Three Song Cold Weather Groove

Winter has arrived where I am. I walked two miles in the biting cold and feel alive in that way only narrow survival can elicit. Your heart rate slows down. The world seems bigger when it's cold. And that's what I'm looking for from music today, slow engmatic expanse, the barely making it blues, a real winter groove.

To world oppressed by the blunt and obvious noise of teen pop and Nu Metal came the delicate elegant Icelandic band Sigur Ros. Their second album, first to be released in America, was called Agaetis Byrjun and came out in 2001. Its slow building but still hook-drenched melodies are perfectly cinematic and could even have you believing you're the hero in some slow-burn Kubrikian drama unfolding among ice and clouds.

Sixteies British folk band Pentangle perform here with an organic soul but also a nearly-mechanical precision that resembles some of Massive Attack's more elegaic moments. It's a lush enigmatic groove that seems to exist both in the future and past simultaneously.

You've gotten where you're going and feeling slowly returns to your extremities. Maybe you have a cup of coffee in your hand and you can feel you heartbeat as you look out the window at the blowing cold. Hopefull you have something as deliberately beautiful and considerate as Cannonball Adderly Sextet's Autumn leaves. With Miles Davis on trumpet and Art Blakey on drums you're not going to find it done better.

                                        

  

Down and Out in 1998

1998 is not a year that gets much love for its music. A lot of nasty things happened that year. The proper births of Nu Metal and Millennial Teen pop are not wrongs easily forgiven. The first Creed album, Britney Spears, Backstreet Boys, Limp Bizkit. It was almost terminally bad.

What '98 was good for though was being a depressed teenager. Even the bands that had until recently provided defiant angry Alt Rock turned up with down and out sad sack albums and I for one remember riding that trough to mope town pretty enthusiastically. It may not have been a great year to be listening to the radio, but it was the exact right time to feel morose and out of place, as demonstrated by these releases.

After losing their drummer Bill Berry REM turned up in late 1998 with what was broadly considered an uninteresting and tedious album full of navel gazing neurosis and tediously monotone musical ideas. I was not reading reviews at the time so all I knew was that REM had released an album that hit me right where I was. I still contend that it is a beautiful and subtly faceted album, emotionally vulnerable and completely hypnotic. It also boasts a bushel of delicate melodies that form like crystals and shimmer gorgeously.

I can perhaps sympathize with those who say that The Smashing Pumpkins Adore represents a major mainstream rock act co-opting and homogenizing underground music currents. It was obtusely out of character for them to suddenly try and be a techno act. The label bandwagon jumpers might well fit in this case. But what I cannot do is relinquish the memories of listening to this album into the wee hours of the night with friends on nights when the world felt enormous yet stagnant. A place where anything could happen but nothing ever did. It's pure high school and purely gorgeous to me, even now.

If this were ten years ago I might feel like I needed to defend this inclusion. Back when everyone was kind of getting tired of the Elliott Smith sadness wave that rose up in the wake of his suicide. Now I think he's just about due for another round of re-discovery. I got in on Smith in the wake of his contribution to the Good Will Hunting soundtrack and XO was his first release in the wake of that success. More than any other album here this represents to me a lost way of relating to and experiencing music. I heard Smith on a film soundtrack and had to hunt from store to store, town to town over the space of months and months to collect his releases. I acquired this album at a record shop that no longer exists, buying their only copy. I felt like a victorious hunter. And then listening to it I was alone and unique in a uniquely beautiful world I could feel confident no one for miles and miles had yet experienced. It was a feeling of personal connection and privacy within a physically represented pop culture that one would be hard pressed to find now.

Monday Morning Glory with Sister Rosetta Tharpe

A little something to explode your preconceived notions about rock and roll. Sister Rosetta Tharpe doesn't care if you don't think women can play guitar, or if spirituals and rock and roll can't make common purpose, or if pacifism can't stir the blood. This is a non-religious spiritual war whoop over the longed for death of all war.

I personally don't think she needs the backing choir any more than she needs a second head but that doesn't make this any less a shocking thing to hear and see.

10 Neglected Songs From the Forgotten 90's

--Compiled by Tzarathustra--

As a connoisseur of 90's alternative music, I'm always coming across lists with titles like "12 Forgotten 90s Bands" or the like featuring extremely well-known bands like Collective Soul and the Gin Blossoms. Bands you may not have thought of in a while, but you still hear their music on in-store radio and nostalgia blocks on modern rock stations.

Well here's a good ten song playlist of 90s bands that were neglected in their day and are barely even rumors now. These are the no-hit wonders, the opening acts and local scene stars. They're forgotten heroes of 90s alternative rock.

Be: Frogpond

Formed in 1994, Frogpond released their first album in 1996 on Sony. Which tells you something about the rate at which guitar bands were being snapped up. This largely female outfit went from the Missouri boonies to touring behind their own album with Everclear in two years. And if you'll recal, in 1996, touring with Everclear was a pretty big deal.

River Otis: Dead Hot Workshop

From the same Tempe, AZ breeding ground that spawned Gin Blossoms and The Refreshments, this crop of dead-ender guitar rockers helped put the lie to "Alternative" as a thoroughly northwestern and depressive phenomenon. Sometimes it was just open chords and open roads on endless summer nights.

Sleep: The Fall Outs

The Fall Outs were A part-time concern of a handful of Seattle locals in the early 90s. They were the kind of band that results from compulsively creative people being in the same place for a long time and occasionally needing to have fun and make music. The title track off of their 1995 sophomore album is a spiky and ragged punk work out that in subject matter mirrors what was being expressed by Greenday, but retaining everybit of harried and authentic credibility Greenday never really even pretended to have. Credibility is depressing. Credibility gets forgotten. But the good news is it still sounds awesome!

Bury Me: Fig Dish

Beneficiaries of the turbulent climate surrounding the Chicago music scene in the early nineties rush to find the "next Seattle," Fig Dish wer swept up in the same signing binge that brought us Smashing Pumpkins and Liz Phair. Later they were victims of a more litteral type of climate turbulence when a blizzard in Nebraska wrecked their van and equipment while on tour. Their sound lights the 90s synapse in anyone who formed that circuitry in record stores that smelled like incense, and on nights cruising that smelled like your friends' second hand smoke and fields of ripe corn.

Mighty K.C.: For Squirrels

An infamous "What if" of 90s Alt Rock, For Squirrels were on the verge of releasing their first album, but on the road back from a successful gig at the iconic CBGB's in Manhattan their van blew a tire and overturned. Their vocalist, bassist, and manager all died in the crash. About a month later their first album Example was released and got a surprising degree of positive notice thanks to its debt to early REM, cracking the Billboard top 200.

Lone Star Song: Grant Lee Buffalo

A band that had the backing of the critics and their peers and which still recieves positive rememberance among discerning list makers; Stockton, California's Grant Lee Buffalo never quite hit the commercial heights they were likely hoping for. They never had that one song that would have gotten them heavy traction on the nostalgia circuit twenty years later. But their rich textures blending earthy and ethereal are still something grand to discover and behold.

Leather Jacket Weather : Coyote Shivers

Perhaps best remembered for his appearance in the 90s nostalgia-mainline film Empire Records (Watching it now is like shooting a cocktail of Clinton era ennui, Crystal Pepsi, and Friends reruns right into your eyeball), eccentric rock journeyman Coyote Shivers also provided the capstone song for that film as sung by Renee Zellwegger (Sugar High). Leather Jacket Weather displays a ragged bounce and humor that recalls Stiff Records product of the late 70's but with big KISS-inspired guitars.

One More Astronaut: I Mother Earth

If you have an empty spot in your playlist right between Smashing Pumkins, HUM, and Our Lady Peace, might I recommend I Mother Earth. Formed in the same Toronto, Canada as gave us Our Lady Peace, I Mother Earth was Perhaps lost in the buzz surrounding the hit machine release that was Our Lady Peace's Clumsy for the length and breadth of 1997/98. But there is no denying their ambition, and the time to circle back and pick them out, if you haven't already, is now.

Out of my Head: Junkhouse

Another example of how the nineties brought roots textures back into rock and roll mainstream. Even though Junkhouse never made it terribly big they were on a major label. And at the same time bands like Counting Crows were proving that the public were hungry for these sort of rustier home brewed sounds. Out of My Head has a straining urgency and a sense of building sonic excess that climbs from pensive to purgative.

Freeway: Salmon Blaster

Perhaps more easily recalled by 90s kids north of the U.S. Canadian border. For residents south of that line Salmonblaster are a fun late stage discovery. Especially if you're looking for that jolt of attitude and energy that always seemed to just barely peek through on 90s alt rock radio between Stone Temple Pilots singles. You know the kind of, "What the F#*K was that?" moment where you hear a song and get as close to the radio as you can to see if maybe they'll I.D. the band because you know they'll never play it again. Because that's just not how radio works.

  But hey, "...there's this new band we think you'll enjoy. So strap in everyone for the first single off their debut album My Own Prison, it's Creed!"

And lo, dark days were upon us all.