STN’s 300 Of The 90s
Was (Not Was) – I Feel Better Than James Brown (1990)
Maybe ultimately making sense is overrated. The art-funk pranksters had a hit with a standard cover of Papa Was A Rolling Stone, which shared an album with a Leonard Cohen guest vocal and backing vocals by Iggy Pop and Gang Of Four’s Andy Gill. Wryly disconnected from whatever machine tooled soul was going on around them, Latin touches meet an electro bassline over which is laid a set of surrealist imagery that under the talk of “transferred to the moon” and Fidel Castro opening a chain of KFCs surely has some veiled meaning about the nature of revolution and getting over your personal circumstances, though good luck getting Don and David Was to admit to that.
11:49 am • 31 January 2016
STN’s 300 Of The 90s
The Blue Aeroplanes – Jacket Hangs (1990)
Gerard Langley’s sung-spoken beat poetry might have put people off the Blue Aeroplanes at the gate. That they had an interpretative dancer even more so. But their highly literate neo-psych wash was the kind of thing underground bands were excavating and gaining a reputation often in a less developed version of the same. Langley’s songs weren’t meant to be anthems but tightly bound, high rolling arch art-rock confections that unfurl in their own meter, a British cousin to open fans REM’s most oblique pre-major label moments.
11:00 pm • 30 January 2016
STN’s 300 Of The 90s
The Fatima Mansions - Blues For Ceausescu (1990)
When Microdisney split in half Sean O'Hagan kept the awareness of baroque melodic arrangements and Cathal Coughlan took on the barbed lyrical sensual assault. The latter reached a peak with six minutes of churning, feedback laced Faith No More-like riffs and an extraordinarily vituperative lyric that began in Romania and extended its sharpened claws across Thatcher’s Britain with talk of reborn messiahs, state violence and casual accusations about the late Lord Mountbatten. Even after breaking completely down into half-heard radio samples and abandoned guitars it revs back up for a coda of “give thanks!”, Coughlan finally spent for good.
9:00 pm • 30 January 2016 • 1 note
STN’s 300 Of The 90s
LFO - LFO (1990)
When LFO appeared on the cover of the NME in January 1992 smashing guitars it was meant to represent that rock as we knew it was over and bedroom techno auteurs were the only way forward. The paper soon changed its mind about that but that early strain of warehouse techno hasn’t so much aged well as secured itself into its own stasis pod, insistent programmed drums and subsonic bass driving grandiose synth stabs and wow signal glitches. Somehow it reached number twelve. Heady days.
7:00 pm • 30 January 2016
STN’s 300 Of The 90s
The Fall – Telephone Thing (1990)
As ever, choosing one song to represent Mark E and your granny on bongos from a decade is a fool’s errand, even one which by common consensus isn’t their strongest even if it did incorporate an EMI stint, a top ten album and the infamous onstage breakup. It also exhibited further adventures in dance motifs, including this collaboration (at arm’s length by all accounts) with Coldcut where a heavy groove, samples and assorted what can only be described as streaky found sounds rub up like sandpaper against an insistent wah-wah guitar workout and Smith namechecking Gretchen Franklin, who played Ethel in Eastenders, because he’s Mark E Smith and that’s what he does.
5:00 pm • 30 January 2016 • 3 notes
STN’s 300 Of The 90s
Sonic Youth – Kool Thing (1990)
Though this corner insists their best work was behind them by this point Goo, the first signs they were starting to think about proper song structures and edging towards standard tunings, is still a lazer focused gem. As for its first single, a mockery of an interview Kim Gordon conducted with a fully machismo’d LL Cool J for Spin, the always allurring sound of Thurston Moore and Lee Ranaldo competing to sound most like sudden highway acceleration is accompanied by a Gordon come-on of a vocal both seductive and self-aware, as if to suggest she, the downtown art kid, would be willing to play the role if she was ever cut out for it. When of all fall guys Chuck D comes in to murmur half-heartedly he’s completely, hilariously undercut.
2:30 pm • 30 January 2016 • 2 notes
STN’s 300 Of The 90s
They Might Be Giants – Birdhouse In Your Soul (1990)
In which the meek briefly inherited the earth. The two Johns had already been putting their eyes to the wrong end of the telescope for a few years when they made the major label leap and put out an album that pivoted around a Four Lads cover and this joyous song about positivity sung from the point of view of a nightlight. The birdhouse is the safe space, see, and the light keeps the occupier safe. All that with a lolloping beat, a fizzy keyboard and lyrical references to Jason and the Argonauts and the Longines Symphonette clock radio. It barely makes sense, and that’s the genius of it.
12:40 pm • 30 January 2016
STN’s 300 Of The 90s
Throwing Muses – Counting Backwards (1990)
There’s definitely at least an argument that Throwing Muses never fully recovered from Tanya Donelly’s departure. This is as close to approachability as they got, or at least writing a genuine college rock anthem, and it still sounds like it’s just off somewhere. Key is the strange structure of the song, which simultaneously sounds like it’s lumpenly dragging and firing off sparkily, the guitar hook and drums seemingly at odds, and don’t hope too hard to make sense of the lyrics. Better to luxuriate in both the grit of Kristen Hersh’s burnt out vocal and the harmonies with Donelly, and that for all its angular craft it actually sounds like it might be about to strike a little bit of uncommon funkiness up.
11:23 pm • 29 January 2016 • 2 notes
STN’s 300 Of The 90s
Cocteau Twins – Iceblink Luck (1990)
When in a quandary about which way to go with this absolutely singular band, the glacial textures conjured up by Robin Guthrie and Elizabeth Fraser’s swooping, extra instrument dramatics in the most lucid of unintelligible reworkings of the basic language, go with the big obvious one. It feels like being caught in a hall of mirrors, lush dreaming spirals of effects reflecting off each other and enveloping everything within, which in this case is Fraser vowing to “burn this whole madhouse down” with renewed resilience.
10:47 pm • 29 January 2016 • 1 note
STN’s 300 Of The 90s
Kev Hopper - The Sound Of Gyroscopes (1990)
Everyone who saw this on The Chart Show seems to remember it. The first of the real Exceedingly Strange But Somehow Wonderful Songs - yeah, there’ll be a few in the collection - wherein the bass player from Stump considers the life’s work of Scottish engineer Sandy Kidd, who claimed to have invented gyroscopic machines that defied gravity. This - the song, not the anti-gravity bit, that was an unsafe claim - is achieved through a jauntily farty bass, an operatic hook and synths on outer space setting.
9:07 pm • 29 January 2016