(My 100 favorite albums in chronological order: #42 – released March 8, 1994)
Track listing: Love & Kisses / Signposts / Same Rain / Baby I Can’t Please You / Circle Of Fire / Strawberry Road / When I Fall / Same Changes / Black Sky / Fighting With Fire / I Need Love / Wheel Of The Broken Voice / Gimme Some Truth
This entire project began with The Beatles; forty-odd entries on, we’ve reached possibly the most Beatles-esque album in my music library. It opens with trilling harpsichord on the left stereo channel and a treated vocal on the right, and ends with an ominous cover of a John Lennon solo song heavily submerged in reverb. In between, there are tunes with Fab Four-ish titles like “Strawberry Road” and “Same Rain”, lots of melodic, ringing electric guitar riffs, and a general excess of pure pop hooks. Colin Moulding, a member of the most Beatles-esque band I’ve written about thus far even plays bass and co-produced one song. And, although Martinis & Bikinis simply wouldn’t exist without the likes of Revolver and Abbey Road, what prevents it from seeming derivative or mere pastiche (in other words, the collected works of Lenny Kravitz) is the woman on the cover.
Sam Phillips (not to be confused with the Sun Records impresario) is many things: a gifted singer-songwriter, an underrated alt-rock goddess, a composer of incidental television music (all those “la, la la’s” on Gilmore Girls) and a performer with a stage presence that’s both warmly confident and magnificently eerie. In recent years, she has also become a fiercely independent artist, almost an iconoclast of sorts—a quality one can trace back near the start of her career, when she recorded Contemporary Christian music under her birth name, Leslie Phillips. After four well-received albums in that genre, she concluded she no longer wanted to be “a cheerleader for God” (as she bluntly put it in one interview) and switched over to secular pop music (and professionally adopted a childhood family nickname). Whether brought on by an actual crisis of faith, feeling discomfort from that boxed-in community, or by meeting musician T-Bone Burnett (who became both her longtime producer and romantic partner after helming her final Leslie album), her decision to leave one world behind for another continually enhances the cultural, philosophical, and yes, spiritual nature of much of her subsequent catalog.
Transitioning from religious to secular music, her artistry immediately flourished. The Indescribable Wow (1988), her debut as Sam, is a near-perfect ten-track album of sly, sighing retro pop. A little more tart and perhaps a few shades darker, Cruel Inventions (1991) kicks off with the clever confession, “If I told myself I believed in love, and that’s enough / I’d be lying,” and concludes with a gorgeous manifesto against uniformity (“Where The Colors Don’t Go”). Both records are very good, though the former’s production sometimes feels a little dated and the latter is occasionally a touch too internal (it could use a little more sweetening). By contrast, Martinis & Bikinis is an important step forward, not only for Phillips’ growing confidence and agility as both a lyricist and a tunesmith, but also in how effortlessly it balances her affable persona with an ever-cunning acidity (just look at that album cover).
Following “Love and Kisses”, a minute-long apéritif whose lyrics contain the album’s purposely frivolous title, Phillips doles out one catchy, tightly constructed pop song after another. Practically every instrumental and vocal part provides some sort of hook, from the clipped barre chords of “Signposts” and the elastic bass line of “Same Rain” to the declarative opening riffs of both “When I Fall” and “Same Changes” (the latter almost as effective as the one in The Beatles’ “Day Tripper”). And yet, only roughly half of Martinis & Bikinis is strictly guitar pop. As with the Fab Four, Phillips doesn’t shy away from adornments inspired by a spectrum of musical genres. “Baby I Can’t Please You”, for instance, has a Middle Eastern flavored, Van Dyke Parks string arrangement (along with plenty of sitars and tablas), while ecological lament “Black Sky” aims for Tom Waits-style, post-apocalyptic minimalism, with Phillips’ vocal almost entirely carrying the melody over a stark, clanging percussion-heavy backdrop. Both are pop songs that also expand the idea of what such a thing can contain.
Martinis & Bikinis’ most striking departure, “Strawberry Road”, is on one hand not much of a departure at all, given that its Beatles-isms fit so seamlessly alongside all of the album’s other Beatles-isms. But this track borrows a bit more extensively: in addition to the title, an obvious gloss on “Strawberry Fields Forever”, the sparse, staccato strings recall those in both “Eleanor Rigby” and “For No One” and the swooping, backing “aaahhh’s” could be from any number of Lennon/McCartney compositions. And yet, while even the most casual listener could detect those influences, you’d never mistake it for a Beatles song. Whether it’s her highly distinctive voice (somewhere between a twang and a lilt), or her particular way with a melody (a trait much easier to intuit than adequately describe), the song is almost like alchemy, with Phillips spinning something new and unique out of various existing, recognizable parts.
Still, while I’m willing to bet that her command of music, melody and vocal tone are often what draw new listeners towards Phillips, her lyrics are what really prolong that initial sense of discovery and intrigue. Although certainly comfortable with making simple, accessible declarations like “Baby I Can’t Please You” and “I Need Love”, more often than not, she’s cultivating an inquisitive persona—she’s ultimately a seeker. Of course, once you know about her past life as the “Christian Cyndi Lauper”, it’s hard not to equate this whole nature as a result of leaving that past behind. However, she’s crafty to a degree that her specific references to such are few and far between. Here, they surface on “I Need Love”, the album’s catchiest, most direct pop song. On the chorus, she admits, “I need love / not some sentimental prison,” then follows it with, “I need God / not the political church.” She tempers that statement’s boldness with the next line: “I need fire / to melt the frozen sea inside me,” shifting back from a cultural to an intimate and fully personal context. It’s not hard to fathom why this remains Phillips’ best known song, though you have to wonder if all those who first heard it in the Liv Tyler vehicle Stealing Beauty or later via a perfume ad had any idea what it was really about.
What’s explicitly stated in “I Need Love” is actually embedded throughout Martinis & Bikinis, but in more poetic and often thornier (and ambiguous) language: “I got myself so tightly wound I couldn’t breathe” (the opening line of “Signposts”); “You try to tell the world how it should spin / but you live in terror with the hollow men” (from “Baby I Can’t Please You”); “You circle the city from the sky / watching children swallowing your lies” (from “Circle Of Fire”); “You can’t get there with your morals or without love” (from “Strawberry Road”). All these songs are deliberately left open to interpretation; the person she hopes to encounter in “When I Fall” could very well be a human being or God, while the subject of “Fighting With Fire” is either a crooked businessman or the Devil himself. As Leslie, she proselytized as the genre required of her; as Sam, she questions. Not only did secular pop music enable her to reach a wider audience by default, it also allowed Phillips to come into her own, opening up worlds of thought and expression that, by her third album as Sam, she was fully taking advantage of.
It so happens that Phillips will return to this project each time she makes another significant career change, but the first one is still years away. Meanwhile, 100 Albums itself will return in January with an entry that both sums up and redefines three decades of British pop.
(My 100 favorite albums in chronological order: #41 – released February 28, 1994)
Track listing: Urban Clearway / Former Lover / Hug My Soul / Like A Motorway / On The Shore / Marble Lions / Pale Movie / Cool Kids of Death / Western Wind – Tankerville / The Boy Scouts of America
“Urban Clearway”, the opening salvo of London trio Saint Etienne’s third album suggests that it will be a very different beast from the first two. Granted, Fox Base Alpha and So Tough had their share of atmospheric, pulsating electronic instrumentals, but they were hidden behind simpler pleasures like a dance cover of a Neil Young song or a neighborhood café narrative that unambiguously invited listeners into its world. Tiger Bay, on the other hand, introduces itself via a barrage of mechanical rhythms straight out of the Kraftwerk songbook (or Donna Summer’s “I Feel Love”).
Then, at 1:16, it curves left as a cornucopia of real strings, woodwinds and harp glissandos all make nice on top of the synthesizers—the song’s heretofore monochrome world has just opened up considerably, now resembling a exuberant version of an imagined late ‘70s action/adventure TV theme (Charlie’s Angels? Hart To Hart?). Perhaps “Urban Clearway” is, at its core, opening credits music for this, the most cinematic of all Saint Etienne albums—it even shares its title with a 1959 Hayley Mills film. But then, the song curves left again, from major to minor key in the final minute. What kind of movie is this? Certainly not a fluffy comedy. Perhaps a kitchen sink drama? Maybe even an epic?
After the adrenaline rush of “Urban Clearway” comes its almost polar opposite: a hushed folk song. “Former Lover” begins with four strummed Spanish guitar chords, each of them slowly plucked so one can hear every single note they contain. Then, the guitar plays a rapid succession of five-note arpeggios over which we hear a sighing harmonica and pining vocalist Sarah Cracknell, who provides the melody via lyrics doled out in simple, Zen-like phrases (“Milan, when I was a kitten”, “Close all of the doors, Maisie”). The transition from the first track to the next nearly induces whiplash, but “Former Lover” is secretly the yang to the previous song’s yin.
Throughout their first three albums, Saint Etienne seemingly pride themselves on what startling juxtaposes they can come up with between (and often within) songs; a majority of Tiger Bay plays like proto folk-tronica, like an imagined collaboration between such disparate souls as Fairport Convention and Gary Numan. However, it’s still pop music and by itself, “Former Lover” is striking in both its somberness and melodicism and for the cozy melancholy it instantly conjures: curling up in a comfy chair, staring out a window, rain gently falling, its narrator delicately, arrestingly lost in thought and reverie.
Tiger Bay’s next two songs were also among its three singles. “Hug My Soul” sports even lusher orchestration than “Urban Clearway”, especially in its opening string fanfare. But Saint Etienne are still primarily an indie dance band (Wikipedia’s catch-all phrase for them) at this point in their career, and the song’s disco beat defines it. Faintly reminiscent of the old Andrea True Connection hit “More, More, More”, it pursues the same end (sex, natch) but via a kinder, gentler, but no less lustful means. By stretching out each world in the chorus almost to its breaking point (“I’ll… be… there…”) before getting to the song’s title, she makes her move but seems almost nonchalant about doing so, and thus all the more irresistible. It’s one of the album’s catchiest, classiest songs, but also atypical top 40 fare—for instance, what other ’94 pop hits featured a luxurious vibraphone solo?
“Like A Motorway” is somehow even catchier and further out there. Switching back from live strings to full-on electronica, its lengthy, instrumental intro positions it as a companion piece to “Urban Clearway”—that is, until Cracknell appears, sighing the song’s main hook (“He’s gone”) into an analog synth cavern. What follows is one of the more sublime and enigmatic songs in the band’s catalog. On the surface, it’s simply another vaguely Latin-accented tale of a former lover, a man who has just left a woman, but she’s not the singer. While Cracknell empathizes with her, she’s also observing from a distance. It all feels like an Antonioni film, with lengthy instrumental passages occasionally broken up by such musings as, “She said her life was like a motorway / dull gray and long, until he came along.” Whereas “Hug My Soul” looked ahead in anticipation, “Like A Motorway” stares in the opposite direction, pondering what has occurred, trying to cull meaning from the past.
A departure from previous Saint Etienne releases in that it less resembles a sample-heavy mix tape with bits and pieces of pop culture effluvia serving as the glue holding all of it together, Tiger Bay is more of an actual ten-track song album. Although it eschews samples (mostly for string arrangements), it has three instrumentals (possibly four, depending on whether you isolate “Tankerville” from the medley it forms with “Western Wind”), the second of which, “On The Shore” returns to the band’s original concept of using a series of guest vocalists. Shara Nelson (best known for Massive Attack’s “Unfinished Sympathy”) lends her soulful wail to a cod-reggae backing track that’s gently buoyed along by an insistent, two-note staccato filigree and occasional string and oboe interjections. Pretty and pleasant and not at all profound, it works well enough as a breath of fresh air between two far more serious tracks.
“Marble Lions” patiently lies in waiting on the other side. At first a return to the whispered elegance of “Former Lover”, it builds slowly, but from the onset is far more direct. Cracknell sings, “Everybody wants something and I want it all,” but not in a bratty way—more like in awe of the world and all its possibilities. “Stars are calling, goodnight, darling; don’t say goodbye” goes the gentle chorus; with it, Cracknell (who co-wrote the song with Michael Bund) appears to be praying for this special moment to endure for as long as it can. When the full orchestra appears after two minimally arranged verses of isolated electric guitar, flute and oboe, the effect is the same as in “Urban Clearway”, everything coming to life at once. Both antidotes to the existential despair of “Like A Motorway”, “On the Shore” and “Marble Lions” take comfort in the here and now: they are calm oases no matter how brief, as essential to life (or any narrative) as breathing.
The third of the album’s singles (but the first one to be released), “Pale Movie” is Tiger Bay’s most Euro-sounding track (band member Bob Stanley described as “a pastiche of a Spanish folk song”), and, with its florid orchestration, on-the-nose flamenco guitar and insistent disco beat, also its most dated song (although it actually pre-dated the whole Ricky Martin/Jennifer Lopez-led Latin pop craze by five years). However, Saint Etienne is one of those rare outfits that excel at being both frothy and cerebral. It’s not difficult to get swept away by the song’s many effusive charms, from the swirling, effervescent “la, la, la” chorus to purposely silly lyrics that name-drop American actress Demi Moore and Nepalese mountaineer Sherpa Tenzing.
If any single theme emerges from Tiger Bay’s diverse collection of sounds and tones, it’s the persistence of movement. Although the album title references a singular place (a Welsh port), its ten tracks form a travelogue of sorts, only more of the mind than any specific locale. It doesn’t matter exactly where the “Urban Clearway” runs or where the “Marble Lions” sit or even if “Tankerville” can be pinpointed on a map; there is even the nagging feeling that not all the album (or possibly any of it) is set in Tiger Bay itself. Instead, each song simply provides an outline for the listener to project his or her own ideas as to what the inhabited landscape is. For example, take “Cool Kids of Death”, a nearly six-minute long electro-dance instrumental. Its chief hooks are house piano chords, Cracknell’s occasional wordless backing vocals and a six-note melodica riff that’s almost a variation of the theme song to The Saint. As with any instrumental, there’s purposely no context apart from the title (and even that was originally meant to be “Cool Kiss of Death”). Still, the track’s relentless pace suggests more than just a placeholder—at best, one can imagine some sort of sustained action occurring; whether it involves the titular figures or not is left up to one’s own imagination.
At least three different versions of Tiger Bay exist. The one surveyed here is the original UK release; a few months later, an American edition (with the band photo on the cover) came out, but with an altered track listing: “Hug My Soul” and “Former Lover” swapped places (I actually prefer this sequencing, only because it works and, as an American, it was the first way I heard it) and “Western Wind/Tankerville” was completely obliterated and replaced with “I Was Born On Christmas Day”, an even frothier track than “Pale Movie” that was a stand-alone UK single the previous December. Rather inexplicably, the album was re-released in the UK in 1996 with an “amplified” track listing that added on four more songs, including “He’s On The Phone”, their highest charting UK hit (#11), first released in late ’95 to accompany the singles collection Too Young To Die.
I didn’t hear the original UK version until it was part of the band’s “deluxe edition” two-disc reissue series of their back catalog in 2009-2010. Previously, I considered Tiger Bay as one of Saint Etienne’s lesser albums; hearing it with “Western Wind/Tankerville” intact, the album suddenly, beautifully, fully resonated. A seven-minute, three-part suite, the track opens with “Former Lover”-like austerity, Cracknell singing what could be a trad-folk melody (“Western wind / when will thou blow?”) over mournful acoustic guitar—all nearly resembling something from The Wicker Man soundtrack. Around the one-minute mark, strings begin slowly fading in, along with a burbling electronic undercurrent. Thirty seconds later, you sense a heavy Serge Gainsbourg influence with the arrival of a full orchestra (complete with harp glissando) and a beat that anticipates trip-hop (a genre that will start deeply permeating 100 Albums in a few entries). This is the instrumental “Tankerville” portion of the song. Unhurriedly flowing like a glass-eyed stream but punctuated by dramatic orchestral flourishes, it continues until the last minute when “Western Wind” reappears, only in a slightly more foreboding key. What wasn’t exactly lighthearted at the beginning ends rather ominously with Cracknell and guest vocalist Stephen Duffy reprising the opening melody and lyrics as the trip-hop beat and orchestration quietly continue, only joined by a faint, siren-like noise.
When preceded by “I Was Born on Christmas Day”, “The Boy Scouts of America” makes precious little sense. However, with “Western Wind/Tankerville” as its lead in, it registers more clearly as part of Tiger Bay’s overall design. A lingering wisp of a song, it depicts a narrative about a boy who “has to keep guard” over a girl who “lies in bed” in a house in Paraguay. We never learn what he’s protecting her from, only that “God has derailed the Lonestar train / that could take her away from sadness and pain.” Cracknell relays the simplistic melody in her beguiling, childlike voice as the opulent, John Barry-esque orchestration seems less pop song than almost folk murder-ballad designed specifically for the stage or screen. At the final verse, she enigmatically concludes, “The Boy Scouts of America taught him all that he knows.” The strings linger a bit, and then fade out into the ether. The album closes as effectively and dramatically as it began.
Tiger Bay was such a departure for Saint Etienne that it likely baffled a lot of the band’s UK fans (the botched American release had nary an impact on their standing in the States.) Like So Tough, it entered the top ten, but plummeted rapidly down the charts. Perhaps in response to this public indifference (and also exhaustion from having recorded three albums in as many years), the band took a four-year sabbatical; we’ll catch up with them when they return with their fourth album—yet another departure, albeit a radically different one from So Tough to Tiger Bay.
Up next: A singular voice seeking no sentimental prisons, no political churches.
(My 100 favorite albums in chronological order: #40 – released September 27, 1993)
Track listing: Can You Forgive Her / I Wouldn’t Normally Do This Kind of Thing/ Liberation / A Different Point Of View / Dreaming Of The Queen / Yesterday, When I Was Mad / The Theatre / One And One Make Five / To Speak Is A Sin / Young Offender / One In A Million / Go West
A band’s best work typically does not come after its first greatest hits album, particularly if that compilation sells well or provides a successful career-to-date overview. More often than not, subsequent efforts will pale in comparison: how can the average band compete with its own best work, or at least the perception such a package suggests? For every rare mid-or-late-career triumph, you’ll find ten or twenty albums made by artists who are past their prime, their artistry steadily in decline—an unfortunate but unavoidable fate in as fickle and fluid a cultural landscape as pop music.
Leave it to the Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe to defy this trend. Arriving two years after Pet Shop Boys Discography (a dutiful but illuminating compilation of the band’s UK singles through 1991), Very is the emphatic opposite of marking time or clinging to the coattails of past successes. While no major musical departure from the band’s beloved, foppishly witty, equally cerebral and celebratory synth-pop (a template they would, in fact, later significantly alter on occasion) Very is a crucial turning point in the band’s oeuvre: it altogether sounds louder, more audacious and vivacious and freer than any of their previous work (especially their last studio album, the elegantly muted Behaviour).
You can partially track this change in approach to Tennant’s publicly coming out as gay, which he more or less first did on record via Discography’s two new songs (“DJ Culture” and “Was It Worth It”). Very both acknowledges and revels in this admission, lending context to songs that previously would’ve been all subtext. While this newfound openness can’t help but diminish PSB’s enigmatic allure just a little, it also pushes them into bold, unprecedented lyrical and emotional territory—the album unquestionably lives up to its title. Although their next record, Bilingual (1996) would more closely dovetail with my own coming out, in retrospect Very was just as significant a talisman for me in that process. As much as I wish not to reduce Very to a “coming out” album, it is an inextricable component of it, with more than half of the songs addressing the very notion that freedom comes from openness and candor.
Whereas Behaviour’s first track was the slow burning, contemplative “Being Boring”, Very’s is more a shock to the system. “Can You Forgive Her” practically explodes on contact, its sonic playground of orchestral synth-stabs careening on by at an almost militant, march-like tempo. The song’s narrator addresses a young man whose girlfriend accuses him of retaining romantic feelings for a childhood friend. Although Tennant does not identify the latter as male, he provides enough clues (“You drift into the strangest dreams / of youthful follies and changing teams”) for intuitive listeners to easily make the inference. While Tennant almost pities the young man (damning his appetite for revenge as, “Childish, so childish!”), he’s also on his side, egging him on, reminding him, “She’s made you some kind of laughing stock / because you dance to disco and you don’t like rock.” Much of Very seethes with anger and contempt for being boxed in and held back from whom you really are. Also the album’s lead single (I’ve embedded its totally bonkers video below), “Can You Forgive Her” had a manifesto’s impact—in it, you could practically hear Tennant and Lowe saying, upfront, “This is who we are, and you’re either with us or you’re not.”
This idea of coming clean resurfaces throughout Very. Second track “I Wouldn’t Normally Do This Kind of Thing” replaces the first song’s coming-to-light paranoia with an almost euphoric sense of acceptance. The very song title is all about freeing yourself via thoughts and actions others wouldn’t expect of you; when Tennant tosses off comments like, “I feel like taking all my clothes off / and dancing to the Rite of Spring”, he does so with the glee of someone fully throwing caution to the wind. The sweet, mid-tempo “Liberation” further articulates these feelings, only placing them in a hyper specific context: “Your love is liberation,” he sings in the chorus, and while it’s a common, simplistic statement, coming from Tennant it feels staggering to be this emotionally open and sincere (certainly a long way from “I love you / you pay my rent”). That he does this without getting sappy about it is even more admirable—note the simple yearning and understatement with which he sings the phrase, “You were sleeping on my shoulder”.
Still, a PSB album of nothing but happy love songs would find them truly being boring, and Very has plenty of drama. Some of it is the usual relationship stuff: “A Different Point of View”, where a couple butts heads at seemingly all possible angles of thought and speech; “One and One Make Five”, possibly one of the catchiest songs ever about infidelity that, as a bonus, also incorporates arithmetic; “Young Offender”, where Tennant considers a much younger lover over a plethora of video game noises and dance club beats, playing the self-deprecating elder to the hilt (“I’ve been a teenager since before you were born,” he drily muses); and “One In A Million”, where Tennant pleads with his lover not to leave him but cleverly turns the tables on himself, realizing that he, not his lover, is the anomaly the song’s title suggests.
However, Very’s highlights often cast internal struggles within a wider context. The lush, loping “Dreaming of the Queen” is about the particularly British obsession the title phrase references. Tennant reminisces of having tea with her Royal Highness, along with Princess Diana and an undisclosed “you” addressed in the second person. The song has plenty of that droll PSB humor (listen to how Tennant sings the second half of this couplet: “For I was in the nude / the old Queen disapproved”) but it’s more melancholy than anything, especially at the chorus: “There were no more lovers left alive / no one has survived.” He concludes, “And that’s why love has died / yes it’s true / look it’s happened to me and you.” As much of an AIDS song as “Being Boring”, in the years since Diana’s death, “Dreaming of the Queen” only feels more wistfully sad.
“Yesterday, When I Was Mad” sits at the other end of the tonal spectrum. Like “It’s A Sin”, it has an extended, calm-before-the-storm intro that gives way to a maelstrom of driving techno/rave, Tennant coming off like a deranged professor with his filtered, spoken word vocal in the verses while goofy synth noises wildly bounce all over him. Deliriously over-the-top and completely unapologetic about it, the song would simply be another glorious PSB trifle if not for how Tennant uses it to explore his own newfound openness. Between all of his gloriously bitchy asides, he admits, “I don’t believe / in anyone’s sincerity / and that’s what’s really got to me.” He’s wise enough to understand the consequences of being forthcoming, but also admits, “Then, when I was lonely / I thought again and changed my mind.”
As Very progresses, it becomes clear that personal liberation is only the first step. With “The Theatre”, Tennant and Lowe present a fiery, cathartic “us vs. them” critique of class and gentrification; that it’s purposely done in the style of an Andrew Lloyd Webber showstopper—the very thing its protagonists finds contemptuous, is something few other artists could pull off. “We’re the bums you step over as you leave the theatre,” Tennant and a massed chorus sing as the music’s orchestral swell (complete with sweeping harp glissandos) empowers them like a vast supporting army. The feeling carries over to “To Speak Is A Sin”, which could very well accompany that scene in Far From Heaven where Dennis Quaid’s closeted character enters a gay bar for the first time, finding himself in a strange new space where every man presumably keeps to himself but yearns to make contact with another. Painting a lingering portrait of men “ordering drinks at the bar” as a mournful sax adds a new flavor to the band’s usual electronic palette, it has none of the previous song’s fury, but it recognizes that there’s safety in numbers and at least some hope of redemption in the camaraderie of like-minded souls.
Very concludes by reinforcing this solidarity with a stirring cover of song originally by (of all people) The Village People. When that campy costumed quintet recorded “Go West” in 1979, it was yet another one of their disco-flavored paeans to San Francisco, that liberal gay mecca which welcomed thousands of young small town misfits with open arms. Keeping in line with and neatly summarizing Very’s overall aesthetic, PSB transform the song into an sumptuous orchestral dance floor banger with a loud, manly, operatic chorale complementing Tennant’s lead vocal. As cover choices go, it’s a perfect fit for Very because it is about liberation, about openness, about community. It may be filtered through an idealistic haze, but that doesn’t diminish one whit lyrics as affectingly straightforward as, “There where the air is free / we’ll be (we’ll be) who we want to be.” In tradition of the best PSB songs, it also lends itself to alternate interpretations. After all, it did come out at the height of the AIDS epidemic, which one could easily see as the impetus for its call to arms. The song’s music video even suggests another reading, the title command now directed towards the then-recently dissolved Soviet Union.
Since Very, we’ve had seven more albums from Tennant and Lowe (not to mention soundtracks, original cast recordings, remix and B-sidecompilations, etc.) that run the gamut from returns-to-form (Electric, Fundamental) to lethargic miscalculations (Elysium) to boilerplate pleasant PSB (Yes). For me (and I suspect most of their fans), nothing tops Very—it not only set the bar incredibly high, it also redefined what kind of bar the band hoped to set. It is essential listening for those struggling with their sexuality, and also for anyone seeking release through coming to terms with who they are for whatever reason.
(My 100 favorite albums in chronological order: #39 – released June 22, 1993)
Track listing: 6’1″ / Help Me Mary / Glory / Dance of the Seven Veils / Never Said / Soap Star Joe / Explain It To Me / Canary / Mesmerizing / Fuck and Run / Girls! Girls! Girls! / Divorce Song / Shatter / Flower / Johnny Sunshine / Gunshy / Stratford-On-Guy / Strange Loop
Like Brian Eno, Gordon Gano (of the Violent Femmes) or maybe even Steely Dan’s Donald Fagen, Liz Phair’s voice is all wrong. At times, she can just barely hold a tune, and she avoids vibrato as if it was a skunk crossing her path. Rob Sheffield once wrote she sounds like “Peppermint Patty on a bad caffeine jag”, still the best assessment of her tone I’ve ever read. But like the other artists mentioned above, Phair succeeded despite her vocal limitations, getting by on her wits, her moxie and most of all, her singular perspective.
When this 26-year-old Chicagoan made Exile In Guyville, the world recognized it as low-fi, guitar-based indie rock, but it didn’t sound exactly like anything else at the time; arguably, two-plus decades on, no one has ever fully replicated its particular, driving, disarming allure (not even Phair herself). As debut albums go, it’s one of the all-time best, up there with Songs of Leonard Cohen, Little Earthquakes, The Modern Lovers, etc. (plus a handful of records I’ll cover later in this project); however, it’s also one of the most misunderstood albums in some circles, both then and now. Phair and Exile were loathed as much as they were loved, for many reasons—some fully plausible, others regrettably inevitable.
What first caught most people’s attention about Exile was its explicit sexual content. After all, the record’s catchiest song is called “Fuck and Run”, where, over crisply strummed chords, Phair reminisces about a decade-plus of casual hook-ups, plainly lamenting, “Whatever happened to a boyfriend, the kind of guy who makes love ‘cause he’s in it?” The repeated line, “I didn’t think this would happen again,” provides the song’s hook and if the word “fuck” weren’t in the title and lyrics, it might’ve been a radio hit. Elsewhere, it was hard to ignore such tracks as “Glory” (a folkish ode to oral sex) or the infamous “Flower”, where Phair recites both a singsong melody and countermelody of smut talk (“I want to be your blow job queen” being a typical example). I’m guessing Phair wasn’t the first woman to ever sing such graphic lyrics, but she was undoubtedly the first that most people ever heard doing so, and she achieved instant notoriety for it.
But here’s the thing about Exile’s sexual content—the real, raw, explicit stuff only comprises a teeny tiny fraction of the album. Most Exile tracks are clean enough to get unedited radio airplay, and the hoopla over Phair’s occasionally dirty mouth overshadowed other capabilities—namely that she was a gifted singer/songwriter. MTV even aired videos (albeit almost exclusively on 120 Minutes) for two of Exile’s singles: “Never Said”, where in the chorus, Phair repeats a simple phrase (“I never said nothing”) over a remedial riff but does so with enough gusto and variation (often stretching the word “I” out to six or eight syllables) that she justifies sustaining it past three minutes, and “Stratford-On-Guy”, a tune about “flying into Chicago at night” which weds her most poetic lyrics (“As we moved out of the farmlands into the grid / The plan of a city was all that you saw”) to her most effective, sparkling, propulsive chorus.
In actuality, Phair pissed a lot of people off for reasons other than content. Some questioned her genuineness as an artist due to her roots (she grew up in Winnetka, a tony Chicago suburb), her good looks (she’s topless on Exile’s cover, which was taken in a photo booth) and her connections within Chicago’s Wicker Park neighborhood scene, unofficially dubbed “Guyville” by its insiders (which most notably also included the band Urge Overkill). Add to that Phair’s rudimentary vocals and shakiness as a live performer, and you can see why some dismissed her as overrated once Exile received increased media attention. Blame jealousy, classism or, as Gina Arnold eloquently does in her 33 1/3 series book on the album, sexism; also consider the mere notion that Phair would have the balls to suggest the whole LP was a song-by-song answer to the Rolling Stones’ revered 1972 opus Exile On Main Street. You could practically see hundreds of (mostly male) rock critics rolling their eyes at such a claim (some have suggested Phair simply made that shit up and I’m not interested enough in the Stones’ album to try to link it up with Exile On Guyville, although in her book Arnold makes a decent effort.)
The point missed by all these naysayers was that Phair, while an unconventional, shit-stirring talent, was nonetheless a real talent: that Exile in Guyville holds together so well and mostly sounds timeless is vindication of such. On opening rave-up “6’1””, she instantly wins you over with her underdog persona, her declaration of empowerment not necessarily dynamic, but certainly relatable and affecting. From there, she maintains that camaraderie through tales of roommate troubles (“Help Me Mary”), succinct denouncements of hero worship (“Soap Star Joe”), earned assertions of self-worth (the softly churning “Mesmerizing”, which musically could be bedsit bubblegum) and affably candid self-awareness (“Girls! Girls! Girls!”, where she comments on her confession that she gets away with “what the girls call murder” via her own sarcastic backing vocal). She’s so effortlessly good at appearing conversational that every phrase of the exquisite “Divorce Song” not only registers but resonates long enough to have a life of its own—what other 26-year-old you know could come up with something as damning and wise as, “And the license said you had to stick around until I was dead / but if you’re tired of looking at my face, I guess I already am”?
At eighteen tracks, Exile In Guyville is technically a double album (at least on vinyl), but at 55 minutes, it easily fits on one CD so superficially it doesn’t have the scope or breadth (not to mention length) of, for instance, English Settlement. Still, the album’s not all precise pop like “Fuck and Run” or “Never Said”. Its intimate swagger often cannily gives off the impression of being recorded in Phair’s bedroom (although it wasn’t); further underlining this aesthetic are tracks where she deviates from the indie pop ideal and aims for something darker, moodier, stranger—sides of Phair’s persona not as outwardly apparent or sensational as the aspiring Blow Job Queen. There are multiple stripped-down, guitar-and-voice numbers (“Glory”, “Dance of the Seven Veils”, “Gunshy”), a reverb-drenched piano-and-voice mood piece (“Canary”), a song made to seem comparatively lush by a backing, omniscient electronic hum (“Explain It To Me”) and another song (“Johnny Sunshine”) broken into two disparate parts, shifting from bluesy grit to dreamy psychedelia.
“Shatter” opens with a guitar strumming at waltz-tempo, the same four bars repeated until they take on a certain majesty. Feedback and other muted layers of noise come in one by one; then, Phair’s vocal finally appears at 2:30, her words cutting right to the bone (“And somethin’ about just being with you / slapped me right in the face, nearly broke me in two”). It’s the longest song on Exile, lasting over five minutes, with Phair pensively concluding, “Honey, I’m thinking maybe, you know just maybe, maybe,” off into a growing feedback ether. It’s all as frank as “Flower” (which happens to be the next track), but with a vulnerability that’s somewhat unexpected and almost revelatory.
Exile won that year’s Village Voice “Pazz and Jop” critics poll, and Phair was wise enough not to even try to replicate its sound (if not further its success). Her subsequent albums were much more polished and professional sounding, to the point where she worked with mainstream producers The Matrix on her fourth album, 2003’s Liz Phair and got an actual top 40 hit out of it (“Why Can’t I”); while I like some of Whip-Smart (1994) and a lot of Whitechocolatespaceegg (1998), neither are as special as Exile. Perhaps Exile’s essence was simply impossible for Phair to replicate once it brought her her success. Now middle-aged, she has stayed out of the limelight for most of the past decade. I’d like to think Phair has another Exile lurking within her, but even if she doesn’t, she remains that rare artist whose legacy will always be firmly secured by one heck of a debut album.
(My 100 favorite albums in chronological order: #38 – released May 11, 1993)
Track listing: I Should’ve Known / Fifty Years After The Fair / 4th of July / Could’ve Been Anyone / Put Me On Top / Stupid Thing / Say Anything / Jacob Marley’s Chain / Mr. Harris / I Could Hurt You Now / I Know There’s A Word / I’ve Had It / Way Back When
In 1993, Aimee Mann was best known as the lead singer of ‘Til Tuesday, a Boston quartet who scored one big hit eight years previously (“Voices Carry”), recorded three albums with each selling less than the previous one and split up before the 80s were over. The hit’s iconic music video forever etched a particular image of Mann in many people’s minds—the new wave girl with the single braid who, after three minutes of tolerating her bad, verbally abusive beau, finally, defiantly stands up and sings out loud in a theatre, much to his (and the surrounding audience’s) chagrin. Thus, by the time she re-emerged with her first solo album Whatever, it took most people by surprise, for who had expected that girl with the braid to make something so relatively inventive and smart?
Perhaps the album’s quality would’ve come as less of a shock if ‘Til Tuesday had been more than a one-hit wonder. While much of their early output is of a piece with the slick, period-reminiscent, synth-heavy sound of “Voices Carry”, one can sense Mann struggling to break out of that stylistic box as early as “Coming Up Close”, a gorgeous, sweeping pastoral ballad from the band’s second album Welcome Home (1986). The maturation between even that album and Everything’s Different Now (1988) is almost staggering: although still fairly glossy, the arrangements are far more nuanced (possibly the reason why it flopped, even with such melodic gems as “(Believed You Were) Lucky”), and the songs get their charge from Mann’s prickly, probing lyrics, many of them about her failed romance with fellow singer/songwriter Jules Shear.
Appearing five years later, Whatever and its opener and first single, “I Should’ve Known”, swiftly establishes Mann as the new alt-rock queen of the kiss-off. Following an extended, sonically adventurous intro (as if the track’s mechanisms are gradually coming to life), the guitars and drums soon kick in, along with Mann’s incensed but measured vocal. In ‘Til Tuesday, she never rocked so hard or appeared so explicitly angry, but her wry approach here keeps it all from becoming too heavy. She expertly utilizes both wordplay (“The minute that we hit the wall / I’ve should’ve known / the writing was upon the stall”) and onomatopoeia (the sung ellipses (“dot, dot, dot”) that immediately follow the song title, providing one of the biggest hooks). She even tempers her bitterness with sweet, Beatles-esque “ahhhs”. You could not ask for a better introduction or make a stronger case for Mann’s arrival as a solo artist.
The rest of Whatever dutifully showcases all her melodic instincts and songwriting prowess cultivated since ‘Til Tuesday disbanded. “Could’ve Been Anyone” and the nimble, poised “I Could Hurt You Now” are more sprightly kiss-off tunes in the mold of “I Should’ve Known”, while other songs take a few steps back, tartly addressing problematic relationships while being in the thick of them. In “Say Anything”, she acknowledges “the comfort of one more lame excuse” via a bridge with a wonderfully circular, Todd Rundgren-like bassline before telling her lover in the chorus, “Say anything, ‘cause I’ve heard everything.” Lest you think Mann’s cold as ice, she’s far more vulnerable on the reflective “4th of July”, where her clear-as-a-bell tone and the arrangement’s restraint (it could’ve just as easily been a standard power ballad) leave a lasting imprint. Same thing goes for “Stupid Thing”, a simple but melodically effective breakup song whose sorrow fully registers in both Mann’s front-and-center vocal and an exceptionally expressive guitar solo that practically mimics her tone.
While I doubt Mann would ever deny the confessional nature of her songs, as a narrator, she just as often inhabits characters. “Fifty Years After the Fair” makes sustained references to having lived through a time long before Mann was born, while in “Mr. Harris”, she sings, with intensive, specific detail of falling in love via a May-December romance, a scenario to my knowledge she has not personally experienced (at this writing she’s been married to contemporary/fellow musician Michael Penn for almost two decades). Burning with the just the right mix of optimism and longing for an imagined past, the former’s heavenly jangle-pop is a better fit for her than the latter’s impeccably arranged, classy-but-stuffy chamber music. But both work in her favor to suggest she’s not just all about bad breakups. “Put Me On Top” feels more personal, commenting on her languishing in record label limbo (“I should be riding on a float in the hit parade / instead of sitting on the curb behind the barricade”) but her self-deprecation (“Or at least put some hope in the bottom of the box,” she suggests as a last resort) is more relatable and applicable—pop star or not, who doesn’t want at least the promise of some sort of recognition?
Mann obviously merits recognition for Whatever’s success, but so does its producer, Jon Brion. A session musician who performed with ‘Til Tuesday on their last tour, Brion branched into production with Whatever and his touch immediately distinguishes the album from any other of its time (and also from everything Mann’s recorded since she stopped working with him after her third album.) His arrangements are like sonic playgrounds (think back to the opening of “I Should’ve Known”), favoring unconventional instruments such as calliope, Chamberlin, Mellotron and other effluvia mostly nicked from The Beatles’ post-Sgt. Pepper’s whimsy-enhanced side. Sometimes, he lays it on noticeably thick, such as the flute-and-martial drum chorus of “Jacob Marley’s Chain” or the fairground atmosphere (complete with trombone, old-timey piano and kiddie xylophone) enriching the lovely chord changes and psychedelic pastiche of closer “Way Back When”. Elsewhere, he’s a little subtler but still effective, casually dropping an up-to-the-minute drum loop into the opening of “Could’ve Been Anyone” or providing minimalist keyboard shading to “4th of July”.
As with Brian Eno and Talking Heads, or Thomas Dolby and Prefab Sprout, you sense how perfectly Brion and Mann fit together as producer and artist throughout Whatever, and they save their best for the penultimate track. From its first notes, “I’ve Had It” almost proceeds like clockwork, the percussion, acoustic guitar and piano dutifully repeating a hook soulfully, not mechanically. However, the song really comes to life at the chorus as ringing guitars and a bass harmonica make everything shimmer and glisten; the sensation fortifies the plainspoken awe of Mann’s lyrics as she reminisces about being in a band, and reflects on what she took away from it. She sings, “Oh experience is cheap / if that’s the company you keep / and a chance is all that I need / and I’ve had it.” How refreshing that the song title ends up not a declaration of weariness but a basic acknowledgement of an opportunity welcomed, challenged, tested and occurred. Thankfully, her directness is not at odds with the elegiac, intricate beauty of Brion’s production—they actually complete each other well, preventing “I’ve Had It” from seeming too cynical or, on the other hand, too idealistic.
Whatever was an act of redemption for Mann, turning her into a critical favorite (if not a commercial one). We’ll hear from her (and Brion) again on 100 Albums and discover how she confronts this conundrum by developing a persona steeped in it, while also gradually refining her sound.
Up next: Everybody else is doing it, so why can’t she?
(My 100 favorite albums in chronological order: #37 – released March 9, 1993)
Track listing: Mario’s Cafe / Railway Jam / Date With Spelman / Calico / Avenue / You’re In A Bad Way / Memo To Pricey / Hobart Paving / Leafhound / Clock Milk / Conchita Martinez / No Rainbows For Me / Here Come Clown Feet / Junk The Morgue / Chicken Soup
My first year in Boston, the day before Thanksgiving: I’m braving the chilly air, escaping my box-like Allston apartment to explore the city, my true new home. At Boomerang’s, an AIDS Action charity thrift store (the now long-gone, exceptionally spacious location on Canal Street near North Station), I pick up a cut-out-bin cassette of British trio Saint Etienne’s nearly five-year-old second album, along with a few others (including Prefab Sprout’sJordan: The Comeback). Upon leaving the store, I put So Tough into my Sony Walkman, and set off on foot towards the North End.
The first sounds I hear are a lone sigh and a man speaking, “Cigarettes… a cup of tea, a bun,” followed by a rapid crescendo of ambient noise (people in motion, forks clinking against plates) that’s abruptly replaced with house piano chords and a woman’s childlike voice singing a wordless hook. The rhythm track kicks in and the first verse begins. The vocalist, Sarah Cracknell, sounds slightly off-key, but charmingly so: she manages to seem bright-eyed and innocent without being overly cutesy or saccharine. The lyrics are a slice-of-life rendering of goings-on at a café in Kentish Town, London, painting a portrait via descriptions like “Squeezy bottles under Pepsi signs”, identifying regulars such as Jackie (who “wants to meet the Glitter Band”) and Dilworth (who is “a strange and lovely man”) and making references to then-current pop culture figures Prince Be (of hippie-rap duo P.M. Dawn) and professional boxer Chris Eubank.
Buoyed upon a stirring string sample, the chorus of “Mario’s Café” ties it all together: “When we meet for a while, Tuesday morning 10:00 AM”. Repeating that line until it becomes a mantra, the song exudes an infectious, beaming optimism that blooms in the chorus’ other key line: “Everyone’s dreaming of all they have to live for.” A flute solo follows the second chorus, and I begin noticing how much Cracknell’s voice resembles it, acting as another element of the entire arrangement rather than an overpowering lead, complementing the other sounds instead of playing on top of them. This reaches its fullest expression at the song’s end, when the rhythm track drops out, leaving only a variation of the sampled strings and Cracknell’s wordless sighs, washed out and blurred like an impressionist painting, as if we were viewing this café, this scene from above and far away, an ordinary moment forever etched in time.
As “Mario’s Café” concluded, physically, I was still in Boston but mentally, I felt like I was in Kentish Town. I’d never even set foot in London (still haven’t eighteen years later), but such is the transformative, hyper-specific power of Saint Etienne’s music that I believed I could practically see, feel and drink in this tiny little corner of the world previously unknown to me. Making my way through the North End’s narrow, hilly side streets and down main drag Hanover, the rest of So Tough affected me similarly, transporting me to such new, unusual yet sonically distinct and evocative places. By the time I hopped on the T back to Allston, trance epic “Junk the Morgue” even seemed to sync up perfectly with the sleek, kinetic motion one experiences riding a subway car, viewing out the window a blur of negative space as one whooshes on by through dark, endless tunnels.
Before we get to the rest of So Tough, some backstory on Saint Etienne. Most days, I consider them my favorite band (no one else will have more entries in 100 Albums) but they also draw a significant proverbial line in the sand in this project’s chronology. Until now, every artist I’ve written about has at least one exceptional musical talent warranting their inclusion here, whether as a vocalist, lyricist, pianist, producer, etc.; that’s not to say Saint Etienne lacks any of those talents (as a singer, Cracknell is on her own distinct plane) but their approach in cultivating them is radically different. The band’s founders, childhood friends Bob Stanley and Pete Wiggs aren’t technically proficient musicians—neither one can sing or really play a musical instrument. However, both are fervent music fans, the types one imagines having massive record collections encapsulating everything from hit singles to long-forgotten crate digging obscurities (additionally, Stanley is also a music journalist). Craftily making use of the time period’s newfangled, accessible technology (samplers, drum machines, cheap synthesizers) and studio assistance from engineer/unofficial band member Ian Catt, Stanley and Wiggs took punk and rap’s DIY nature (if not its sound) to heart, proving you could make great pop music if you had the vision (if not necessarily the technique).
Originally conceived as a vehicle with a revolving cast of vocalists (Moira Lambert sings on the band’s first single, an unrecognizable dance cover of Neil Young’s “Only Love Can Break Your Heart” which, oddly enough, remains their only charting song in the US), Stanley and Wiggs soon found an ideal permanent front-person in Cracknell. She first appears on Saint Etienne’s glorious third single, “Nothing Can Stop Us” which established the band’s cut-and-paste aesthetic, sounding as if they sampled bits and pieces of a dozen 1960s Dusty Springfield tunes and assembled them into something both familiar and fresh. While UK fans tend to revere the band’s debut album, Fox Base Alpha (1991), to me it’s a little half-baked apart from the aforementioned singles and a few isolated tracks like the lovely “Spring”; perhaps you just had to be there in early ‘90s London to feel and understand what sea change it indicated.
If Fox Base Alpha now scans as the rudimentary effort of music fans trying out ideas and discovering what they could accomplish, So Tough plays like the full actualization of that effort further enhanced by a newfound ambition to see just how far they could take it. The two albums do have a lot in common in terms of structure and content: both include snippets of film dialogue, inside jokes and other sampled sounds placed between the actual tunes, but So Tough is altogether more confident and songful, its transitions more surprising and inspired. With barely a moment of silence throughout its jam-packed duration, it’s less traditional-ten-song-album than grab-bag-mixtape; not everything scales the same heights as “Mario’s Café”, but that’s fine—on a few occasions, So Tough soars even higher than that.
Clocking in at over seven-and-a-half minutes, “Avenue” is the album’s centerpiece and not just for its epic length. It kicks off with a quick thud, as if instantly materializing before us. A faint fog of keyboards and Cracknell cooing, “Ooo-ooo-ooh… your… heart” over and over fades in until the first verse arrives. We hear her sing both the melody (as dictated by the lyrics) and a countermelody of nothing but “bup, bup, ba’s”. The mostly electronic music resembles what would transpire if someone cut up the entirety of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and spat it back out through a sampler. The chorus reprises the opening melody only to resolve in a thrilling, dramatic chord change where Cracknell urgently wails the line, “And, ooooh… oh, the clown’s no good,” stretching out “good” to four yearning, mysterious, blissful syllables.
As “Avenue” proceeds, it keeps revealing new facets, like the sudden, massive crack of thunder after the bridge, placing the song on hold for ten seconds before Cracknell’s “bup bup ba’s” re-emerge and we can move on to the next verse, or the harpsichord break occurring at 4:32, or the faint “woop woop’s” placed under Cracknell’s repeated wail of “Oh, the clown’s no good” beginning at 5:27. As it rises and falls, “Avenue” feels simultaneously unpredictable, dangerous, expansive and transcendent. It eventually fades out only to suddenly return at full blast, the melody obscured/replaced by a mélange of psychedelic sounds that soon vanishes just as quickly, leaving us with a few quietly chirping birds before some dialogue from Billy Liar (“A man could looooooose himself in London!”) brings us into the polar opposite next track, the undemanding, almost deliberately cheesy retro girl-group pop of “You’re In A Bad Way”.
Following “Memo to Pricey”, a non-sequitur 23-second link (basically a pub conversation backed with music from an ancient Chanel No. 5 advert) and dialogue from obscure 1972 film Made (“Do you think a girl should go to bed with fella…”) comes “Hobart Paving”, the album’s other peak. A simple, sparse ballad, it places Cracknell front-and-center singing an almost impossibly beautiful, fragile melody. Lyrically, the song seems to be about a woman waiting on a train platform, leaving someone or something behind (a lover, a family, a childhood home?), but it’s never as clean-cut as the scenario laid out in, say, The Beatles’ “She’s Leaving Home”. Instead, Cracknell strings phrases such as “Rain falls like Elvis’ tears,” together with song titles (“No Sugar Tonight”, “Dim all the Lights”) and the repeated line in the chorus, “Baby, don’t forget to catch me.” While the original UK album version sticks to this minimalist piano-and-voice template (along with a harmonica solo), the single version (which also appears on the album’s US edition) adds an orchestral arrangement from cult artist/Brian Wilson-collaborator Van Dyke Parks. Combining synthesizers with real instruments, it enhances the song tenfold, adding complexity without obscuring that which made it so affecting in the first place.
“Avenue” through “Hobart Paving” is the album’s most dynamic section, its two bookends illustrating Saint Etienne’s tendency to respectively create entirely new sonic worlds out of artifacts of (and references to) the past and infuse traditional song structures with their own singular outlook. The rest of So Tough pings back and forth between such extremes, as if to say anything is possible where pop music is concerned.
Naturally, tracks falling on that spectrum’s more experimental end are the ones you notice first. After “Mario’s Café” vanishes into the ether, “Railway Jam” begins with dialogue from the Michael Powell classic Peeping Tom (“I’m Helen Stevens…”) before a doo-wop sample (The Flamingos’ “Golden Teardrops”) appears, the clanging of a passing train gradually consuming it until the rhythm finally kicks in at 1:22; the peculiar, catchy instrumental that follows wouldn’t sound out of place on Brian Eno’s Another Green World(as Robert Christgau has noted). “Conchita Martinez” is even further out there, swerving between a techno rave-up about the titular tennis player and a sampled, 16-bar loop of the deliriously fast guitar hook from Rush’s “Spirit of The Radio” (!). “No Rainbows For Me” would be just a pleasantly dreary ballad if not for Cracknell’s submerged, unintelligible vocal, buried in a soupy arrangement that just seems to hang there like a scene in a David Lynch production. Superficially, “Junk the Morgue” resembles dance floor fodder, a Fox Base Alpha throwback until its sharpness slowly registers in waves—the pulsating beat, the Moroder-like synth washes, Cracknell’s intonation of such enigmatic, impenetrable phrases as “Close your eyes / kiss the future / junk the morgue.”
Still, Saint Etienne’s love of pop comes through just as often as their impulse to experiment. “Calico” isolates Cracknell to repeatedly, effervescently sighing the title world in the chorus, allowing 16-year-old female rapper Q Tee to take the verses. The latter’s distinct tone (perhaps a Brit equivalent to Digable Planets’ Ladybug Mecca) unlocks another door in the band’s universe, while the loping, Middle-Eastern accented melody creates a big enough hook for even the casual listener to hang on to. “Leafhound” is a playful whirlwind of Balearic guitar, orchestral synths and Cracknell’s sweet, conversational tone as she revisits a strangely familiar locale. She reminisces in the chorus, “Something about this place makes me lose a grip on time and space,” phonetically spelling out each syllable as if in awe. The tonal polar opposite of “Hobart Paving”, “Leafhound” cultivates a sense of return and renewal, with Cracknell concluding, “Yes, I know it’s strange / that you could be here with me now,” that last word neatly spiked with exuberance as if sung by the young girl on the album cover (who is actually Cracknell herself).
The original version of So Tough ends with a brief dialogue, presumably back at Mario’s Café (“Chicken Soup”), but the American release adds on “Join Our Club”, which was a UK single the previous year. An ideal album closer, it sums up everything great about Saint Etienne as a pop group, from the descending “ba, ba, ba’s” of its sighing, immediate chorus to its Stevie Wonder and The Lovin’ Spoonful quotes and groovy sitar solo; even if the song title was meant to be a little tongue-in-cheek (hence the lyric, “Teen Spirit is the ‘90s scene!,” six months after Nirvana’s Nevermind), it all scans like an invitation to be part of something new, exciting, different and grand. After hearing So Tough for the first time on that frigid yet sunny Wednesday afternoon, I counted myself a Saint Etienne fan for life.
(My 100 favorite albums in chronological order: #36 – released November 24, 1992)
Track listing: Who Needs Love (Like That) / Heavenly Action / Oh l’Amour / Sometimes / It Doesn’t Have To Be / Victim of Love / The Circus / Ship of Fools / Chains of Love / A Little Respect / Stop! / Drama! / You Surround Me / Blue Savannah / Star / Chorus / Love To Hate You / Am I Right? / Breath of Life / Take A Chance On Me
Erasure is the quintessential synth-pop duo of its era, if not the wittiest one (Pet Shop Boys) or the funniest (Sparks) or the sleaziest (Soft Cell) or the most accepted by the mainstream (Eurythmics) or the most innovative (OMD circa Dazzle Ships) or the most political (The Communards). Still, they exemplify an “opposites attract” component that is so elemental to the genre, pairing an outlandish, flamboyant singer (Andy Bell) with a bookish, stone-faced synth wizard (Vince Clarke). In their late ‘80s/early ‘90s heyday, they were a force of nature in their homeland of the UK, scoring five consecutive number one albums and a dozen top ten hits; their US sales were far more modest, limited to two top twenty singles (“Chains of Love”, “A Little Respect”) from 1988’s The Innocents (probably their best studio LP) and a fluke third hit (“Always”) six years later.
Pop! The First 20 Hits is exactly what the title claims it to be, collecting the band’s UK singles-to-date in chronological order, a format obviously modeled on Pet Shop Boys’ Discography from twelve months earlier. And while Erasure has interesting album tracks scattered throughout their discography (especially by the time you reach Chorus (1991)), Pop! is an ideal showcase for them. Like ABBA (whose songs gave Erasure their sole number one UK single via the ABBA-esque covers EP in summer ’92), Bell/Clarke are a consummate singles act. Naturally, not everything on Pop! scales the heights of “Chains of Love” or “A Little Respect” or even “Love To Hate You” but it has absolutely no all-out duds—not even a sappy aberration like “I Have A Dream”, which I always skip over on ABBA Gold.
Here’s the conundrum to grasping Erasure’s appeal: a lot of their music may sound dated due to Clarke’s fondness for cheesy synths, and Bell’s often simplistic lyrics and heightened campiness are inevitably off-putting for some. However, the band’s sheer, unadulterated exuberance is so complete and sincerely felt that it has the power to nearly cancel out such deterrents. The best Erasure tunes practically explode with the notion that a three-minute pop song can sweep away your troubles with a killer chorus, an excess of perky, fizzy undeniable hooks or just a sense of gleeful abandon. While the idea of pop music as redemption is as old as the hills, Erasure take it to new extremes, as if life itself depends on whether or not they can compel the listener to hum along and feel similarly transformed.
The band’s early singles are pleasant enough but pale in comparison to Clarke’s prior work as one half of the short-lived Yazoo (known as Yaz in the US), partially because Bell is nowhere near as agile as that band’s singer, Alison Moyet; also, Clarke seems to have altered very little of Yazoo’s sound palette. “Oh l’Amour” is the first Erasure single to really register, mostly due to Bell’s tremulous vocal, which perfectly fits the song’s key lyric, “What’s a boy in love supposed to do?” “Sometimes” is the great leap forward: opening with an attention-grabbing, sinus-clearing wail from Bell, all the key elements are in place, from a lighter-than-air tone offset by Bell’s urgent demeanor to a catchy, immense chorus. It’s all buffed and polished to a fine shine (dig the trumpet solo after the second chorus) yet feels effortless, exuding both ecstasy and goodwill. Unsurprisingly, it was the band’s first big European hit, kicking off a string of likeminded follow-ups full of little inventive touches to distinguish each one: the odd but acceptable African chant in the middle of “It Doesn’t Have To Be”, the obvious but lovable oompah-pah arrangement of “The Circus”, the winning yet deliciously tart defiance of “Victim of Love”.
With The Innocents and its gorgeously overwrought first single “Ship of Fools”, Bell and Clarke let their ambitions show without sacrificing the simple pleasures established by their previous hits. Follow-up “Chains of Love” finally broke them in the US: hinging upon an almost remedial synth hook, the song nevertheless soars on soulful chord changes, gospel-like female backing vocals and the affirmative joy that comes from working through pain, with Bell singing, “Don’t give up, don’t give up, now,” as the promise of liberation blossoms and resounds behind him. “A Little Respect” goes even further: a forlorn yet danceable ballad, it puts Bell’s ever-elastic performance (alternately furiously stringing phrases together and stretching out other words like “soul” to umpteen syllables) against a universally appealing melody and a rich, warm wall of sound eons away from the skeletal backing of “Oh l’Amour”. And “Stop!” is a massive adrenaline rush that fully warrants the exclamation point in its title, electro Ramones-simple but instantly thrilling, all synapses firing as Bell insists, “We’ll be together again,” and Clarke does all he can to ensure that that happens.
Although the band’s next album, Wild! (1989) is often an overreaching mess, its singles are excellent. “Drama!” begins all serene and subdued but soon ramps up to “Stop!”-level energy, only with a chewier lyric regarding “the infinite complexities of love” and a kitchen-sink arrangement full of orchestral stabs, record scratches and thunderous, damning exclamations of “Guilty!”. “Blue Savannah” sets its sights on classicist nostalgia, the mechanical beat gently loping along with ease while Bell’s lush, multi-tracked vocals and Clarke’s acoustic piano runs lend a human touch. The bouncy, slightly twangy “Star” takes a cue from Latin-derived rhythms and Eastern European melodies but sounds so much like its own unique thing that the word “pastiche” hardly comes to mind. Slow-burner “You Surround Me” is this period’s hidden treasure: delving into his lower register, Bell’s croon is a long way from his excitable waver on Pop!’s earliest tracks, and when he suddenly swoops up to a falsetto at the chorus’ “to my sen-sessss” part, he nearly matches Moyet (and Annie Lennox) for intensity and dexterity.
As Pop! winds down, it alternates between attempts at social commentary (the ecology-minded “Chorus”, the contemplative “Am I Right?”, where Bell broods like a new-wave Auden) and decidedly less-serious stuff like “Love To Hate You”. A deliriously campy kiss-off teeming with horror-film keyboards, a pounding beat and fake crowd noise, it deliberately swipes the recognizable string melody from “I Will Survive” while Bell spouts off knowingly catty lyrics such as, “And the lovers that you sent for me / didn’t come with any satisfaction guarantee.” A worthy companion piece to Abba’s “Money, Money, Money”, it paved the way for ABBA-esque the following year; “Take a Chance on Me” from that EP closes out Pop! with a wink and a nod (and, just to keep you on your toes, an incongruous but fun female reggae toast before the last chorus). In between those two songs sits another underrated gem: “Breath of Life” is the band’s lost hi-NRG disco anthem, careening on by with Clarke’s ping-ponging synths and Bell’s declarations of self-worth, his voice soaring off into the night.
Here’s another secret facet to Erasure’s appeal: not only are they a profoundly uncool band, they seem to know, accept and even embrace it. For all their pretensions (their excessively theatrical Phantasmagorical Entertainment Tour from around this time fully lived up to its name), Bell and Clarke have always come off as down-to-earth and utterly sincere pop stars refreshingly unapologetic about who they are. Bell, for instance, has been openly gay from the start of his career—I can’t begin to explain how significant this was for gay teens like myself who had next to no representation in pop music at the time. The heterosexual Clarke as well has mostly stayed true to his dinky synth-pop muse, forgoing stylistic trends or obvious, audience-broadening moves. That they’ve stayed together for three decades speaks to their rare chemistry and friendship. Although long past their commercial and artistic peaks, they still occasionally eke out great singles such as “Breathe” (from 2005’s above-average Nightbird) or “Reason” (from last year’s The Violet Flame). Pop! adeptly documents a golden era for Bell and Clarke, making the case that sometimes, a strong, consistent greatest hits album is all a band needs to secure a legacy.
(My 100 favorite albums in chronological order: #35 – released October 6, 1992)
Track listing: One Thing Leads To Another / Sure Thing / Off My Mind / Gently Fall / Please Yourself / Angels Fallen / Isolation / Long Day In The Universe / Wave / If
I came of age just a few years before the Internet suddenly, gloriously materialized and radically changed the way we receive and send information. These days, I’ll almost mechanically go to Spotify or YouTube or iTunes or any other platform for streaming (and sometimes purchasing) music—I’ve done it this way for so long that a part of me forgets the old, seemingly limited ways of discovering it: listening to the radio, going to concerts, trading mix tapes with friends, hearing something in a record store and reading reviews. Of course, all these things still exist, some more so than others (sadly, physical records stores have all but vanished) but with the exception of live music (I’ve never been a big concertgoer), none carry as much weight as they did before DSL became as common as compact discs once were.
In the early-mid ‘90s, I heard about new music most via magazines. I picked up every new issue I could of Request, the unexpectedly great free rag one used to procure at Musicland or Sam Goody along with a purchase of a cassette or CD. I also subscribed to Entertainment Weekly and Rolling Stone primarily for the reviews. In late 1992, this book, an offshoot of the latter, became my new bible:
The recently published third edition of the Rolling Stone Album Guide was not flawless: it employed but four writers and too neatly condensed an array of artists warranting more than the requisite 250-500 words given them. Still, like Automatic for the People, it arrived at just the right time; I read it nearly cover-to-cover. Over the next few years, it generously filled in gaps regarding my knowledge of pop music not covered by the local classic rock radio station or the sixth edition of The Billboard Book of Top 40 Hits. And without its gushing essay by J.D. Considine on the band’s first two albums, I might’ve never heard of Welsh quartet The Darling Buds.
Originally lumped in with the “blonde pop” movement in the UK (i.e.—guitar bands with blonde (and Blondie-influenced) female vocalists, like The Primitives or Transvision Vamp), The Darling Buds started off as rather sugary retro-pop (their 1988 debut was even called Pop Said…) but quickly transcended that label with Crawdaddy (1990), which Considine dubbed a “masterpiece of ‘60s revivalism.” With its soaring melodies and fuller, more ambitious arrangements, Crawdaddy (a used cassette of which I soon picked up in a bargain bin) should have been massive. Alas, female-fronted alternative rock (with the exception of Concrete Blonde, perhaps) mostly remained near the margins in 1990; the single “Tiny Machine” was a college radio hit but it did not cross over to pop, while in the UK, the album sold less than the debut—the band’s moment already having passed.
Still, reuniting with Crawdaddy producer Stephen Street, The Darling Buds made a third album, Erotica. It had the misfortunate to come out a mere two weeks before Madonna’s astronomically higher-profile album of the same name, though that gaffe did ensure a deluge of mistaken purchases of the wrong Erotica would frequent used bins around the world (that’s where I secured my copy). On first listen, I could discern another reason why Erotica flopped—less immediate than Crawdaddy, it found the band diving head-first into dream-pop territory, upping the guitar distortion and general wooziness, relying a little more on texture and atmosphere. I quickly retreated to Crawdaddy’s relatively simpler, more direct pleasures.
However, I didn’t entirely forget about Erotica. In retrospect, I’m glad I didn’t give up on it, for it proved one of those records that reveals its worth gradually over time—after numerous listens, I acclimated myself to the album’s amped-up sound and occasionally drifting demeanor and it all began to make sense. The best place to begin with Erotica is right in the middle, on track six, “Angels Fallen”: it kicks off with an onslaught of impressionist noise (like a furious Cocteau Twins) only to switch to the sort of crisp, clean sound Street perfected when producing The Smiths a few years back. The remainder goes back and forth between these two disparate poles. It’s as if the band couldn’t settle on being My Bloody Valentine or The Sundays and decided to strive for the best of both of those worlds; that they pull this off seamlessly while taking full advantage of the delirious tension resulting from this dynamic it what gives Erotica its unique allure.
Other songs dutifully follow this pattern, but it never becomes blatantly formulaic. For instance, “Gently Fall” has an extended intro that starts off all glowing and pastoral until the crunching guitars come in after twenty seconds. When vocalist Andrea Lewis finally arrives nearly a minute later, she’s practically submerged beneath driving, stabbing barre chords, which enables her abrupt, cascading “ohhh” at the chorus to pack quite the punch, especially as it’s suddenly backed by briskly strummed acoustics. The song concludes as it begins, with an extended outro throwing in some cellos and a pounding piano reminiscent of The Velvet Underground’s “I’m Waiting for the Man”; it’s the only time Erotica enhances its guitar-bass-drums-vocal instrumental palette.
And yet, it’s often stunning what Street and the band eke out of such a traditional lineup: the layers-upon-layers of interlocking riffs in “One Thing Leads To Another”, the distorted guitar shading that makes the bass-up-front “Isolation” sound like so much more than just a distaff Cure or New Order, the way potentially remedial, two-chord “Off My Mind” transforms into forceful wonder by sheer determination and a host of tricks ranging from a case full of guitar pedals to its thrilling false ending. Granted, everyone from The Pixies to Sonic Youth was doing this sort of stuff at the time, but not with a singer like Lewis. Although her voice is on thin end of the spectrum, it’s a vital part of Erotica’s sound. She’s often utilized as if she were an additional bass or rhythm guitar, delicately wrapped around the other instruments instead of merely playing over or on top of them. By the way, Lewis’ unorthodox approach here anticipates another UK-based female vocalist a few entries away from making her 100 Albums debut.
For all of its sonic experimentation, Erotica retains the strong melodic instincts of the band’s first two albums. “Sure Thing” and “Long Day in the Universe” are bursts of (sometimes blistering) sunshine, ringing with great chord changes and Lewis’ lighthearted, inviting tone. On the single “Please Yourself” (itself powered by an Eastern-sounding lead guitar riff worthy of Echo and the Bunnymen), she’s playful and a little flirtatious—a perfect fit for the lyric, which turns the Divinyls’ recent hit “I Touch Myself” on its head with Lewis singing “I don’t mind, I don’t mind” as her lover bashfully pleasures himself. Her tartness prevents “Wave”, the closest thing Erotica has to a ballad from becoming too treacly. On closer “If”, her high-pitched wordless sighs provide an ethereal swoon over the music’s momentous, dancefloor-ready rush.
Predictably, the band split up shortly after Erotica failed to expand their audience any further. Perhaps that was wise, since for all their skillfulness and innovation, The Darling Buds sound strongly of their time, that post C-86, pre Britpop limbo that was the UK in the late ‘80s/early ‘90s. As much as I would’ve liked to have heard more from Lewis and her bandmates, I know from experience that often, a band only really has two or three good (or even listenable) albums in them—at least with Erotica, artistically, they went out on top.
(My 100 favorite albums in chronological order: #34 – released October 5, 1992)
Track listing: Drive / Try Not To Breathe / The Sidewinder Sleeps Tonite / Everybody Hurts / New Orleans Instrumental No. 1 / Sweetness Follows / Monty Got A Raw Deal / Ignoreland / Star Me Kitten / Man On The Moon / Nightswimming / Find The River
A Dozen Tributaries:
1. Forget everything you know about R.E.M., or at least anything after Automatic for the People was released in autumn 1992. Forget the “return-to-rock” follow up album, Monster (1994) which led to a stadium tour besieged by illness, including an aneurysm suffered by drummer Bill Berry, who’d leave the band a few years later. Forget the multi-million dollar contract that ensured R.E.M. would continue as a trio after Berry’s departure, and how deeply felt his absence was through five additional albums, most of them interminable, all of them inferior to what came before.
I know, it’s near-impossible a task, especially if you were of a certain age in autumn ’92 and lived through everything that came after. I had just entered my senior year of high school and knew R.E.M. from their second phase as former college rockers who had fully crossed over to the mainstream with a string of hit singles and iconic music videos—all of them undeniably commercial but also undiluted of the regional idiosyncrasies that had turned on a slightly older generation to them in their first, early-mid ‘80s phase as indie trailblazers who combined tuneful melodicism with Michael Stipe’s often unintelligible vocals.
From the Chronic Town EP (1982) to Out of Time (1991), R.E.M. continually built their audience and enhanced their sound to the point where the latter (itself almost an 100 Albums entry) became their first number one album. It showcased a band at its peak, incorporating everything from hip-hop (“Radio Song”) to The B-52s’ Kate Pierson (“Shiny Happy People”) while scoring a massive hit with mandolin as its unlikely lead instrument (“Losing My Religion”). Less than eighteen months after this triumph, it’s no exaggeration to suggest we all fervently anticipated what could come next.
Following a barely audible count off, “Drive” begins R.E.M.’s eighth album with a repeated, almost classical-sounding acoustic guitar arpeggio and Stipe singing, “Hey, kid, rock and roll / nobody tells you where to go / baby.” He’s borrowed a phrase from David Essex’s spooky/cool 1973 hit “Rock On” but there’s no cool or even any hint of swagger in his voice. He’s impassioned but direct, addressing his (ever-growing) audience in big-picture terms, but also conversationally: “What if I drive / what if you walk / what if you try to get off” goes the chorus, with Stipe alternating pronouns to propose multiple scenarios. Meanwhile, the arrangement gradually builds, first with accordion coloring, then with Led Zeppelin bassist John Paul Jones’ spacious, articulate strings. Like XTC’s “Dear God”, it develops tension via dynamics: it goes soft-loud-soft-loud then really loud when Peter Buck’s electric guitar charges in after the second chorus, only to get soft again (and then loud again). It vacillates between extremes, but the changes in volume never feel forced or unearned.
“Drive” was Automatic for the People’s first single. Despite being only a casual fan of Out of Time at that point, when I heard it on the radio days before the album’s release, I was transfixed—it seemed tender, imposing and eerie all at once. I couldn’t get its acoustic guitar riff out of my head. I bought the album that first week of release. A month later, I’d hear Abbey Roadfor the first time; its opening song, “Come Together”, reminded me more than a little of “Drive”. Perhaps this was just a happy coincidence, for together, Abbey Road and Automatic For The People forever changed how I listen to music.
2. From its sweet tick-tick-ticking percussive intro, you’d expect “Try Not to Breathe” to be a lighter confection than “Drive”, and you’d be correct regarding its sound. Nearly lilting, mid-tempo, in 12/8 time and suffused with organ and an electric guitar that gently oozes a little distortion for added texture, the song could’ve easily fit on Out Of Time. Though perhaps a likelier lead single than “Drive”, I think they picked the right song to introduce Automatic to the world. This is less profound, less enigmatic, less likely to catch you unawares like “Drive” does.
Lyrically, however, “Try Not to Breathe” introduces themes that will reverberate throughout Automatic: aging, mortality, death and the general passage of time (despite its title, Out Of Time is less heavily concerned with these things.) It appears to be sung from the perspective of someone nearing the end of his life. In the first person, he addresses a friend or perhaps a family member (“I will try not to worry you”), imparting wisdom and assessment (“I have seen things that you will never see.”) Avoiding being fatalistic or maudlin, the song continues the conversational tone of “Drive”, but with more compassion and warmth. Always R.E.M.’s secret weapon, bassist Mike Mills’ occasional counterpoint backing vocal in the later choruses only further pushes this feeling, as does the soulfulness Stipe repeatedly adds to the word “remember”. One not need wallow in sorrow and misery, for death, like breathing, is a constant—essential to a life.
3.Automatic was touted by the press as generally a downbeat, quiet album. A notable departure from the likes of “Stand” and “Shiny Happy People”, it had only two up-tempo songs on it (possibly three, depending on how far you stretch what “up-tempo” entails). The first of them, “The Sidewinder Sleeps Tonite” is Automatic’s most joyous, lighthearted track by a wide margin. With its title a take-off on doo-wop oldie “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” (months before Disney would re-popularize the tune for a new generation via The Lion King), it’s also one of R.E.M.’s most playful songs ever, thanks primarily to Stipe’s fizzy performance. He kicks it off with a few dee-dee-dee-dee’s straight from the older song, then launches into an excitable narrative steeped in Southern regionalism (“A can of beans or black-eyed peas / some Nescafe and ice”) and irreverent humor (“Tell her she can kiss my ass / then laugh and say that you were only kidding”). Throughout, Stipe employs a number of vocal tricks, deliberately stuttering for effect (“Today I need something more sub-sub-sub-substantial”), speeding up his cadence (the breathless chorus repeating the phrase, “Call me when you try to wake her up”), instinctually substituting nonsense words (final line, “We’ve got to moogie, moogie, move on this one”) and even occasionally shifting into a daringly higher register, reaching it with ease.
Though it may not represent Automatic as a whole, “The Sidewinder Sleeps Tonite” fits in well enough, thanks to Jones’ stirring orchestral arrangement. Although he only worked on four Automatic songs, his strings not only lent a new wrinkle to the band’s sound, they also beautifully, eloquently complimented the album’s overall tone. In “Drive”, they accent the drama that might’ve come off as too subdued by Stipe’s lyrics and vocals; here, they cast an ever-so-slight melancholic afterglow to the song’s good cheer and celebratory air. Issued as the album’s third single, it certainly sounded like a hit, but it never connected like “Drive” (or two other songs to come) did, receiving scant radio and MTV play in the US. Perhaps, it flopped because many of us were waiting for the song directly following it on Automatic to get a single release and win over the masses.
4. In his Entertainment Weekly review, Greg Sandow deemed “Everybody Hurts” the album’s “one surefire pop hit”, even likening it to Simon and Garfunkel’s “Bridge Over Troubled Water”; it’s a spot-on assessment, one I also thought of when hearing it for the first time. It’s almost absurd that the band waited until the following summer to release it as the album’s fourth single—that is, until you consider its uncomfortable place within R.E.M.’s folk/rock-heavy catalog, the backlash it provoked among many longtime fans and, despite only reaching #29 on the Billboard Hot 100, the feeling of overfamiliarity that eventually engulfed it.
Some years after the song reached a certain level of ubiquity, I had trouble listening to “Everybody Hurts” and only partially because I had grown sick of it. In the six months or so before everyone knew the song, it was my most beloved and played track off of Automatic. The clear, highly vulnerable, almost naked tone of Stipe’s vocal and the lyrics’ explict directness (the song is an emphatic plea to a friend against committing suicide) right away resonated with my 17-year-old self. I immediately took to the song’s gentleness, the timeless ‘50s rock ballad feel, the lullabye-ready guitar triplets and the tick-tock beat, the effective counterpart “hold on” vocals in the second verse. Most of all, I swooned at the chord change leading the second chorus into the middle-eight, were the orchestra and the band come in, full blast, the entire song blossoming after a slow build, hitting its most crucial emotional high with Stipe singing, “No, no, no, you’re not alone.”
Even though I’ve never seriously considered suicide (nor have ever been close to anyone who has), I identified with the song’s idealistic notion that, no matter how bad things seem, no one is really alone. As we age, we tend to encounter periods where we dismiss things that were significant to us as teenagers; in my 20s and early 30s, I lived through turbulence and disappointments I could not even imagine experiencing at 17. Thus, by that time, “Everybody Hurts”, with its simplistic optimism, seemed much further away than it once did—a view of the world that I felt no longer matched up with my own decidedly more nuanced and complicated experience. I can imagine this is how a lot of people older than me perceived the song when its famous, speculatively subtitled, freeway traffic jam-set music video was all over MTV in summer ’93—it aspired to be for everybody (well, it is right there in the title), downplaying any of the band’s past quirks for a big pop move, one practically calculated for universal appeal.
Then again, R.E.M. arguably already made that big pop move back with “Stand” or “The One I Love”; “Everybody Hurts” is more an effort to lend an olive branch to its audience, saying that it’s okay to will yourself to go out on a limb and open yourself up to the world. Phrases that sound banal on paper (“It’s time to sing along”, “Take comfort in your friends”) resonate beautifully within this context and also in the plainspoken but passionate way Stipe sings them. In preparation for this essay, when I first listened to “Everybody Hurts” after years of not listening to it so closely, I was nearly moved to tears—the same reaction I had at 17 and a sign, perhaps, that at 40, I’m now in a stable place or at least one where I’m more open and receptive to what “Everybody Hurts” proposes.
5. I never appreciated instrumentals (or at least those outside of jazz) until I began listening to Brian Eno about a decade ago. I used to think of them as filler, mostly skippable tracks that somehow carried less value because they had no words, no singing. It took Eno’s generally instinctual approach to creating sounds with “the studio as an instrument” for me to really get how these wordless compositions could provide texture, atmosphere and insight. They held the potential to add to or alter the flow of an album, to act as a link between other songs or occasionally, as a palette cleanser.
“New Orleans Instrumental No. 1” was the second time in a row R.E.M. sequenced a wordless song as an album’s fifth track (following Out of Time’s “Endgame”). Just over two minutes long, it’s Automatic’s least essential song almost by default. For years, I wondered why they didn’t include the terrific “It’s A Free World Baby” (B-side of the “Drive” single, later appearing on the Coneheads soundtrack, of all things) in its place. Built around an electric piano, e-bow guitar and possibly stand-up bass, it relays a ridiculously simple, two-chord melody; even its title is blatantly generic (was there ever a “New Orleans Instrumental No. 2”?). However, coming after the grand, emotional drama of “Everybody Hurts”, it allows one to catch one’s breath, to reset and reflect; it also lovingly evokes the calm, delicate stillness of sitting in a darkened room at three in the morning. Automatic doesn’t need the song in the way it absolutely requires “Drive” or “Everybody Hurts”, but its presence reassures that R.E.M. are still weirdos who will place their least commerical song right next to their most accessible one on an album if they want to.
6. My grandmother passed away nine months before Automatic came out; no one close to me had ever died before. Strangely enough, looking back on 1992 as a whole, I remember being uncommonly happy, notwithstanding the obvious grief I experienced right after my grandmother’s death. For as I turned 17, I began to come out of my shell and open myself up to world, if just a little. Entering my senior year of high school, I felt triumphant getting my driver’s license and reveling in the newfound independence that entailed. Despite my loss (or perhaps because of it), I was learning more about how to live.
Although it proceeds at an almost dirgelike tempo, “Sweetness Follows” somewhat mirrors such sentiments. As the cellos chug along and an organ drones behind him, Stipe, once again in that clean, clear tone he uses on much of Automatic, relays the album’s most explicitly death-centered lyrics. The opening couplet, “Readying to bury your mother and your father / what did you think if you lost another,” immediately presents the subject as universal. From there, he confronts the messiness in coming to terms with death, the resolve sitting aside undiminished pain, its presence constant as we remain “lost in our little lives”.
And yet, following a dramatic chord change and two lovingly drawn out “oh’s”, he sings the song’s title, which makes up the entire chorus and it’s all he needs to make his point. Grief after the death of a loved one never entirely vanishes, but we learn how to process and live with it. “Sweetness Follows” is ultimately about finding solace in our acceptance of death. We grieve, but we console, we remember, we heal. The song, which ends with a mewling of guitar feedback (a slight preview of Monster) brings Automatic’s first half to a resolute, somber close.
7. “Monty Got a Raw Deal” is, of course, about Montgomery Clift. A handsome leading man and respected method actor in the decade following World War II, he survived but was left shaken by a serious car crash in 1956; ten years later, he was dead at age 45 from a heart attack brought on by drug addiction. The “raw deal” in the title obliquely refers to his bisexuality, most likely a primary reason for his career’s gradual derailment. I didn’t know any of this in 1992, although I’d fully comprehend Clift’s otherness five years later when I first watched his breakthrough film, 1948’s Red River. In direct contrast to co-star John Wayne’s heroic, masculine persona, Clift came off as far more tender and vulnerable but not soft, which was the key to his singular appeal.
In its lyrical, solo acoustic guitar extended intro, R.E.M.’s tribute to Clift seems full of sorrow, until after Stipe finishes singing the first verse. Then, the rest of the band comes in, powered by Berry’s forceful drums, and it transforms into an inquiry rather than a lament. Although not overtly angry, “Monty Got a Raw Deal” practically seethes at times—with defiance, regret, maybe even a little scorn both for how Clift was wronged by society and for the destructiveness with which he confronted his demons. However, by addressing Clift in the first-person, Stipe ends up making the song as much about himself, noting straightaway that “Mischief knocked me in the knees / (and) said ‘Just let go. Just let go.’” Stipe would acknowledge his own bisexuality in the years immediately following Automatic, but one could easily argue that his first notable attempt to come out was via this song. I didn’t pick up on any of this at the time, which is fitting since I was also in deep denial about my own sexuality; still, I could sense the significance buried deep within, even if I didn’t yet have the acuity to pinpoint exactly where it was or what it meant.
8. An emphatically angry screed against the Reagan/Bush years, “Ignoreland” may come off as a little quaint to some given Bush/Cheney, 9/11 and everything that followed; you could just as well argue that it lost none of its relevance in the early ‘00s and still retains much of it to this day. Automatic’s sole rocker, it seems to have been included only because of its release date, one month before the ’92 presidential election. Louder than anything else on the album, the kitchen-sink arrangement features ringing electric guitars, blasts of harmonica, an unlikely clavinet, backing cowbell and manly vocal punctuations of “HUAH!” in each bridge leading to the chorus. Meanwhile, Stipe sounds as garbled as he did on any of R.E.M.’s first four albums, almost deliberately muffled to appear as if he’s shouting from a distance into the void. “Ignoreland” is Automatic’s true outlier, but also hooky enough to warrant inclusion, injecting a bit of life into an altogether moody and reserved album. Plus, it contains the classic Stipe statement, “But I feel better having screamed, don’t you?”
9. Let’s talk about the album title and cover. The former refers to Weaver D’s, a venerable soul food restaurant in the band’s home base of Athens, Georgia. “Automatic for the People” is literally the establishment’s slogan, a greeting bestowed upon customers by the titular proprietor. The cover, meanwhile, is an extreme-to-the-point-of-being-abstract close-up of a star-shaped Miami motel sign (and not of Weaver D’s sign, which I once thought was the case). It’s mysterious, something of a non-sequitur and not at all a stretch to call it weird.
When Automatic was first released, Mills described its songs as “weird”, and while they’re not necessarily strange compared to some of Murmur or Fables of the Reconstruction, you know what he’s getting at, especially on a track like “Star Me Kitten”. In great contrast to the in-your-face brashness of “Ignoreland”, it perpetually shimmers, practically just hanging there for over three minutes on a bed of unceasing “ahhh’s” and brushed percussion that’s still too rock ‘n’ roll to be mistaken for jazz. The guitar melody seems to lazily slip up and down the fretboard, an organ softly bleeds throughout and finger snaps are audible but threaten to disappear into the ether, not really enticing you to snap along with them.
Even the title’s weird, although explicable: the lyrics actually read “Fuck Me, Kitten”, the word “Star” substituting it on the album sleeve presumably to avoid Automatic from getting slapped with a then-omnipresent Parental Advisory sticker. Obviously one of R.E.M.’s lustier songs-to-date, though both the title change and Stipe’s vocal, submerged under that wall of sound again create a distancing effect. Yes, it’s a peculiar little experiment but rather disarming in how its graphic nature is contradicted by a certain bashfulness. If you’re curious, check out the somewhat less bashful version of the song the band later recorded with William Burroughs.
10. A few weeks after Automatic’s release, a Friday in late October, just after dinner: I’m sprawled out on my bed, listening to the album on headphones, likely on shuffle as I got my first CD player earlier that year and was still entranced by the novelty of hearing something in random order. I remember listening to Automatic often in this ill-advised way up until then (you can imagine how further disorienting “Star Me Kitten” appeared when played out of sequence). However, that particular evening, “Man on the Moon” came up and just like that, all of the album’s disparate pieces seemed to fall in place. I lay there in awe of the song’s cavernous yet cozy vibe as if I were gently cascading along an intimate yet sweeping vista, ever-expansive in its “yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah” call-and-responses, inviting harmonies and Buck’s magisterial-for-being-so-rare slide guitar solo.
An almost effortless wonder permeates “Man on the Moon”, Automatic’s second single and possibly its most-beloved standard. Like “Monty Got a Raw Deal”, it’s a tribute to a deceased, cultish performer, in this case Andy Kaufman—another person I knew little about at the time, apart from his role as Latka Gravas on the sitcom Taxi. At first, the lyrics seem purely stream-of-consciousness (“Mott the Hoople and the game of life”; “Let’s play Twister, let’s play Risk”), each phrase followed by those four yeahs. Kaufman is mentioned by name (along with his wrestling friend (Fred) Blassie), but the song does not turn conversational until the bridge, with Stipe shifting tone to address Kaufman in the afterlife, asking, “Andy did you hear about this one? Tell me are you locked in the punch?” The chorus finds Stipe readying a mixed metaphor about the chasm between what we’re told and what we actually choose to believe. I don’t seriously think the song vindicates all those naysayers who deem Apollo 11 to be a sham, but it does ponder how fantastically unreal such a thing as a man walking on the moon is in theory. If we can buy that, then why not believe in the absurd and the near-impossible, both critical components of Kaufman’s comedy and worldview?
Once again, an openness to the world reveals itself as one of Automatic’s ongoing themes. “Man on the Moon” may be concerned with one specific man and the unparalleled mark he left in his short lifetime. However, as I listen to it now, more than two decades after that October evening when it first affected me so deeply, I still feel greatly moved by the song’s spirit and also its sense of camaraderie, the idea previously proposed in “Everybody Hurts” that we’re all in this together, and isn’t that wild and absolutely profound? The song’s music video further supports this notion, with the final chorus straightforwardly lip-synched by a variety of people at a bar, male and female, young and old, all given their own brief moment on camera, powerful not for individual performances but for the communal whole—for the people, natch.
11. Although “Nightswimming” was the album’s fifth single in some countries, it retained a “deep cut” status in the US. I remember how thrilled I was to hear it played at my post-prom in May ’93—certainly not the most obvious choice for a slow dance (or a single, for that matter). The arrangement is among Automatic’s sparest, consisting only of piano (played by Mills), Stipe’s vocal and Jones’ orchestra. The cute opening snippet of the latter tuning up soon entirely gives way to Mills and Stipe, repeating a circular melody nearly as basic as the one in “New Orleans Instrumental No. 1”. Although minimalist, “Nightswimming” is rich with detail. The orchestral flourishes lithely accent the melody, occasionally dropping out and reappearing for dramatic effect. There’s also an oboe solo before the last verse that returns for the song’s final measures, its bittersweet tone a moment of grace.
Lyrically, “Nightswimming” highlights Automatic’s other major themes apart from death: memory and the passage of time. On the surface, it appears to be about after-hours, deep woods skinny dipping and presumably autobiographical, although Stipe later claimed that most of it was made up. Regardless, the yearning with which he sings these lyrics suggests a deep connection to them, even as he favors poetic abstraction over specificities. Brief, Zen-like phrases also take precedence over wordy, sentimental generalizations. When he sings, “The photograph reflects / Every street light a reminder / Nightswimming / Deserves a quiet night,” rather than paint a picture, he more conjures up a mental, almost dreamlike state where past memories coalesce with the present. The music’s elegance gives the listener something to grasp on to, while also enhancing Stipe’s wistful yet sincere, approachable tone.
12. Long ago, I read of review of Automatic (I couldn’t find it online) that began with a sentence along the likes of “A river has a beginning, many tributaries and an end.” Although a little pretentious, it neatly sums up the album’s effect as a whole, directly referencing its final track, “Find the River”. Like much of the rest of the album, it’s a pastoral ballad, acoustic guitars gently buoyed by piano, organ, melodica and backing vocals. As with “Nightswimming” it’s steeped in imagery regarding memory and the past, but also shows the narrator assessing his place in the world and pondering his future. The river of the title obviously represents life: always flowing, leading towards a goal (the ocean), hoping not to sink (or in this case, get swept away by the tides or the undertow) but keep swimming, keep moving.
Like a river, Automatic is a journey. It begins by mapping out different scenarios (“Drive”), celebrating good times (“The Sidewinder Sleeps Tonite”), dealing with the bad ones (“Everybody Hurts”), along the way making inquiries (“Monty Got a Raw Deal”), declarations of lust (“Star Me Kitten”) and wisdom (“Man On The Moon”), remembering (and perhaps visiting) past haunts (“Nightswimming”), eventually arriving at a crossroads in “Find The River” where Stipe shifts from singing “Nothing is going my way,” to “All of this is coming your way,” at the very end. The music then slowly fades out, its guitar riff practically undulating like a current in a stream stretching beyond the horizon.
I’ve called Automatic my all-time favorite album on numerousoccasions. I no longer know if that’s true; I find it increasingly difficult to rank the music, books, films, etc.; that I love. A year at a time is somewhat manageable, but of everything I’ve ever heard, consumed, absorbed? Given how one can easily listen to a piece of music over and over again without devoting anywhere near the time a book or a film requires, a perception of how much it informs your life naturally varies over time. I’ve gone through years where I’m lucky if I listen to Automatic once in full; so many great albums I’ve heard since then have become just as central to my life, similarly informing the way I listen to music and perceive the world. If anything sets Automatic apart from these records (many of which will appear in this series), it’s simply because it was the first album to have such an impact on me, at an age when I was most vulnerable and willing to unequivocally accept it. Perhaps I wouldn’t even be writing about it (or at least at such length) if I had first heard it a few years earlier or later; more than any other album, Automatic was the soundtrack for my coming of age. As I return to it decades on and continue to find a lot to love in it, it feels serendipitous that it came out at the exact moment it did.
(My 100 favorite albums in chronological order: #33 – released September 21, 1992)
Track listing: Dancing Queen / Knowing Me, Knowing You / Take A Chance On Me / Mamma Mia / Lay All Your Love On Me / Super Trouper / I Have A Dream / The Winner Takes It All / Money, Money, Money / S.O.S. / Chiquitita / Fernando / Voulez-Vous / Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! (A Man After Midnight) / Does Your Mother Know / One Of Us / The Name Of The Game / Thank You For The Music / Waterloo
In the decade following their 1982 breakup, Abba was perhaps as verboten a four-letter-word as any you couldn’t say on television. Not that the Swedish quartet was exactly perceived as hip or cool in its heyday, but they arguably defined the 1970s as much as the Bee Gees or Elton John, selling as many records (and in some places, more) throughout the world—except in the US, of course, where they were a little too European and unselfconscious to reach such a level of mass saturation. Thus, over here, Agnetha, Bjorn, Benny, and Anni-Frid (Frida) were confined to a single number one hit (“Dancing Queen”) and three other top-tens (compared to nine number one singles in the UK). Still, their domestic sales were respectable to the point where I faintly remember seeing a TV commercial for a K-Tel like Abba greatest hits album at an early age.
Apart from an occasional spin of “The Winner Takes It All” on the adult contemporary radio station my parents favored, I can barely remember hearing any Abba growing up, not until after graduating from high school in 1993. I do recall one incident during my freshman year—a girl on the bus belittled by her friends for listening to Abba on her Walkman, none of us familiar with the band, one person even remarking with disdain that it sounded like “church music”. What none of us knew at the time was that the girl who liked Abba was ahead of the curve. Over the next few years, as the 1980s melted away and the preceding decade slowly started coming back in fashion, people began talking about Abba again. As usual, the UK led the charge, with U2 covering “Dancing Queen” on their Achtung Baby tour and a certain duo (a few entries away from appearing on 100 Albums) scoring their sole number one on the UK Singles chart with an EP of four Abba covers. There was even a popular Australian tribute act calling itself (ahem) Bjorn Again.
Building on this resurgence in visibility, in autumn 1992, Polygram issued this 19-track compilation, Abba’s first greatest hits album of the CD era. It entered the UK album charts at number one; twenty years later, it was the third highest-selling album there of all time. Released in the US in 1993, it never charted higher than #36, but it achieved the unlikely feat of dramatically rehabilitating the band’s image in this country, allowing them back into public consciousness at a greater degree than ever before. It has since sold six million copies in the US, which accounts for over one-fifth of its worldwide sales total of just under 30 million. Aiding this was a gradual, growing prevalence of Abba across various pop culture channels: for instance, Muriel’s Wedding and The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, two mid-90s indie films from Australia (where Abba was particularly huge) both heavily featured the band on their soundtracks; both also became crossover hits. Later in the decade, Mamma Mia!, a jukebox musical centered on Abba songs broke attendance records in London’s West End and later on Broadway (and later still, as a hit film starring Meryl Streep).
Although Gold: Greatest Hits was not singlehandedly responsible for the great Abba revival, it undeniably provided the spark inspiring everything that followed. As an introduction to the band’s catalogue, it’s near impossible to top. By collecting all of their most popular and iconic worldwide hits, it effortlessly makes the case for Abba by highlighting their genius as a mostly consistent and dexterous singles act. Unlike the other twocompilations I’ve written about so far, Gold is not chronologically ordered. The earliest selection (and album closer), “Waterloo” would’ve made a superb opener, but truthfully you could put the album on shuffle and your listening experience would not be any lesser than if you had played it in sequence. However, Gold goes for maximum impact (and easily clinches it) by putting Abba’s most quintessential hit in the pole position.
I’ve already mentioned that “Dancing Queen” was the band’s only American chart-topper, but if I asked you to identify which song in their catalog held that status without naming it, you’d likely pick the correct answer. I’ve also written over 700 words and not yet one about what Abba really sounds like—admittedly, not an easy task, for it’s like asking what as ubiquitous and iconic a band such as The Beatles sounds like. Fortunately, “Dancing Queen” sums up everything distinctive and compelling and effective about Abba: the recognizable but supple appropriation of a current musical style (in this case, soft disco), its irresistible orchestral sweep, Benny’s dramatic piano filigrees (almost like Liberace gone pop), Agnetha and Frida’s impassioned, Nordic-accented vocals, minimalist-but-not-dumb lyrics a five-year-old could fully comprehend and overall, a sustained sense of unadulterated glee.
Gold is frontloaded with a few of the band’s best (and biggest) hits. On the surface, all of them seem nearly as elated as “Dancing Queen” because the band simply can’t help but exude cheerfulness—it’s as essential to Abba’s nature as brooding and gloom are to The Cure’s—but it’s deceptive. Beneath all that pleasant chirpiness is utter desperation often increased to operatic levels when placed next to the music’s relentless, jaunty merry-go-round pull. Both “Take A Chance On Me” and “Mamma Mia” try to mask this with an excess of sugarcoated but maddeningly catchy hooks (the men’s incessant “Take-a-take-a-chance-chance” in the former, the boisterous, repeated two-note opening in the latter), but the utter pleading in each song still comes through loud and clear. “Knowing Me, Knowing You” attempts an even trickier balancing act, making fully palatable the conflicting emotions that arise at a relationship’s destruction yet also not shying away from such a situation’s very real, heartfelt consequences.
From there, Gold skips all over Abba’s discography, placing universally beloved sing-alongs (“Fernando”, “Money, Money, Money”) next to slightly less-remembered diversions (“Chiquitita”, with its insane percussive rolls; the Bjorn-sung “Does Your Mother Know”), jumping from 1977 (“Take A Chance On Me”) to 1975 (“Mamma Mia”) to 1980 (“Lay All Your Love On Me”) without smoothness of transition even being an issue. The compilation also finds places for all the genre outfits the band tried on over the decade, including glam by way of ‘50s rock n’ roll (“Waterloo”), Studio 54-ready disco (“Voulez-Vous”), campy Eurodisco (“Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! (A Man After Midnight)”), grandiose aspirations to the musical stage (“Thank You For The Music”) and even straight-up schmaltz (“I Have A Dream”, perhaps the only Abba hit I absolutely detest).
Despite Gold’s stylistic diversions, Abba always remains identifiably and recognizably Abba—their aesthetic is completely singular, despite their musical love of all things pop and their eager willingness to try and court as large of an audience as possible. Both the band’s most ardent fans and detractors could site Abba’s utter simplicity and accessibility as an overarching reason for loving/hating them. The repetitive song titles, the occasional English-as-a-second-language lyrics (“You’re so hot, teasing me / So you’re blue but I can’t take a chance on a chick like you” from “Does Your Mother Know” is my favorite example of this), the emphasis placed on blatant hooks running the gamut from easy-to-pronounce phrases (“Ma-ma Mi-a”) to bellowing, grin-inducing oompah-pah beats (“Chiquitita”)—all of them ploys Benny and Bjorn craftily utilized to get a song stuck in your head. Haters probably still gasp at the shamelessness inherent in them, but all these things helped make Abba one of the world’s biggest-selling bands.
However, listen closely and you’ll detect hidden but significant complexities present in some of the band’s best songs. “S.O.S.” is an early example of Abba’s growing ambition: note how the minor-key verses suddenly but naturally transform into a major-key chorus without depleting any of the song’s urgency—in fact, it ramps it up even more at the “when you’re gone / how can I / even try / to go on?” part. “The Name of the Game” initially comes off as an attempt at mid-tempo, quasi-soulful Southern California rock a la Fleetwood Mac. Midway through, the music’s languorous strut almost entirely drops out, apart from a minimal beat and Frida’s vocal, accompanied by backing doo-doo’s from the rest of the band. Then, the full arrangement returns and suddenly, there’s far more tension arising from less certainty as to what one can expect going forward.
Gold’s selections from the band’s later years are even more elaborate. “The Winner Takes It All” is “Knowing Me, Knowing You” made flesh and blood as the circular piano lines and propulsive beat support Agnetha lamenting a relationship in its aftermath, her doing so a mere year after divorcing Bjorn. “One of Us” roughly covers similar themes set to a more genteel, light reggae beat, but the intricate, overlapping harmonies add grace and heft of the sort you wouldn’t find in a UB40 tune. “Super Trouper”, the band’s last number one hit in the UK is Gold’s secret highlight. From its simple and sweet a capella opening to more of those heavenly overlapping vocals to the fun “Sup-pa-pa, Troop-pa-pa” choral chants, musically, it’s bubblegum of the highest vintage given a serious tint by a lyrical ambivalence regarding fame and performance. Still, as Frida and Agnetha sing about “Feeling like a number one,” you can’t help but both cheer them along and stand in awe of their poise and self-awareness. It wipes away any argument that Abba trafficked in nothing but mindless pop.
An ideal gateway, Gold does not render the rest of Abba’s catalog irrelevant. While they only made one truly consistent studio album (their last, The Visitors (1981)), there are enough minor singles and album cuts to make up a compilation as solid as Gold. In fact, the inevitable sequel, More Abba Gold is a pretty good effort, although it excludes such gems as “Hey Hey Helen”, “Tiger” and “I’m A Marionette”. No matter—thanks mostly to Gold, Abba’s presence in pop culture will never, ever fade again. They are now as vital a chapter in 20th Century music as Gershwin, Sinatra, The Beatles and Michael Jackson, albeit with slightly worse sartorial sense.
Next: Maybe the most important album on this list.
Haunted Jukebox 