An American Werewolf In Belfast: Love Letter to... 1994 pt. 2

Much to my surprise, somebody told me that they enjoyed my post on '90s albums the other day. I was pretty sure I was just pleasing myself, so that was really nice to hear. Though, I guess it is my blog, so pleasing myself isn't so criminal.
In the spirit of that, here's some more knowledge emptied out of the part of my brain that isn't being used for math or science. In the interest of brevity I'll try not to talk each album into the ground, with the exception of the first entry:

In 1994 the artist who shaped me musically more than anyone, Beck, released three albums. The first, Mellow Gold, was his debut with his presumed one-hit-wonder, "Loser." The others were an album of folk/blues, One Foot in the Grave and a collection of throwaways and oddities from past tapes, Stereopathetic Soul Manure. After buying 1996's Odelay and having my 4th-grade mind blown I had hoped that Mellow Gold would deliver the same impact. It did and more.
Beck has dismissed the album as being hastily written and recorded. The evidence of this is apparent and also why I love the album so much. There was no time for perfectionism - it's like a rock album by a crazy junkman, veering from blues to hip-hop to heavy metal to Indian raga and mixing them all up. Abrasive songs like "Sweet Sunshine" and "Motherfuker" were scrutinized endlessly by me like archeological objects. Who made songs rapping through a harmonica mic with a drum machine and a kalimba? My young mind saw what some deride as sloppiness and nonsensical dadaism (an argument I now sympathize with, even if I don't necessarily agree) as some mysterious language to decode.
What Mellow Gold delivered in that respect, Soul Manure delivered in spades. Though not a classic in any means, the sheer audacity of this album (if you can call it that) still amazes me. It's something that could only be loved like I loved it by a 12-year-old - especially the 20+ minute noise collage at the end with ramblings about leaving horses in the desert for sourdough bread and other nonsense.
Lastly, One Foot in the Grave is, like many of my favorite albums now, a record that I hated the first time I heard it. It didn't deliver what I expected at all. In the end it became an even more special album to me than the other two, introducing me to music forms that I had previously had no interest in.

The album that perhaps defined Brit-pop in the '90s was Blur's Parklife. I won't get started on Oasis being puffed-up hacks - comparing Damon Albarn and Graham Coxon's career output to the Gallaghers' does it for me - but I think it's safe to say that even the biggest Oasis apologetic has to respect this album. Known stateside mostly for the hit "Girls and Boys," the album has no weak track. I love their previous, more sprawling album, Modern Life is Rubbish, even more, but Parklife did something that album couldn't - it created a movement (except in the states, where nobody gave a shit).

Elsewhere, in Ireland, one of my favorite overlooked, under-appreciated bands put out the first of two albums. Compulsion's Comforter is probably not on anyone else's 90's best-of list, but it's seminal for me. While Blur explored Britain in a shinier, poppier way, Compulsion put out songs about city sprawl and class unrest, eating and mental disorders, crime and other things in Ireland's musty basement.

And speaking of writing songs about things people don't want to hear, some of my musical heroes and eventual undeserved musical punchline, Chumbawamba, put out the amazing, Anarchy. There's not a lot of love stateside or elsewhere for a 9+ group of vegan anarchists who write unabashed pop songs about politics, but, to my mind, there should be. The thing I love about Chumbawamba is that, like Steely Dan and Randy Newman, they write deceptively smooth and sunny songs about dark, dark subjects. Operating under the ethos that more people are going to listen to you if your music is easy to listen to, Anarchy is full of angry songs about unchecked homophobia, class and, um, anarchy subversively couched in pop songs.

Another overlooked group, Soul Coughing, put out their first album, Ruby Vroom in 1994. As with Chumbawamba, it's not surprising that a band made up of a jungle/jazz drummer, a sampler/keyboardist, an upright bassist and a surrealist beat-poet struggled to find a niche on the pop charts, but it's something of a shame. Soul Coughing put out three albums, each with a sound distinct from the others and distinct from anything else. Mike Doughty went on to become a semi-successful adult-contemporary songsmith and the sampler, Mark de gli Antoni, put out a really bizarre album on John Zorn's label.

Similarly nerdy, though with a considerable cult following, They Might Be Giants put out John Henry, their first album to eschew drum-machines for a real band. Though I hesitate to call John Henry stranger than TMBG's previous, very strange output, it is extremely weird and undeniably darker. Songs like "Why Must I Be Sad?" "Stomp Box," and "A Self Called Nowhere" are songs with a heaviness not evidenced on earlier tracks like "Birdhouse in Your Soul." Likewise, the patience-tasking breakdown at the end of "Spy" is pretty unreal. There's also a track about dirt bikes taking over a town (or something...), painter James Ensor and a gracious hermit crab:

Also experimenting and defying a public that seemed to want conformism was Sonic Youth. Having just put out their most accessable album to date, Dirty, Sonic Youth changed directions and made a truly singular album. Though it's seen by many fans as a bridge between the straighter-ahead noise of the early ninetees to the dense, mature sound of Washing Machine, this view doesn't do Experimental Jet Set, Trash and No Star justice. This is my favorite type of album: one that fires in all directions and succeeds. It even begins with an acoustic song - more shocking than anything else SY could've done - and netted them their biggest, surprise hit, "Bull in the Heather." It's an album where each track asks to be taken on it's own terms, which is something I love.

Lastly, an album that is nerdy in a way none of these other ones are. Like the Brian Setzer before him, Jon Spencer used to play harder, faster music in Pussy Galore before leaving it to reinvent older styles in the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion. Taking notes from the Cramps, the Blues Explosion put out their best album in '94 with Orange. Though I think it gets silly at times the best tracks on it are hard to deny (plus they gave Beck an impromptu call to rap over the phone on "Flavor," yielding appropriately strange results - Beck would later remix the song and accompany them in the music video in a chef's outfit, assaulting people on the subway with a Godzilla doll).