If 1990 lacked many great albums, 1991 was awash with them. I’ve picked half a dozen of my favourites, but I could easily have picked a dozen more. Here are a few, for example: The Real Ramona – Throwing Muses; Ex:El – 808 State; The White Room – KLF; Microgravity – Biosphere; Rumor and Sigh – Richard Thompson; White Light from the Mouth of Infinity – Swans; Just for a Day – Slowdive; Steady Diet of Nothing – Fugazi; Nevermind – Nirvana; Trompe le Monde – Pixies; Screamadelica – Primal Scream; Everclear – American Music Club; Orbital; Foxbase Alpha – Saint Etienne; Drive Like Jehu; 0+2=1 – NoMeansNo; and Laughing Stock – Talk Talk.
Post-rock starts here. Six tracks of slowcore that brood and burn. Spiderland limped out to so-so reviews and poor sales at the time. It’s one of those records whose reputation has grown immensely after the fact. Robert Christgau hated it – what finer recommendation could you have?
When this came out the band were forced to change their name to get airplay from Massive Attack to Massive because of the shenanigans in Kuwait. Seems ludicrous now. The two Shara Nelson tracks “Safe from Harm” and “Unfinished Sympathy” are the pick of the bunch, but there isn’t a weak link.
Ten tracks, two CDs, nearly two hours. The Orb’s dub-inflected ambient techno was never better than this. There is a cosmic theme to the pieces which culminated in nearly twenty minutes of “A Huge Ever Growing Pulsating Brain That Rules from the Centre of the Ultraworld”. Pure magic.
Warp started as a bleep techno label, and the form’s finest exponents were LFO. Their eponymous tune was about as basic as bleep techno can get, but sometimes you don’t need sophistication to create a bona fide classic (ask the Ramones). Jez Varley and Mark Bell created something truly groundbreaking. The album is varied enough to hold the attention throughout its fourteen tunes.
To my mind this is the pick of Uncle Tupelo’s four excellent LPs. They’ve been daubed the creators of alt-country, but there was more to the band than that. They took cues from country music, sure, but also old timey folk, rock and hardcore. (I couldn’t imagine many alt-country acts recording a tribute to the Minutemen’s D. Boon). Jeff Tweedy is the excitable romantic (check out the irrepressible “Gun”), whilst Jay Farrar is the world-weary cynic. They probably never complemented each other as well as they do here.
It shouldn’t really work, with all the instruments mixed into a formless mush, with wow and flutter, distortion, and mumbled vocals buried so deep that barely a word is recognisable. But not only does it work, it was a hugely influential record, not just on the shoe-gazers who studied it like it was the fey guitarist’s answer to Bert Weedon’s play-in-a-day, but to rock heads and techno heads alike. “Soon” is a woozy trip that begat Andy Weatherall’s second best known remix. Brilliant.
Music Musings and Miscellany 