Nostalgic for the Nineties?

I call it 'A Portrait of the Blogger as a Young Man Wearing a Cat'. Yup, that's me, like a hundred years ago. I look like a frigging chipmunk with those cheeks. That was back when I was planning my first band - a duo with my sister. We'd borrowed a Casio-tone keyboard from the school's music room and worked out how to work the pre-programmed drumbeat on it. We were both quite into metal then and had selected the 'heaviest' beat and then jacked the tempo up as high as it would go. I didn't have either a bass or a guitar but I figured if I blew onto a piece of wax paper wrapped around an old comb I could make a sound that roughly approximated an electric guitar. I figured wrong - what that sounds like is a kazoo. We quickly abandoned the idea - thus denying the world it's first and only brother/sister kazoo & Casio-keyboard metal duo. Society's loss, I guess.

The cat's name was Comet. He was the biggest, sweetest, most chilled cat I've ever known. He was not, however, terribly bright. My father once allegedly referred to him as an amiable boof-head.
I loved that cat.

But all that is years before the content of this blog takes place, so onwards...


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The faded plaid, the jeans with the knees worn out to ragged tangles. The hair rendered into unnatural colours with cheap dyes and then left to grow out, always darker for a full inch at the root. Combat boots and summer dresses bought from some op shop or other. Laces dragging and tattered. Hair hanging across unsmiling faces. The slacker chic. The carefully-crafted cynicism masking a kind of frail naiveté. Weird rambling films about dis-spirited kids working in fast food joints or convenience stores; drifting abstractedly through the world. 'So fucking what?' becoming a catch-phrase. I loved the flick 'Heathers' man. I adored Winona Ryder's brittle assertivness. I totally longed for Christian Slater's coat and world-weary humour. With lines like: 'Dear diary, my teen angst bullshit now has a body-count'. Jeez, that stuff is legendary.
And okay, I'm aware that 'Heathers' was actually released in 1988. I just forever associate it with the very early Nineties - when I first saw it myself.
The Nineties had grunge; they had that old perennial favourite androgyny; they had a bitter laugh and a slightly knowing wink.

Man, I miss that shit.

That Nineties-specific nihilism seems almost innocent now: like kids play-acting the end of the world. Now we've got sexts and rampant narcissism. A different, shallower kind of hopelessness. This era feels vacuous, hyper-materialistic, vapid. The Nineties had a whiff of that too, but every generation pushes that vibe deeper. God, am I ever sounding old and cranky.

Still at least we've got hipsters now. I adore hipsters.
I didn't really work the grunge aesthetic. I mean, I wore the knees out of every pair of jeans I owned but that wasn't deliberate, wasn't some kind of statement - I just have really bony knees and that's hard on fabric. I had a hint of plaid, though. And then, as now, I was always in need of a haircut. But I did as pretty much every other kid my age did - I went to school, I watched 'Friends'.
Then in the last year of highschool I started working the Goth shtick a little harder.

None of the albums that really changed my world during the Nineties were grunge. I had the required copy of Nirvana's Nevermind (on cassette no less), sure. But I can't say it really impacted.

So here's a scrawled list of the discs (or cassettes, dubbed tapes with photocopied covers, or whatever) that meant something to me then. These are the albums that linger with me still even though I haven't listened to any of them in well over a decade. Forgive me then, for these will only be fragments - broken shards of memory. They will only be what those albums meant to me, or the traces of them that linger with me still. Doubtless, all of them deserve more than that but they are almost all lost to me now - packed away in boxes, left in other cities, given away (or in the cases of the tapes - simply rotted down to white noise).
So here goes...

PJ Harvey 'To Bring You My Love'.
Hell, I loved this album. The primal, almost feral urgency in her voice. The percussion - sometimes delicate, sometimes near-tribal, the heavy mood of the guitars. The open-hearted need there, something almost carnal. I still fondly think of the desperately whispered playground chant - taunting: 'little fish, big fish, swimming in the water.' She is an amazing artist - is Polly Jean Harvey. A damn fine songwriter and musician, blessed with a thick, powerful voice. Her shamanic delivery - a punk poetess and a fitting heir to the throne of Patti Smith. Not that Smith is herself ready to secede that throne just yet.

Throwing Muses 'University'.
A tape copy of this. Bought quick and cheap from a record shop. Back when there were record shops. I loved her voice - Kristin Hersh. The naked vulnerability of it, the wounded energy. This album was all hooks. Rich, fat walls of guitar. Melodic as anything. I didn't think I knew any of the songs until I put the thing on. Bam...I'd heard damn near every one on RDU: the student-run radio station. I just never knew what they were. This album was less of a taster for Throwing Muses for me than it was a gateway drug to...

Kristin Hersh 'Hips and Makers'.
A solo album in the truest sense of the word. For the most part it was just her aching, bee-sting voice and her own acoustic guitar accompaniment. Every now and again there was a sighing of cello -  courtesy of Jane Scarpantoni, if I recall. This album was so fragile and so brave, strong in its own delicate way. The songs hung around inside of me for days, weeks, months afterwards. There was such courage on display here. To listen felt almost voyeuristic. The lyrics were impenetrable: 'never was a Baritone till you walked in', 'we have hips and makers, we have a good time'. But it felt like they spoke of things too personal, locked too deeply within Hersh herself that you couldn't hope to understand them without first living inside her head. The album sparkled and glimmered; a thousand beautiful, broken shards winking in the sunlight.

Cop Shoot Cop 'Release'.
A five-dollar used CD bought from a store that always smelt of feet and stale cheese, old glue. The disc was all beat-up; fingerprints and scratches. Someone had listened the hell out of it before me. It had a freaking anvil on the cover. This was the album that snatched me away from metal and opened up a whole knew world of possibilities to me. Without this disc I would never have fallen for the music of Nick Cave or Tom Waits. Frontman Tod A had a cynical swagger of a voice. The music was all dissonant no-wave, noise rock shot through with primal jazz and blues DNA. Dissonant frigging horns, man. The lyrics were exquisite - bitter, bruised and perfect.
'Well it's 4:30 in the morning and the vacuum sucks you in. The tell-tale trace of lies upon you face; the sidewalk feels just like your skin.' CSC are gone now. Disbanded, all the back catalogue out of print. Tod Ashley is still rolling though, man; got himself another gig, been running it for many years now. Called Firewater - they play wild Circus/World Music/Klezmer/Surf/Garage/Punk. They're something special.

Mazzy Star 'Among My Swan'.
Those hazy sun-shattered guitars, rolling out like the way the air shimmers over a heated road. The aching drawl of Hope Sandoval's voice. They sounded like a dream on a sweating afternoon. If David Lynch had set Twin Peaks in warmer climes it should have been these guys on the soundtrack in place of Badalamenti and Julee Cruise. There was always a darkness beneath the melody here. They'd draw you away from the everyday, but there'd be an unspoken threat. Underneath.

Portishead 'Portishead'
Though I adored the crisp drums, Isaac Hayes samples and dark matter of the debut - it seemed almost too graceful, too penetrable. I preferred the sneering guitar rolls here; on the sophomore album. The half-choked drumbeats - booming and echoing but buried deeply, weirdly muffled. Hip hop at half the speed - crawling endlessly forward. I loved the biting black wall of brass; the Morricone influences; the fact that on a couple of tracks Beth Gibbons seemed to be channeling an evil Shirley Bassey. It sounded like the soundtrack to an infinitely darker, more dangerous and deviant Bond flick. I heard once that the strings and brass sections were recorded separately for this one - pressed onto vinyl and then sampled back into the final mix - so that they could be scratched and chopped into place, just like on the debut. I heard they blew out their studio budget. 'Half-Day Closing' sounds like a psychedelic rock band dissolving into the ocean. 'Cowboys' looms up full of swagger, bitterness and very sharp teeth. 'Only You' will break your heart with its yearning and devotion.

Mercury Rev 'Deserter's Songs'.
The bruised heart of New Weird Americana. This album was written while locked away in a cabin, despairing that they'd never break though, never shift enough units to become a viable act (they'd hung their hopes on the divine 'See You on the Other Side' and it'd sank without a trace). This album is beyond sublime. It's a lavish disc - so densely layered it's positively orchestral. It soars, it sweeps, it burns its way into your heart. Jonathan Donahue's voice is a fragile tenor, peculiar and achingly beautiful (like a choirboy Neil Young). I had a bit of a crush on him for a while there (but y'know; in a totally masculine, heterosexual way). It introduced me to mellotron and the idea that music can create this vast rippling panorama. 'Holes' sounds like flying. As a song it simply yearns. 'The Funny Bird' is a hurricane in an abyss - the My Bloody Valentine-style waves of melodic feedback, the treated vocals - full of desperation and hope.  This album was pastoral and wistful, full of joy and sorrow...and beneath it all, a woozy, tripped-out darkness. It sounds deeply odd. Queasy and surreal; a 3am phone-call of an album. And again, positively Lynchian.

Tricky 'Angels With Dirty Faces'

This album suffocates, it strangles, it chokes and unsettles. From the cover onwards it confronts you, unblinking and unrelenting. Tricky's hash-fogged rasp playing a ghoulish call-and-response with the achingly sweet yet utterly mournful tones of Martina Topley-Bird. She sounds like the ghost of Billie Holliday singing 'God Bless the Child' from a locked room while Tricky's shadow of a voice haunts the corners. 'Broken Homes' is crippled gospel. PJ Harvey lends her voice to that one and it is a magnificent performance but this is Tricky's show and he leans crookedly into every dark place. The beats skitter and warp, spurring the album forwards but never resolving into anything as cohesive as a hook. Dissonant blues guitar tangles across a bunch of the tracks; Marc Ribot within the void. Most of the songs seem to develop in spirals, in whirlpools. This album is full of smoke and whispers - it is thick and pungent and psychedelic. It's a smoked-out hip-hop headtrip, man. And it doesn't want you for a friend.

Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds 'Let Love In'.
This almost feels the male counterpoint to PJ Harvey's 'To Bring You My Love'. It's occasionally raw, powerful, even savage and snarling. Other times it has a dark, mythical swagger - Cave as the black-hearted preacher-man with a red right hand and a heart full of dark and terrible things. This album is all about the legend of Cave - the performance, the act. I never cared for his later honesty; I have no real love for 'The Boatman's Call'. I wanted Nick Cave the actor; the tall, looming figure cut out of shadows and crooked lines. Still other times it's almost crushingly beautiful, rich with need and urgency. 'Do You Love Me Part II' remains one of the most hauntingly lovely and utterly disturbing songs I've ever been a witness to.

Bjork 'Homogenic'.
The break-up album. Or something. Full of dark, bone-trembling bass and beats; dense, almost Russian-sounding Classical influences. At other points it's achingly lovely and exquisitely ripe with a sense of awe and hope. 'Bachelorette' remains one of the most extraordinary songs ever written. The rhythm is so urgent, so powerful, so infectious. Bjork's voice is always an astonishment: from childlike wonderment to flirtatious coo; from vulnerable verismo to snarling barely-restrained hostility; and ultimately, to banshee howl. Hers is a passionate, full-bodied delivery - utterly emotive, devoid of any of the clinically-detached ennui of most electronica artists. The lyrics are still a delight (even the odd bit about killer whales). 'I'm a fountain of blood in the shape of a girl'. Her finest album, probably, from a lifetime of stunning releases. It has a strength, a quality that her previous releases were a little light on: for all the ground it breaks it remains a deeply cohesive album. There is a narrative logic to the structure - a coherence. It is an immersive experience. In this dude's opinion at least.

Tori Amos 'From the Choirgirl Hotel'
A voice as rich and sultry as sun-baked earth, as the steam rising from that scorched dirt. Petrichor. I always loved the way Amos' voice had a slightly fractured hoarseness to it, like it was scalded just below the surface. This is a huge album. Denser and more lavish than her others. Amos treats us to her trademark Bosendorfer here - working the lower notes, the ones that hit you in the meat and marrow. But there are other instrumental layers aplenty (very little sparseness here); rich keyboard swathes, marimbas, strings, and (in a possible first for her) blood-stirring dance beats. 'Raspberry Swirl' rides a propulsive rhythm. Infectious and urgent; panting, hungry and powerful - all quite appropriate given the subject matter. There's a darkness to it too - almost a witchy Goth-club vibe. 'Playboy Mommy' seems lightweight, playful in a melancholy way, a jazzy strut. Until you realise it depicts a miscarriage. Elsewhere Amos bewitches and beguiles. I've flirted with her other releases; but this album won my heart from the very first listen.

Acid Bath 'When the Kite String Pops'.
Sludge. Stoner Doom. Psychedelic Blues Metal. Shit, call it whatever you want. All I know is this deranged, drug-influenced band from Louisiana had hit upon something complex and strange and maddeningly addictive. The lyrics are a stream-of-consciousness nightmare - all terrifying imagery about insects and planets and oceans and death. Frontman Dax Riggs delivered them all in either a ravaged, throat-scraping bellow or a smoke-glazed and weirdly melodic voice. Oh, he could be beautiful when he needed to be and one only had to witness the delicate semi-classical acoustic guitar interplay of 'The Bones of Baby Dolls' or the finger-painted scrawl that was 'Scream of the Butterfly' (it was years before I got the Jim Morrison reference) to know that this was a band of rare and corrupt majesty. Man, look at those titles - where do you think I got my writing style from?

Marilyn Manson 'Antichrist Superstar'
Oh, he may seem like a worn-out joke now - for all that his most recent album was a fierce beast indeed. But nothing changes the sense of awe and amazement that washed over me when I first heard 'Sweet Dreams'. I'd never heard acoustic guitar creepy-crawl like that before. This album was like that times a-hundred. It was caustic, poignant, vicious, triumphant and had such a sense of weirdly-joyous anarchy to it. The grinding bass; the bleeding electronic loops and sniggers; the thin, oddly buzzing guitars; and Manson's fractured baritone howl. He could sound so furious at one instant and so wounded, even oddly emotive the next. It was a massive album that made you want to fling up your fist and shout along. 'I wasn't born with enough middle fingers.' They just don't make rage sound that infectiously thrilling any more. 'Man That You Fear' haunts me still - poisonous and sour-sweet with its calliopes and its lurching rhythm; a funhouse mirror of a song.

Mr Bungle.
This album changed the world for me. Just a little bit. There was a DJ that worked the late-night shift on Mondays at RDU; called herself Mighty Mouse. Every time she was on she would throw down a track from this album. It was deranged, wild, a freefall on a rollercoaster ride. Mike Patton's first band - improbably signed to a major label (Warner Bros!) after the success of Faith No More. The songs leapt from ska to funk to punk to metal to jazz to dub to circus music. Often within the same track - sometimes within the same verse. Patton sounded snotty and self-possessed, spitting and sneering and smirking his way through the mire of their lyrics. Those lyrics were skatalogical, pornographic, hilarious and disturbing. Explosions of brass and seasick organs drove most of the tracks. It was madness sculpted into music. It pushed the limits of what a band was capable of. Years later they eclipsed even their debut with the phenomenal, exotica-tinged 'California'.

Massive Attack 'Mezzanine'
Their first two albums - which still sound to me like critically-acclaimed muzak for cocktail parties - served only to introduce me to the sublime, hash-scorched rasp of Tricky (by 'Mezzanine' he was gone). But this disc is a very different beast altogether, and for me this remains one of the most glorious and opulently dark releases of the Nineties. 'Mezzanine' saw their sound roughen, deepen - the crawling hip-hop beats and dub rumblings now cloaked in squalls and shivers of hefty post-rock guitar & bass. Here the urgent whispers of 3D and the deep, threatening interjections of Daddy G combine exquisitely with Horace Andy's rich, reggae-soaked voice and the gossamer-glitter of ex-Cocteau Twin Elizabeth Fraser. Each track feels carefully and intricately constructed - layer laid upon layer; complex enough that each listen reveals new elements - yet the listener is instantly drawn in, thrilled, seduced... and intimidated. It is an essential album.

Type O Negative 'Bloody Kisses'
The late and lamented Peter Steele - 6'9" tall and apparently hewn entirely from muscle and cheekbones. Possessed of arguably the deepest 'clean' voice in metal. There was the striking image of him wearing a freaking double bass slung on a chain across his shoulders, gripped as one would a guitar. Type O Negative's sound spliced the blues swagger & doom-laden crush of Black Sabbath with a Beatles-esque sense of melody and the gossamer keyboard-and-reverb fog of the Cocteau Twins. All graced with the stentorian bass-baritone chants of Mr Steele (and the more traditional metal rasps of Kenny Hickey). 'Bloody Kisses' was the album that introduced me to them, to their grim and gleeful vision of the world, and to this day I cannot pick a weak track on it (I dig the supposed 'filler' and instrumental tracks too). It is an immense album - intense, grand, beautiful and heavy as all goddamn. This is Gothic metal delivered with a knowing wink and a thick Brooklyn accent.

So that's my patchwork of memories - fragment stitched to fragment. It's been said that what you're drawn to between the ages of thirteen and nineteen (in terms of film, music, art, books etc) will shape your taste for the rest of your life - you will carry those with you forever and you will always be looking for echoes of what you loved then.
This is what shaped the world inside my head.

That doesn't mean that those are the only truly great albums that I recall from the Nineties - there are others that mean a lot to me; but I either didn't discover them until outside of that decade, or they didn't mean the same thing to me then that they do now. There are a couple of other bands that meant the world to me then but that I have grown to dislike or openly loathe in the years since (*cough* Radiohead *cough*). They too, have been omitted.

Music has changed a great deal since then - now it seems as if the musical world is a great, heaving mass - too vast and teeming to keep track of. Genres have spawned sub-genre after sub-genre. Televised 'talent' shows have drowned the pop music world in a wash of oversung, easy-listening effluent and it has all become so...complicated. In the days of Elvis Presley the sneakiest production trick they had was 'fattening' the voice; a process by which multiple identical copies of the vocal track were laid over one another to make the voice sound fuller and richer in the mix. Nowadays it takes up to sixty separate audio tracks and as many as forty different (synthesized) musical instruments to create a single Justin Bieber song - and after all that effort, production and unrelenting precision all you're left with is a Justin Bieber song.

It's not all bad though. There's just so much more of it, more of everything. Now you have to sift through the wreckage to find the treasures; but it's so freaking accessible now - everything is there and waiting at the end of a high speed internet connection. Waiting for the click of your mouse. But you have to be savvy and careful. You have to do the research.

But back to that list... Back to the meaning of that list.
Ultimately what these songs are is a key that unlocks our past. It is the soundtrack to our memories - to the whirling din of fragments that makes up a perfectly ordinary life. There are things for which there are no words, that is why we have always needed (and will always need) music.