Then:
- XTC, Apple Venus, Volume 1
- Everything But The Girl, Temperamental
- Soundtrack, Magnolia
- Indigo Girls, Come On Now Social
- Pet Shop Boys, Nightlife
- Belle and Sebastian, Tigermilk
- Steve Wynn, My Midnight
- Pizzicato Five, Playboy & Playgirl
- Jason Falkner, Can You Still Feel?
- Ben Folds Five, The Unauthorized Biography of Reinhold Messner
British oddball alt-pop trio XTC became one of my favorite bands five years earlier after I borrowed Oranges and Lemons from the library and quickly consumed the rest of their back catalog, aliases and all (see their fab psychedelic side project Dukes of Stratosphear). At this time, their most recent album was 1992’s Nonsuch. Disappointed with their major label’s lack of promotion and nonexistent royalties, they went on a seven-year strike, finally freed up to independently put out some long-gestating new music in 1999. This wait explains why Apple Venus, Volume 1 was likely my most-anticipated release ever. Happily, it fully lived up to the prose written about each song-in-demo-form in Neville Farmer’s book XTC: Song Stories published six months before. Predominantly orchestral and acoustic, it endures as an intriguing next step for a band that could’ve taken this mature direction much further had they not split up after 2000’s more trad-rock Wasp Star (originally conceived of as Apple Venus Volume 2.)
This year, I also finished grad school. Without anything so much resembling a job lined up, I lived off my savings for a few months while I got my shit together; in turn, this limited my ability to buy much new music (I was borrowing from libraries a lot.) Viewing the top ten I cobbled together at year’s end (by then I was temping and had at least some income), there’s mostly new music by favorite artists (the new Aimee Mann songs on Magnolia held as much currency for me as the XTC album) and one library discovery (Falkner’s superlative power-pop.) Tigermilk was technically a 1996 album but it had a limited release of 1,000 copies at the time and wasn’t heard by mostly anyone until its CD release three years later. (Still, I’ve left it out of the below list.)
Now:
- The Magnetic Fields, 69 Love Songs
- Fiona Apple, When The Pawn…
- Original Cast, Hedwig and the Angry Inch
- XTC, Apple Venus, Volume 1
- Fountains of Wayne, Utopia Parkway
- The Negro Problem, Joys & Concerns
- Everything But The Girl, Temperamental
- Steve Wynn, My Midnight
- Super Furry Animals, Guerilla
- Jason Falkner, Can You Still Feel?
Given how little new music I heard in 1999, it’s inevitable that my revised list today contains ample stuff I had yet to encounter then. Beloved by music critics, 69 Love Songs wasn’t exactly a bestseller on arrival but when I listened to 30-second snippets of some of its tracks online in Spring 2001, I knew I had to fork over the cash for the 3-CD set. It’s still one of my all-time faves even if I rarely listen to it as an album anymore (a half-dozen or so beloved tracks often surface on shuffle play.) As for Fiona Apple’s second album (not reproducing the 90+ word title here), I acquired it in the new year. Although her debut and her three subsequent records are all good-to-great, this is the one I play most often, not to mention the one whose style I wish she’d revisit if she were the sort of artist who did such things. Hedwig and the Angry Inch came into my life around the same time; had I owned a physical copy, it might’ve rarely left my CD player.
Temperamental, My Midnight and Can You Still Feel? all remain in regular rotation, as does Nightlife and Playboy & Playgirl to a lesser degree; they just miss the top ten here. Second albums from Fountains of Wayne and The Negro Problem are both the ones to get for each artist (though for the latter, frontman Stew’s solo work is even better), whereas Super Furry Animals’ arrestingly brain damaged third album is more of an advanced studies course, albeit a densely rewarding one. I now limit my Indigo Girls intake to comp Retrospective, while Ben Folds Five’s not uninteresting third album feels like a big step down from their first two.
