most evocative and danceable rock riffs in living memory, songs like "Selling Jesus", "Intellectualise My Blackness" and "Little Baby Swastika" are the very reason why alternative rock is the cornerstone of my musical life, and is a necessary force in the world which needs to be fostered.



That isn't to say this isn't an album with it's share of tenderness with "Charity" and "100 Ways to Be A Good Girl" bringing the pace down while retaining the intelligence, insight and awesomeness of their pacier neighbours.



While Stoosh and Post Orgasmic Chill annihilate almost any other alt rock release for quality, when you are stripping the albums down to the essential tracks, then Paranoid & Sunburnt offers as many songs as it's successors put together.



If you don't have this album, buy it - you'll thank me.

Whatever Happened to Alternative Music

The return of Skunk Anansie, along with Alice in Chains and a few others has made me look at modern alternative rock and find it wanting. Who is prominent and relatively new who can compete with these bands early records for passion, musicality and emotional insight?

Looking back at the mid-to-late nineties, and I see a plethora of quality records and classic songs which make me smile and often dance and sing with unbridled joy ten-to-fifteen years later.

Of course you could put that down to nostalgia (and to some degree you'd be right) but I look back and see the bands on the chart edge of alternative music then, and judge them to be far superior in every single way to what is happening now.

The likes of Bush, Garbage, My Vitriol and the Cranberries had far more passion, intelligence and verve than their modern emo counterparts. It seems we traded genuine emotion, political and intelligent social commentary for insincere cookie-cutter depression and formulaic songs.



Even the alternative/metal crossover seems weaker now - in the late nineties we had the Deftones, Machine Head and Fear Factory making vital and interesting records, now we are told that the likes of Sonic Syndicate or Bring Me The Horizon are exceptional or insightful metal bands.



This might sound like the rant of an old man, who's raging against what the kids are liking - but you can't tell me that Paramore are as good as Garbage or that Bring Me The Horizon are one tenth the band that Demanufacture-era Fear Factory were?

The tipping point seems to have been when nu-metal went from being just a de rigueur term for rap-rock mixed with groove metal to becoming an all consuming meta-scene which swiftly flooded the airwaves with a million bands who weren't a patch on their predecessors. A few years into the new millennium and the same thing happens to Emo, and suddenly alternative music just isn't as alternative anymore...

...and I do make the distinction between 'alternative' meaning something which is edgy but still popular enough to BE an alternative and 'underground' meaning stuff that the average man in the street will NEVER be exposed to, let alone choose to listen to.

Now I KNOW that the quality bands are out there, it just seems that nowadays they are pushed under by some truly mediocre, yet apparently more marketable stuff - that's a real shame. Strange that I find myself pining for the days before the internet, before iTunes, a more innocent time it seems. Now that IS just wishful nostalgia.

Slainte,
Chris Crowing

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