FREEFORM 1990's ALTERNATIVE ALBUM POLL - THE RECKONING (TOP TEN COUNTING DOWN NOW)

surprised that post wasn't 'It's like slapping yourself in the faaaaace'

Perry Farrell doesn't have the world's most pleasant voice, but the way he uses it on those three songs is unbelievably awesome. I don't think anyone else can sing them and have the same impact.

I quite like his voice. It's whiny and desperate and sordid and somewhat ratty, in the best possible way.

ratty is a good description.

I kind of want to say something about Disco Volante but a) we just talked about it, and b) I am currently playing "Black Cop" by KRS-One and it's kind of disrupting my thought processeBLACK COP! BLACK COP BLACK COP BLACK COP!

hang on, No One Leaving has the SAME 'yeah...yeah' or is it 'yo...yo...yo' sample-thing as Three Days!

I actually own Disco Volante, and whoo boy does it suck!

― Tuomas, Thursday, 29 April 2010 16:21 (5 days ago)

My mouse pointer hovered over the SB button for about 3 minutes.

i would like to know if T thinks that disco volante also sounds like suede

26= Superconductor - Hit Songs For Girls (1993)
75 points
1 vote
1 first-place vote
Contributor: contenderizer

http://useless.ngoo-fi.com/images/blog_121209.jpg

Carl's old band Superconductor were 10 times more interesting [than the New Pornographers].

― everything, Tuesday, 19 October 2004 17:02 (5 years ago)

Superconductor! Carl Newman's supergroup of 7 guitar players in pure noise fuzz pop bliss.

― Softly Weeping at the Oki Dog (Ben Boyer), Friday, 30 July 2004 00:10 (5 years ago)

Ben you need to find the emo-tastic song titled "there goes helen" from hit songs for girls from 92 or 93... it is still one of my favorite songs, maybe the best song Carl ever wrote.

― gygax! (gygax!), Tuesday, 30 March 2004 00:21 (6 years ago)

SLIGHTLY NONPLUSSED AMG REVIEW BY ILX'S NABISCO: http://www.allmusic.com/cg/amg.dll?p=amg&sql=10:0bfoxqehld0e

http://cache2.asset-cache.net/xc/73165940.jpg?v=1&c=IWSAsset&k=2&d=77BFBA49EF878921F7C3FC3F69D929FD91D5B443437FBB445789A45473B2B936D7C6A980A52ABAD3B01E70F2B3269972

http://cache1.asset-cache.net/xc/73165958.jpg?v=1&c=IWSAsset&k=2&d=77BFBA49EF878921F7C3FC3F69D929FD91D5B443437FBB448A141957433D332282EA9949BE5FD99DB01E70F2B3269972

Sorry Superconductor, but I've been waiting for ages to post these

kind of a shame that they don't seem to work, then

Oh man, I will definitely have to check that out.

Oh god, no! They work! They work!

not if you have images off

yeah they dont work for me either, what the hell are they?

I'm assuming they're stills from Human Centipede

A retirement age Perry Farrell palling around with Tony Blair.

eh, same diff

It's kinda weird, because Perry looks like he's a head taller than Blair. He must be wearing some outrageous platforms or something.

I hope he is doing an acapella version of 'Idiot's Rule'.

hahahahahahaha dan!

Perry is pretty old - Jane's broke when he was just past 30 iirc

Hmm...I have heard 3 of the top 50 so far, I felt a lot more clued in during the first half.

26= Various Artists - The Music In My Head (1998)
75 points
1 vote
1 first-place vote
Contributor: KMS

http://static.boomkat.com/images/136200/333.jpg

And--duh--The Music in My Head Vols 1 & 2 are the BOMB.

― Matos-Webster Dictionary (M Matos), Wednesday, 22 February 2006 03:49 (4 years ago)

Could anyone advise me of any Afropop along the same lines as the borderline genius Mark Hudson 'Music In my Head' compilation (which, for those not in the know, features early Youssou N'Dour, Thione Seck, Gestu de Dakar etc). I'm looking for stuff that genuinely excites and pushes boundaries (trad or electronica), rather than the staid 'World Music' substitutes. All suggestions/links gratefully received........

― baboon, Thursday, 6 December 2001 01:00 (8 years ago)

The Music In My Head: made African music appealing to someone whose previous forays into the music of that continent always seemed to end in boredom (I know, I know...).

― baboon2004 (baboon2004), Thursday, 5 May 2005 19:41 (5 years ago)

The Music In My Head compilation was so eye-opening for me because it placed musical ingenuity and plain brilliance ahead of ethnic 'worthiness' or 'suitability' in the choice of tracks.

― baboon, Friday, 7 December 2001 01:00 (8 years ago)

Um, this is my favorite Afropop/rock comp ever. How did I forget it?

― Kevin John Bozelka, Tuesday, 9 October 2007 15:54 (2 years ago)

new Bela Fleck semi-successfully unites west African/bluegrass banjo, goes on too long probably. after listening to The Music in My Head, Bela, forgeddabout it.

― whisperineddhurt, Monday, 2 March 2009 20:59 (1 year ago)

thanks KMS, will check that out

let it not be said that this poll is all the usual shit

25 Unrest - Perfect Teeth (1993)
76 points
1 vote
1 first-place vote
Contributor: Shakey Mo Collier

http://dcist.com/attachments/DCGent/perfect%20teeth.jpg

Okay so I was thinking about this over lunch and I offer the following defense of Perfect Teeth. (Okay okay commence indie-boy eye-rolling:)

I get the feeling it needs to be thought of somewhat in context to be appreciated. American indie rock coming through into the nineties was pretty much deplorably rock: the 80s models were bands like the Replacements or Fugazi, big shouty crunchy-chord American rock bands, and just before 93 -- when Perfect Teeth was released -- a great grungy shot of even rawkier influence had been injected and toppled the whole thing over toward the mainstream. Meanwhile the UK was seeing stirrings of a less traditionalist indie approach -- Too Pure, roots of post-rock or what-have-you -- but while plenty of American bands were following this, they weren't really impacting the overall course of American indie, and even the American bands flogging that stuff in the UK, like Th Faith Healers, still had heavy doses of very American grit.

Perfect Teeth was not only an antidote to that but an advancement on it. It was entirely clean-lined: Robinson's big guitar blasts pretty much lacked distortion -- in America! in 1993! -- and instead gave us that frantic sped-up jangle that's distinctively his contribution to the lexicon. The record was also spacious, and spacey. At the point Stereolab was still working its wall-of-sound drone, but a lot of the tiny blip-tone melodies Unrest were constructing pointed ahead to the stuff Stereolab would be doing during a much later phase of their career -- the backing vocals at the end of "Angel I Will Walk You Home," for instance, this sort of concrete tone-placement approach that's all over the record. They managed to turn the foreground of their music into something like a Mondrian painting, the clean-lined blocks of particular tones, in a way that seemed to turn away from most of the other things going on at the time, and the sort of techy spaciness of those tones combined with Robinson's vague leaning toward some image of a 50s-style pop combo to create and probably surpass what would, four or five years later, become a major theme in indie internationally, even though no one connected that with anything Unrest had been doing.

It seemed cleaner and spacier and more friendly and cerebral than the highly-emotive rock idiom of the moment, and more bedroomy, and more personal: "Back when I was twenty / I didn't think anyone liked me." And it managed to set all of its most fascinating impulses in context: it functioned terrifically as a rock album, as a pop album, and as an "experimental" album. Which is, I think, a lot of why it gets praised so often, but also a lot of why it gets slated as a run-of-mill record: it certainly seems continuous with most of what else was going on at the time, but really it's quite difficult to come up with anyone else who sounded quite like them, or even anyone else who's particularly followed the techniques that were actually uniquely theirs.

― nabisco (nabisco), Tuesday, 27 August 2002 17:03 (7 years ago)

*great* album-cover IMO

this band had an absolutely amazing design sense

am really loving the experience of trawling through the archives and discovering all these bitchin' (usually nabisco) posts that make everything just so much clearer

never seen that nabisco post before but he hits on a lot of things I love about this record - it is very refined, everything carefully sculpted and in its proper place, tying all kinds of disparate strands of art and music together. there's a certain New England art school coyness to the latter half of their career but it works so well to evoke this sci-fi springtime of teenage dreams - part Factory Records, part Krautrock, part punk, part Velvets/Byrdsian jangle. I never tire of this album.

Well, I'll be sure to check it out! It sounds thoroughly intriguing.

I wasn't about when it was announced but can I say that Noyd's verse on Give Up The Goods (Just Step) is possibly the most exhilirating moment in the music the whole decade had? And this is on a record with Shook Ones ffs.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l9TiuooWA5M

^^^marvel at the rhythm guitar playing here

Unrest could also be pretty funny, in must be said

What's the story behind the lady on this album cover that isn't in the band?

that is Cath Carroll, they wrote a song about her

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cath_Carroll

photo is by Robert Mapplethorpe btw

Were they friendly, or did they call her up out of the blue? I feel like there's a story here.

she looks kinda androgynous in the best possible way. also faintly oriental.

I'm not sure... Unrest was REALLY into the whole Factory Records thing, I think that's the connection.

They had also previously dedicated an EP to Depression-era social realist/feminist artist Isobel Bishop (and used several paintings of hers for sleeve designs).

ART STUDENTS!

24 Burzum - Filosofem (1996)
76 points
2 votes
1 first-place vote
Greatest contributor: Captain Ahab

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_b3oNt1Ou6cM/SKrplhHOOjI/AAAAAAAAAPc/wRVkk347qTU/s320/filosofem.png

Burzum "Filosofem" - first 30 minutes are monumental, second 30 are boring sub-Tangerine Dream noodling.

― Siegbran (eofor), Sunday, 29 January 2006 17:08 (4 years ago)

While I don't agree that Varg is an idiot, he has certainly done a ton of extremely retarded shit. Does this take one ounce of shine off Filosofem for me? Absolutely not.

― roxymuzak, Monday, 8 October 2007 05:07 (2 years ago)

I fucking sold Filosofem to a friend during an unload-everything-I-own flurry before I moved. Some of the biggest seller's regret I've had, though the rec is in deserving hands.

― producto do Brazil (╓abies), Monday, 3 August 2009 16:03 (9 months ago)

i'd go with filosofem, philip, and then maybe hvis lyset tar oss - but real black metal people seem to prefer the 1st two. filosofem is difficult due to the long ambient keyboard passages, but the good stuff is amazing. contains, "jesus tod", one of my favorite rock songs of any kind, ever. sounds like the munsters attempting to negotiate a mountain road, in the darkness, at 90 mph.

― contenderizer, Friday, 20 November 2009 04:27 (5 months ago)

Vikernes managed to turn every weakness into a strength:
- crap drummer: play only simple patterns without any fancy fills or variation
- crap guitarist: drown everything in fuzz and reverb, and record layers and layers of guitar lines until it all becomes a thick blur (esp. Filosofem)
- crap singer: only sing a one or two verses per song, write loooong songs and lots of instrumentals
- and finally: go MIDI and dump guitars, drums and vocals altogether

― Siegbran (eofor), Sunday, 22 June 2003 19:47 (6 years ago)

Gonna post one more quickly; am going into town for a bit now. The last two later.

The reason I'm posting another one quickly is that Shakey Mo is HERE AND ON HEAT.

(lol spoiler)

23 Unrest - Imperial F.F.R.R. (1992)
79 points
2 votes
0 first-place votes
Greatest contributor: Shakey Mo Collier

http://cdn.pitchfork.com/media/8362-imperial-ffrr.jpg

Unrest are genius, mostly. I don't particularly like much of what they did pre-Imperial (there's some occasionally great moments) but Imperial is a godlike record, one of the few records I can still listen to and adore ten years after I first heard it. "Suki", "Isabel", "Skinhead Girl" are dead-set classics round my way. Perfect Teeth is great too, but not quite as jaw- dropping. "Cath Carroll" gets major points for featuring a Factory catalogue number in the lyrics, too.

― electric sound of jim, Tuesday, 19 February 2002 01:00 (8 years ago)

Listening to Imperial F.F.R.R. for the first time in forever (nice remastered LP reissue). Might like it better now than I did then, and that's saying a lot. A lot a lot a lot a lot. Especially digging the more abstract tracks that seemed so much less immediately appealing when I first heard it. Best semi-unheralded U.S. indie rock LP of the early 90s? I dunno. How much competition is there? More than anything, I like how of its time and genre it sounds without sounding like anything else out there. It presents itself superficially as this casually scruffy, almost tossed-off object, very much in the style of the moment, but the arrangement and sequencing are incredibly well integrated. is It doesn't "break barriers" or invent a whole new pop aesthetic, but it hums along with this oddly propulsive slackness and hits it out of the park song after song after song. I can see why some might be annoyed by the sentimental directness of "Isabel", but it's short and sweet enough for me to accept without qualms. In fact, Isabel's only deficiency is its tendency to be held up as the album's avatar (when Imperial & Loyola obviously deserve that honor). Only thing I really miss is "Yes She Is My Skinhead Girl", and maybe the 7" version of "Cherry Cherry". "Wednesday and Proud"?

Now I wanna dig out Kustom Karnal Blaxploitation and Perfect Teeth.

― a bleak, sometimes frightening portrait of ceiling cat (contenderizer), Sunday, 11 October 2009 03:28 (6 months ago)

one of my favorite bands ever, so creative

― Remove This Vile Tweet (Shakey Mo Collier), Wednesday, 14 October 2009 22:16 (6 months ago)

Am looking forward to coming here later and finding SMC trying to explain Unrest to a load of highly-strung Black Metal lurkers

and vice versa

a load of highly-strung Black Metal lurkers trying to explain SMC to Unrest?