33 rebellions per minute
BEST MUSIC OF 1998
1. Alanis Morissette, SUPPOSED FORMER INFATUATION JUNKIE
As intensely, thoughtfully personal an album as has ever been made, run through inventively computerized and drum-machined production. Gushed-forth but circling-back paragraphs of self-analysis, relationship dissection (romantic, friendly, and parental), dialogue, and unbashful plans and dreams. That these erratic 12-step transcripts constitute _songs_ --- let alone danceably propulsive songs, let alone great ones --- is a triumph of faith over commandments, expressionism over color-by-numbers, Torville and Dean ingenuity over actual competition rules. Meter and rhyme were overrated anyway.
2. Loud Family, DAYS FOR DAYS
Singer/ songwriter Scott Miller was already, quite possibly, the best melody-writer around, even before he here found a gifted harmony singer. He was already one of the most ingenious self-producers, even without occasional aid from Tim Walters. He was already the brainiest, wordiest, perhaps occasionally even funniest lyricist in the history of the world, even before making a sudden, unexpected lurch towards being the wisest. That last combination is, I fear, what's kept this out of #1; I'm only Alanis's age and IQ, so how does he expect me to figure out everything he teaches? But if all word puzzles were as fun and as rewarding to solve as these, I'd spend lots of time playing word puzzles.
3. People From Earth, LUVSKULL
Hey, someone has to write romantic depressive songs now that Scott Miller's busy elsewhere. Measured folk-rock nicely spiced with Dixieland brass, attractively eccentric vocal arrangements, and a water-bottle quartet. By the standards of naturalistic lo-tech production, this is as brilliantly recorded as any album I've run across.
4. Babe the Blue Ox, THE WAY WE WERE
Perhaps the one genuine masterpiece to emerge from the "grunge" movement, perhaps because of its refusal to entirely stay there. Rosalee Thomson's sweet, yearning vocal harmonies and her fierce Jon Spencer Math-Rock Explosion bass-playing supplement a lyrical vision in which Tim Thomas complains about the world in the gentle, angstless way of a man who doesn't exactly mind doing the laundry or shopping for groceries or eating at chain restaurants, but who hasn't forgotten life was supposed to have been more special.
5. Tori Amos, FROM THE CHOIRGIRL HOTEL
An intensely personal album run through inventively computerized and drum-machined production. Wildly eclectic, and as always with a voice like hers, often beautiful. Also, her most comprehensible and powerful lyrics since her debut.
6. Jesus Jones, ALREADY
-- Herb Heinz, FAILURE
Radio-wise, the main use of synthesizers has been as polish, as pop confectionary; historically, though, synthesizers were invented by geeks making noises to provoke a "What the heck was _that_??!" Neither Jesus Jones nor Herb Heinz seem to see any contradiction in these impulses. ALREADY, constructing "Right Here, Right Now" anthems from truly PERVERSE sampler chatter, should have been a major hit. FAILURE, also tuneful, is synth-pop in what I'd call a "cross-indexed collage" structure: even the looniest ideas, in the looniest juxtapositions, are each foreshadowed by something earlier, while musical and lyrical motifs keep reappearing, slightly morphed, wherever in the album they can play a reassuringly sane role.
7. Carter USM, I BLAME THE GOVERNMENT
The most emotionally wrenching album I ever hope to encounter. Tuneful but fragile, smart with a dwindled supply of smartass. The arrangements veer at no moment's notice from "poised" to "poised on the edge of complete collapse". The result of taking "love thy neighbor as thyself" seriously, and then being willing to move right next door to anyone who needs it.
8. Rasputina, HOW WE QUIT THE FOREST
Worrying about the world's problems and hoping to solve them may be the noblest course. Rasputina, however, taking childlike delight in the problems' forensic details and twisted plots, and constructing an anachronistic fantasy world of cellos and electronics and fables around them, will probably live longer and happier lives.
9. Savatage, THE WAKE OF MAGELLAN
-- Mike Keneally + Beer For Dolphins, SLUGGO!
Seven years after the burial of the Van Halen/ Motley Crue style of chart-toppers (they still exist, they just don't top charts), we can see that it wasn't the hard-rock genre at fault, merely a correctable lack of imagination. MAGELLAN is a grandiose progressive lite-metal concept album about 19th century whistle-blowing and drug trafficking: a well-played, well-sung blend of Metallica and Elton John, APPETITE FOR DESTRUCTION and Gilbert & Sullivan, wherein Savatage improve on the ingredients through 80% skill and 20% sheer conviction of its importance. SLUGGO!, jazzy and virtuosic, is just as determined in its brainy silliness, and therefore just as successful
10.Liz Phair, WHITECHOCOLATESPACEEGG
-- Ani DiFranco, LITTLE PLASTIC CASTLES
Liz, long since having made the transition from slackly ingenious home taper to rock star, discovers commercial polish and an unexpectedly clear singing voice. Ani, the independent, devoutly admired founder of the Righteous Babe label--- a feminist folk/jazz singer who plays a mean acoustic guitar and forms complex rhymes as if words were just born that way--- discovers love and musical eclecticism (the one she's defensive about is love). Both, in my opinion, make too little use here of their guitar brilliance, and too much use of their rotten taste in men. But I still jump around grinning while the music plays.
Best songs
1. Herb Heinz, "Beautiful Thing"
The lyrics portray a love affair in which guy mistreats gal, gal gets sick and leaves, guy gets nicey-nicey to win her back, "over and over, always the same, never repeating, over and over". The peppy, inventive music is a perfect metaphor, an initially mild clash of styles unravelling in slow, random but logical regression only to resolve in attractive calm. And the vocal arrangements, from duet to fugue to progressively layered counterpoint to harmony, are as good as in any song I've ever heard.
2. People From Earth, "Ice Tears"
In a remarkably catchy 5:40, PFE summarize everything that's best in their style (see above). In lyrics, and in much of the singing, it's desperate lovelornness on display. But the music keeps escaping and turning _fun_; it even ends with the band yipping in applause for themselves. As long as songs are something that are consciously written, then rehearsed and played, that distance from depressing sentiments will always be there, performing its healing function; that "Ice Tears" makes this an implicit part of the song seems off-handedly profound. I also like that the 7/8 rhythms sound natural, while the 4/4 ones sound forced.
3. Babe the Blue Ox, "Basketball"
-- Babe the Blue Ox, "Plan B"
Anthems of wistfulness. The one about giving up on sports superstardom maintains the bounciness, sunniness almost, of someone who realizes he should never have been serious; the one about giving up on the American Dream of promotions=success (or, for females, love=success) is furious and pulverizing. I wonder if, had Babe been black, the perceived realism, and thus the emotions of the two songs, would have been reversed?
4. Loud Family, "Why We Don't Live In Mauritania"
Lots of songs are about passively waiting for life to happen to you, or at least for life to arrive with the right purchase. A few of those songs even know that's what they're about. Very very few can say it without an attitude of blustering self-righteous indictment. Only this one tosses in a hyperliterate Beach Boys parody on the way.
5. Tori Amos, "Hotel"
-- Tori Amos, "Spark"
In "Hotel", the pop world's finest piano player, before she reminds us that she's the pop world's finest piano player, takes a few minutes to make up for Nine Inch Nails's absence. In "Spark", Tori gets right her own balance of piano, synth, and shiny contemplative guitar. In 13/4 time by the way. And why, despite years of Will Sergeant and the Edge on guitar, does "shiny contemplative" sound self-contradictory? Have we so easily been brainwashed into the notion that all shiny people ever do is laugh, hold hands, wear colorful clothes, and be happy? Shame!
6. Thinking Plague, "Dead Silence"
On their three previous albums, peaking with the mesmerizing IN THIS LIFE ('89), Thinking Plague's music was like a cobwebby undergorund labyrinth, keeping its treasures in quiet wait for those persistent explorers with the patience to persist through wrong turns and misleading maps. For IN EXTREMIS, they spent nine years rewiring the maze to serve as a tourist trap, but under the apparent delusion that it's the fluorescent lighting, the hurtling cabbies, the loquacious ill-dressed schizophrenics, and the muggers that make the attraction go. But "Dead Silence", for four flawless minutes, demonstrates the style I think they intended to create: operatic, charged, angular, off-balance, yet indelibly pop. With the coolest woodwind hooks in years.
7. Alanis Morissette, "I Was Hoping"
-- Alanis Morissette, "Uninvited"
If everyone who broke off a relationship was forced to give detailed accounts of what their hopes for the relationship had been, and what the disputes were, maybe people would get better at finding relationships they didn't _need_ to break off. There is the whole obstacle of love and its absence to get around first, though: sometimes "I don't think you unworthy; I need a moment to deliberate" is the best that can be said, and letting aggressive middle-East-tinged string sections take over for you is the best way to finish your thought.
8. Patty Griffin, "Tony"
-- Eels, "Last Stop: This Town"
-- They Might Be Giants, "Doctor Worm"
1998 was, oddly, a year for powerful suicide elegies with interestingly out-of-place synthesizer parts. Patty's song is from the regretful perspective of someone who hadn't helped: "When I wasn't busy feeling sorry for myself, I stared over his shoulder at a map of the world". The Eels singer would've loved to help his sister, but "would you take me where you're going if you're never coming back?" is a revealing lesson on why he couldn't. There need, I suspect, to be more support and empathy and celebration of losers _before_ the problem hits. "Doctor Worm", the jaunty horn-fueled manifesto of someone who's a little too creative to admit his social doom, and who clearly deserves better, is the product of a band whose concerts serve as a Geek Friendship and Dating Service to the East Coast. We need more bands like them.
9. Barenaked Ladies, "One Week"
-- Loud Family, "Deee-pression"
Speaking of geeks.... quick half-spoken verses with instantly catchy guitar-pop choruses, and some thoughtfulness hidden by novelty-song moves. "One Week" got a million kids trying to rap along to "Hold it now and watch the hoodwink/ as I make you stop, think/ you'll think you're looking at Aquaman". "Deee-pression" did not get a million kids trying to sing along to "Shake when I'm empty like a bowl full of semper fi/ hung by the chimney to signify, simplify". The difference between Reprise Records (huge) and Alias Records (tiny, inept)? Or just a sign of what a gratuitous "big like LeAnn Rimes" brag gets you?
10.Priya Thomas, "Antigone"
-- Home, "Our Blue Navy/ Industry 2000"
Unexpected proof that heavy metal, pop, and dance music (respectively) could just as easily have originated and flourished from the materials of abstraction. Not that I would have wanted this origin; I am rating these songs 10th, not 1st. But the examples are nonetheless breathtaking.
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