From Cubist Castle 01.09.09: 1999 - A Year In Review
Posted by Jon Kinsey on 01.09.2009
This week, From Cubist Castle breaks out the time machine and takes a whistle stop tour of 1999. Join us!
New Year is often a time for reflection, for looking at the year just gone and anticipating what is to come. As always, I am an unfortunate victim of my contrary nature, so, while some take a look back to 2008, I'm going to go a little further afield. The thought struck me the other day that 1999, one of my favorite years in music, is now officially a decade ago and, since the calendar has ticked over, it seems as good a time as any to take a look at it.
Bear in mind, folks, I'm writing this from the "Cubist" perspective, so there is an emphasis on the alternative side of things and it is naturally biased toward the music I listen to. Oh, and I'm focusing mainly on album releases, as I never really appreciated the singles market. I warn you of all this now in an attempt to stave off a lynching later!
Here we go then folks – 1999: A Year in Review.
Traditionally, January is a quiet month for music releases and January of 1999 was no exception. There were album releases from The Black Crowes, Sugar Ray and Anthrax and a balding former actor releases one of my favorite albums of all time (more on that next week).
This was also the month that brought the first Britney Spears album and saw a good friend of mine sneaking out of school to buy it "for his brother", whose birthday was not for another eight months. The inlay poster then curiously ended up on my friend's bedroom wall. Were malevolent forces at work? I shall let you be the judge.
One thing is for certain, the Spears phenomenon, which began when "Baby One More Time" was released the previous October, wasn't going away any time soon. Record company executives could see the vast wad of money that the Spears franchise generated for Sony and would soon put their clones into the market. So it would come to be that, by the end of the year, we were given Mandy Moore (remember her?), Christina Aguilera and Jessica Simpson. As for the girl herself, she built a career out of being the "virgin everybody wanted", which, for some strange and as yet unfathomable reason, took years for the public to see through. Hindsight might be twenty twenty, but in this day and age, where she is not so much broken in as just plain broken, it is almost laughable to think that she carried off the sweet and innocent act for so long.
In FebruaryEminem releases his Slim Shady LP, proving that he is no flash in the pan. Finally, there is evidence that it is possible for a white man to create a genuinely authentic body of work in rap oeuvre. The album goes on to become a crossover smash and turns it's writer into an overnight star. Rap and hip hop are embraced by a new audience, which, in turn, breathes new life into the genre. Elsewhere, Vanilla Ice wishes that he was dead so that he could turn in his grave.
February was a ying and yang month for indie bands. For Elephant Six founders Of Montreal, it was a beginning. For Sebadoh who, along with Pavement had carried independent guitar music on its shoulders for much of the nineties, it was the end. Their final album, the creatively named The Sebadoh was released on the 23rd and, after a short promo tour, the band split. In truth, it had become something of a dead dog by this point in any event. By the time the final tour concluded, only Lou Barlow and Jason Loewenstein survived of the original members (Eric Gaffney had, for all intents and purposes fried his brain by 1994, and by the time The Sebadoh was toured, even his replacement had left.) and the band's sound had changed significantly. Barlow's writing showed signs of frustration – he clearly wanted to focus on his side project, Folk Implosion, and his contributions to this album seemed, at times, to be a matter of obligation, rather than intent.
For Of Montreal, 1999 was a different story altogether. They would release The Gay Parade which, for five years, would be their outstanding contribution to music. At this point I feel I need to answer a question that has been known to come up when I discuss this album. Kevin Barnes has made a career out of playing with gender and sexuality in his lyrics. Of course the title is deliberate.
And because it's Of Montreal, it's not hard to guess that The Gay Parade was a concept album. It was a character study, with each song telling the story of one of the people in the "parade" – the clock factory worker who dreams of his escape, the fun loving nun, the missing child who was rescued by an anthropormophasised owl. The tales were bafflingly odd in parts, but were accessible enough that they found an audience. This remains the most user friendly of all of Barnes' albums (his previous offering was a concept album about a fairy who gave up her magic to live as a human.) and it is, perhaps for this reason, that it is the most readily known Of Montreal recording.
March and April saw a slowdown in alternative music releases. While the mainstream was glutted with the likes of Madness and Elton John, there was little to prop up the wish lists of those of us whose tastes were outside the norm. Fugazi released a soundtrack album, Frank Black released the below par Pistolero and Echo and the Bunnymen continued their ill-advised comeback. Welsh band The Stereophonics empirically proved that there is such a thing as a sophomore slump with such spectacular gusto on Performance and Cocktails that I am, to this day, amazed that they didn't spontaneously combust.
Blur released their sixth studio album 13. It wasn't very good, but music journalists dribbled all over it and it sold a trillion copies.
There were some tidings of joy, however. Tom Waits returned from an eight year hiatus with The Mule Variations, a gripping hour and a bit of clanging, scraping and wheezing, telling the usual tales of hobos, oddballs and freaks. "Georgia Lee" made me cry. The band for whom I named this column, The Olivia Tremor Control followed in the footsteps of their Elephant Six Label mates and gave us their second album proper - Black Foliage: Animation Music Volume One. While not as immediately engaging as Music from the Unrealized Film Script, Dusk at Cubist Castle, its astonishing sonic palette rewarded those who were willing to persevere. Finally, my biggest guilty pleasure, Fountains of Wayne, released Utopia Parkway, which, despite some pretty obvious lyricism, was genuinely moving in parts.
I've tried desperately hard not to have to write the next sentence but, despite hours of research, I can confirm that May had absolutely no redeeming features whatsoever. I'm serious. Absolutely none. It was basically Ricky Martin, The Backstreet Boys and Mike and the Mechanics. Try as I might, not even I can polish that turd.
May's colossal paucity was more than abrogated by the riches to come. June gave us Blink 182 and Enema of the State. While in retrospect this album was nowhere near as clever as I thought it was when I was 17, it still makes me smile whenever I listen to it. Somehow, the songs on Enema…perfectly encapsulated what it was like to be a teenager peering over the precipice into adulthood. It also marked the start of a change in the band. Travis Barker had been brought on board to drum and they were beginning to explore different themes within their lyrics. "Adam's Song", the standout track on the album, was a precursor to the more serious material to come.
June also saw the release of Soft Bulletin by The Flaming Lips. The Lips had started life as an LSD punk band in the eighties, and it would be fair to say that their early recordings were, how can I put this politely, a little loose. The Soft Bulletin surprised many critics by displaying a genuine cohesion and dedication to the songwriting craft. It was an album of blinks and blips and twitters and gave the world my favorite Lips song, "A Spoonful Weighs a Ton" – a tale of a team sacrificing their lives, moving the sun in order to save the human race.
This is, of course, the music industry, so, while June had a raft of great releases, there is always a turd in the water pipe. June also gave us two of my most hated albums of all time - Play by Moby and Dido's No Angel. These are the albums that the US government plays to torture political prisoners in Guantanamo Bay. I challenge anyone to find another month in a calendar year that has produced such a cataclysmic tag team of dross. No Angel is as insipid as an album can be. Dido sings, for what feels like hours, as if she is being stabbed; her songs are as potent as orange squash. Play was built on the backs of the Alan Lomax Library of Congress recordings, with nothing more than a dash of spit and polish from Moby, a man so smug and self satisfied that, had Mother Teresa been alive, she would have flykicked him in the face. The liner notes consists of a series of essays. They might as well have been called "The Gospel According to Moby" or "The Vegan's Guide to Loving Your Fellow Man". Moby loved his fellow man so much that he made himself into a millionaire by hawking the works of people who died in abject poverty to every ad agency in the land. What a guy.
June was also the month that the Sebadoh-Pavement parallel came full circle, when my favorite band released Terror Twilight, their last album. Produced by Nigel Godrich, who had recently worked on OK Computer, the album that would make Radiohead stratospheric, it is the bands most polished work and the most concise statement of their raison d'être. Yet in all the polish and the sheen, they managed to lose the very thing that had made them great. They were rambling, ramshackle, rudderless and, at times, thoroughly unprofessional, but it gave the music an edge that was absent here. The four standout tracks "Major Leagues", "Platform Blues", "Billie" and "Carrot Rope" are as good as anything the band had ever produced, but the rest seemed a little throwaway. They would split later in the year and the great guitar band pantheon became poorer by one.
July and August plodded along, highlights included The Divine Comedy's greatest hits and The Auteurs unexpected reunion on How I Learned to Love the Bootboys. Lowlights included Lou Bega, Sarah Brightman and Macy Grey. Critics proceeded to confuse gargling rocks with genuine vocal talent.
September brought some treats. Nottingham band Tindersticks followed up their breakthrough album Curtains with their most accessible outing yet - Simple Pleasure. Unlike their first three LPs, it weighs in at just under 45 minutes, meaning that you don't need to create an anomaly in the space-time continuum to listen to it in one sitting. It boasts some of Stuart Staples' best songwriting to date, though his vocal still bares the "Nick Cave on valium" qualities of his previous work.
This was also the month that gave us the years most ambitious release - Magnetic Field's glorious 69 Love Songs. It does exactly what it says on the tin – a set of 69 songs spread over three discs. It is a glowing testament to the songwriting brilliance of Stephin Merritt that, on an album consisting of so many tracks, there are genuinely only five or six duds. "I Don't Want to Get Over You" is probably the best pop song of the last twenty years.
In October, DC band The Dismemberment Plan release Emergency & I, which keeps the elitist portion of the music press suitably lubricated during the harsh winter months. Despite their pleas to the contrary, this album will not change the world, make your life a better place or put a man on Mars. It is, however, a wonderfully crafted collection of songs, full of wonky time signatures and sonic trickery designed to challenge the listener. It sits quite happily across two or three genres, taking elements from each, like a bastard hybrid of Wire, Talking Heads and The Beastie Boys. Lyrically, it deals with subject matter ranging from nuclear holocaust ("8 ½ Minutes") to the emptiness of being left behind by someone you love ("The City"). "Gyroscope", one of my favorite songs of the decade, is a catchy tune about an emotional breakdown. Many people listen to the album once and then return it to the record store, thus missing the point entirely.
Also in October, David Bowie releases Hours and Bloodhound Gang give us Hooray For Boobies. Unlike Blink 182's offering. …Boobies' humor is still intact. It is as funny to me now as a 26 year old as it was when I was eighteen. The main difference, I think is that Enema's humor springs from the listeners ability to recognize and relate to the situations the band paints in the songs, something which is lost when you outgrow it. Jimmy Pop's strength is in his word play, which is so vibrant and clever that it retains it's kick. I can also testify that it is still a brilliant road trip soundtrack!
As winter draws in and the year draws to a close, Nebraska band The Faint release Blank Wave Arcade, thus rendering all of their previous output obsolete. By replacing their guitars with keyboards and changing their lyrical theme, they are able to tap into a new sound. Their opus Danse Macabre would never have been possible without the sea change on this album. The year ends on a high as the Foo Fighters, Rage Against the Machine and Beck all give their fans a reason to have a very merry Christmas.
And with that, we conclude our whistle-stop tour of 1999, a year that produced a fifth of my all time top 20 albums. I had intended to conclude this column by giving out my awards for 1999, but I spent so long debating "Album of the Year" that I gave up on the idea. I have never known, in my lifetime, a year so important to my development as a music fan. Not only were so many exceptional albums released, but they caught me at a time in my development when listening to something great can still change your outlook on life. My only regret is that, in all likelihood, I will never experience a year so brilliant ever again.
Next week, in a continuation of my jaunt back to 1999, and on the tenth anniversary of its release, I take an in-depth look at an album so dense, brooding and special that to discuss it this week would fail to do it justice. One of the best albums of the decade – the greatest offering from one of my favorite artists – Bonnie "Prince" Billy's I See A Darkness.
