Category Archives: Songs from 1993

Album: Phaseshifter, 1993

Justification: I’m just pretty much continuing the theme of Songs That I Heard The Other Day At Dig It Up That I’d Waited Half A Lifetime To Hear (along with ‘Happy Man’ and ‘Alone With You’ by the Sunnyboys, ‘In The Echo Chamber’, ‘Leilani’ and ‘Death Ship’ by the Hoodoo Gurus, ‘Godbless’ by Died Pretty, ‘Aloha Steve & Dano’ by Radio Birdman – technically Rob Younger and Deniz Tek the other day, but even so…) we have The Other Killer Single Off Phaseshifter (along with ‘Jimmy’s Fantasy’).

And that’s because I really, really loved Phaseshifter. It was for me what the first Weezer album was for a lot of my friends: a welcome post-grunge reminder that huge, chunky guitars and big pop choruses were not just permitted, but were fucking awesome. And while it’s about chicks watching bands at gigs, I still contend that it’s not technically a touring song and thereby gets past REM guitarist Peter Buck‘s awesome rule that the second a band releases a song about Life On The Road, they should be drummed out of the Musician’s Union. Other songs that I’ve decided don’t fall into this trap for reasons opaque even to me include ‘Range Life’ by Pavement and ‘Reunion Tour’ by the Weakerthans.

When I was of an age to write the names of bands I liked on books, it was probably still Duran Duran. Jesus.

Anyway: my point is that this album was my entry point to Redd Kross and I loved it so much that, uncharacteristically, I was nervous to work back. It’s almost like I felt nervously unworthy of it – as though it was one of the popular girls in high school showing an inexplicable interest in me which I enjoyed, but didn’t want to push lest it somehow popped the soap-bubble thin veneer of her interest*.

Generally if I found a record I liked I’d devour the back catalogue with indelicate haste, but this time around I’d heard Phaseshifter was their most mainstream pop album and was genuinely concerned that maybe I’d hate their other stuff and didn’t want to possibly like this album less by contextualising it. It took buying a friend’s car and their having left a mixtape from another friend in the glovebox to make me fall in love with ‘Bubblegum Factory’ and thereby give previous album Third Eye the all-clear, and that was at least five years later. I guess what I’m saying is this: I’m a bit of an idiot.

In any case they absolutely killed at the Enmore on Sunday, and hearing this power-pop masterpiece blasting through the PA was especially glorious. And once again, I’m reticent to see them play their sideshow tonight, so much did I love their set (and I didn’t even see all of it, scurrying off late in the piece to see Royal Headache). Some crushes are better left unconsumated, perhaps.

SONG YOU SHOULD HAVE REDISCOVERED THIS TIME IN 2010: Elastica were being the best thing in the world, very briefly, via the short, sharp and shiny ‘Stutter’.

SONG YOU SHOULD HAVE REDISCOVERED THIS TIME IN 2011: Nuttin’. There was a bit of a gap, actually. Weird.

AND HERE’S THE LAST FIVE…

457. Jens Lekman: You Are The Light (12 Apr)

458. The Magnetic Fields: Andrew in Drag (13 Apr)

459. Cracker: Teen Angst (What the World Needs Now) (16 Apr)

460. Of Montreal: Disconnect the Dots (17 Apr)

461. The Sunnyboys: Happy Man (23 Apr)

*This evocative and powerful metaphor is entirely imaginary, incidentally: when I was in high school I was the absolute dictionary definition of The Guy All The Girls Really Really Liked But Only As A Friend. I didn’t even have my first proper snog until I was 17. Seven-fucking-teen. Best years of my life, my arse.

Album: Icky Mettle, 1993

Justification: I came to the Archers pretty late in the piece, via their major-label debut All the Nation’s Airports, which came out in 1996 and I heard in (ahem) 2005. Like so many of the bands I now adore I had kind of assumed that I wasn’t anywhere near cool enough to like them. It was the same prejudice that initially prevented me from getting into Guided by Voices too, although I was a huge Pavement fan and I can’t for the life of me work out what possible distinction I was making there.

Ah, the 90s: when graphic artists were gunned down in the street like dogs.

Anyway: having come to this song with some historical perspective rather than hearing it as The New Cool Thing Out Of America, I have a thesis topic to propose: “Every single alternarock band that appeared in Australia from 1993 onward took Icky Mettle as its template, from You Am I to Something For Kate to Glide and onwards: discuss.” Listen to this song: Eric Bachman’s husky bark is a dead ringer for Paul Dempsey, the down-stroke power chord on the two is pure Tim Rogers, and the rhythm section could be late period Big Heavy Stuff – while Adelaide’s Flat Stanley, who I adored then and now, really could have been an Archers tribute act. For an indie single by a Chapel Hill band, this song reminds me of a lot of the local music I loved.

SONG THAT YOU SHOULD HAVE REDISCOVERED THIS TIME IN 2011: Prefab Sprout were having their biggest hit with ‘When Love Breaks Down’.

AND HERE’S THE LAST FIVE…

437. Lucious Jackson: Naked Eye (1 Mar)

438. Menswear: Daydreamer (2 Mar)

439. Vampire Weekend: Oxford Comma (5 Mar)

440. Real Life: Catch Me I’m Falling (6 Mar)

441. Baxter Dury: Francesca’s Party (7 Mar)

Album: Porno for Pyros, 1993

Justification: I never liked Jane’s Addiction. As far as I was concerned they were part of that hateful alternative-rock-funk movement of the late 80s/early 90s that vomited up the Red Hot Chili Peppers and Living Color, both of whom could also go fuck themselves, and which was exclusively beloved by dickheads (well, a lot of perfectly lovely music students also dug Living Color, to be honest). Yet, for one moment in 1993 I thought I might have underestimated Perry Farrell et al. This song, with its circular chord progression, haunted vocals and inspired lyrical take on the human condition, managed at once to be witty, memorable and musically inventive, and I still adore it to this day.

Then, of course, I heard the rest of the album and realised that no, they just made one amazing song. And pretty much everything else Farrell did before and since was arse. Especially that new album this year, which is a abysmal. Not as bad as the Farrell solo album, sure, but still shitful.

SONG YOU SHOULD HAVE REDISCOVERED THIS TIME IN 2010: Nik Kershaw made his bid for pop immortality with ‘Wouldn’t it be Good’.

AND HERE’S THE LAST FIVE…

384. Fountains of Wayne: Denise (18 Nov)

385. The Notwist: One with the Freaks (21 Nov)

386. The Sundays: Here’s Where the Story Ends (22 Nov)

387. Gentle Ben & His Sensitive Side: The Beginning of the End (23 Nov)

388. Adam & the Ants: Stand & Deliver (24 Nov)

Album: Very, 1993

Justification: Pet Shop Boys hold a very special place in my heart, but even I have to concede that they’ve never made a consistently excellent album. Neither have they made an entirely awful one (although Bilingual rarely gets a spin on the APS decks), but that puts them in the company of the likes of ABBA, Madonna and (whisper it quietly) New Order who have never made a stone-cold classic long-player, but whose singles collections are pretty much nothing but gold.

However, in the unlikely scenario that someone was to hold a gun to my head and demand that I declare one PSB album as being their least-flawed effort, it would be Very. I concede that this particular situation is, at best, wildly unlikely and is in fact only made remotely possible by this very post, assuming some deluded gunman was to read it and think it was a pretty decent sounding idea. However, hopefully-imaginary gunman, this is kind of a spoiler alert: Very’s got a slab of their best songs (‘I Wouldn’t Normally Do That Kind of Thing’, ‘Yesterday, When I Was Mad’, their triumphant cover of the Village People’s ‘Go West’), their ballads are tolerable rather than ghastly (although I could merrily go through the rest of my life without hearing ‘Dreaming of the Queen’ again, which goes double for the godawful hi-NRG of ‘One in a Million’, which sounds like it took 15 minutes to write and record), and they did some awesome other tracks around this time (including their remix of Blur’s ‘Girls & Boys’).

But the reason this album has such a place in my heart is two lines from this song, the album’s opening track and first single: “She made you some kind of laughing stock / Because you dance to disco and you don’t like rock”. Now that is just plain awesome. It’s also one of the few songs ever sung with a degree of genuine sympathy to a closet case, although it’s quite possibly autobiographical: the single came out a good six months before Neil Tennant did.

The ‘Yesterday, When I Was Mad’ single had an amazing swing band cover of this as a b-side. It’s worth hunting down.

SONG YOU SHOULD HAVE REDISCOVERED THIS TIME IN 2010: Marcy Playground were having the only hit of their lives with ‘Sex & Candy’.

AND HERE’S THE LAST FIVE…

377. ELO: Don’t Bring Me Down (9 Nov)

378. Frankie Goes to Hollywood: Relax (10 Nov)

379. Death Cab for Cutie: I Will Possess Your Heart (11 Nov)

380. James: She’s a Star (14 Nov)

381. Magnapop: Slowly, Slowly (15 Nov)

Album: Dummy, 1993

Justification: Looking at the dates, I must have heard this before I heard the theme to Silent Hill by about six years – so this, therefore, would be where the idea that percussive steel strings (I’m pretty sure it’s a dulcimer) are terrifying. I think it’s straight from the Lalo Shifirin sample that gives this song its basis, but still: that’s one immediately hairs-on-the-back-of-the-neck-raising sound.

That, by the way, is why I was always a bit confused when people talked about Portishead like they were soundtrack music for sophisticated 90s dinner parties. Sure, every other trip-hop artist was ghastly, but Portishead always seemed like music from outer space to me, as though aliens had been listening in and gone “ah, this is what the humans like!” and then made music that fell right into some weird audio uncanny valley.

It still creeps me out, the first Portishead album, and I’m far from convinced they’re not aliens. Especially Beth Gibbons. The plural-mammalian surname’s not fooling anyone.

SONG YOU SHOULD HAVE REDISCOVERED THIS TIME IN 2010: Is there a song filled with more indie-jollity than ‘Here Comes Your Man’ by the Pixies? No. No, there is not.

Album: Debut, 1993

Justification: Listening to Björk’s new album Biophilia reminds me – as most of the last few Björk albums have – how little I actually enjoy listening to her music these days. Yes yes yes, it’s all very impressive and artistic and expressive and she’s taking the artform to strange new places and her voice is fantastic instrument and everything else that music reviewers say to show that they can understand art that’s not just a bunch of chords strung together, but the fact remains that she’s got a unique gift for a hook and – both as a solo artist as with the Sugarcubes, she was responsible for some of the strangest, most brilliant pop singles on the planet. While I’ve followed her career avidly over the years, the fact remains that I like her pop songs. Do I appreciate what she was getting at with Medúlla? Yes, absolutely. Do I listen to it for pleasure? Under no circumstances.

Debut, on the other hand, is still one of my favourite albums – not least because it was clearly the work of an artist just starting to get an idea of quite how wide her vistas were. She’s still working within conventional song structures, and the influence of Nellee Hooper and Graham Massey is considerable, but the whole album sounds exactly what it was: a staggeringly talented artist stepping away from her old sound and into something new and exciting. And whoever decided to have the song’s bassline played on timpani? Genius.

Amazing Gondry video too.

SONG YOU SHOULD HAVE REDISCOVERED THIS TIME IN 2010: Weekend, so here’s the 1993 archive! Enjoy!

Album: Fuzzy, 1993

Justification: I’ve explained how I fell in love with Grant Lee Buffalo in this earlier post, but was put in mind of it by a) the fact that it comes up on my iPod at least once a week, so much do I love it, and b) because Grant Lee Phillips turns up playing a poo-tar in Margaret Cho’s song ‘Eat Shit and Die’ (which he also co-wrote, fact fans). In fact, Phillips appears to be part of that weird little comedy-music LA klatch that also includes comics like Paul F Tompkins, Maria Bamford, Doug Benson, Scott Aukerman et al and musicians like Aimee Mann, Michael Penn, Andy Prieboy and Jon Brion, a little dream team of staggering geniuses which may or may not exist entirely in my own imagination – as, again, I’ve mentioned before.

Anyway: it’s about as perfect a song as can be imagined, with all sorts of beautiful little touches – like each chorus is one measure longer than the last, for example, perhaps making up for the truncated second verse. Also, if there is a better metaphor for a barren relationship than the impossibly sad “We water like a dead bouquet / It does no good, does it dear?”, I’m yet to hear it.

And as someone who found the cloudy effects of antidepressants harder to deal with than the mood swings they purported to level out back in my moodier days, that shrugging chorus line “I’d like to / But I’m fuzzy” touches me something very deep and terrifying.

SONG YOU SHOULD HAVE REDISCOVERED THIS TIME IN 2010: Hey, funny we should mention Andy Prieboy – it was his big hit with his old band Wall of Voodoo: ‘Far Side of Crazy’.

Album: Become What You Are, 1993

Justification: Sure, Britain, Britpop amy have been in the ascendent in your neck of the woods, but in the US alt.rock was about the take over the world and we in Australia popped some corn, sat back and watched you duke it out.

It was a good time for chicks with guitars – The Breeders, Belly, Veruca Salt and so on – but if there was one safe horse to bet on, it was Juliana Hatfield. Her indie band the Blake Babies had split a few years earlier and OK, her solo debut hadn’t done so well, but now she was fronting a power trio, she had been romantically linked with Evan Dando (and had played bass for the Lemonheads during the It’s A Shame About Ray sessions), so 1993 was to be her breakthrough year. And the fact that you hadn’t seen the words “Juliana” and “Hatfield” in the same place for a decade tells you how well that worked out.

Hatfield never seemed to quite have the temperament for the rock thing, coming across as nervous in interviews and announcing, among other things, that she was a virgin (at the time she was in her mid-twenties) and didn’t really care for sex. A million teenage indie masturbation fantasies died that day.

I saw her play solo with Ben Lee and with the Three when they toured with Belly (and her bassist Dean Fisher ended up marrying Belly’s Tanya Donnelly, incidentally, having met her on that tour) and she was always downright awesome. Her albums were pretty patchy, though, although Beautiful Creature is well worth going back to.

Incidentally, she had no sister (which is pretty obvious when you listen to the song), and she gets extra points for the gormlessly cute pronunciation of “Del Fuegos” when she cites her “first all-ages show / It was the Violent Femmes, and the Del Fu-way-goes”.

THIS TIME IN 2010: Roxy Music were insisting that ‘Love is the Drug’.

Album: Bleeding Star, 1993

Justification: Shoegaze was alive and well and living in New Zealand by the early 90s, when an indie pop band originally called the Jean-Paul Satre Experience discovered the Pixies and made one near-perfect album after three reportedly-OK ones which I’ve never heard.

It effectively split the band up (their guitarist Dave Mulcahy left during its recording and the band sputtered to a halt a year after it was released) but there was a moment there where songs like ‘Ray of Shine’ and ‘Into You’ were going to be the breakthrough singles where the Jesus & Marcy Chain and My Bloody Valentine had attempted and failed. It didn’t happen, of course, but I still adore this song.

THIS TIME IN 2010: The Wonder Stuff were reaching the pinnacle of their career with ‘The Size of a Cow’.

Album: Souvlaki, 1993

Justification: Slowdive were pretty much a punchline when they made their masterpiece. The beast that was Britpop was starting to stir and shoegaze was on the way out (as canny bands like Lush and Seymour, subsequently renamed Blur, had already worked out) and fragile albums with cathedrals of pristine sound were enough to make people write angry letters to the NME. Truly, it was a different time.

And the band didn’t seem to have a great time of it either. The album had been made and scrapped by the time they put in a we’ll-never-get-him-but call to Brian Eno, who produced Souvlaki (named, can you believe it, after a skit by the Jerky Boys) and this perfect, ethereal song was the first single. It got the band US attention, but it didn’t last: soon most of the band quit and the remainder went minimalist Warp-esque electro with the third and final album, Pygmalion.

Singer/guitarists/co-founders Neil Halstead and Rachel Goswell took late-period drummer Ian McCutcheon to form Mohave 3, who have just reactivated after a few years off. Apparently there’s a new album on the way. This is good news for people who like good-sounding music.

THIS TIME IN 2010: Radiohead’s best single, bar none: ‘Just’.