One sub industry I did take to was trip hop, the morphed distillation of the clever part of rap stretched into danceable grooves or stretched down to rainy afternoon cinema by the likes of Tricky and Portishead. Also, having initially dismissed it I grew to understand techno and EDM and, if I didn't love that, at least preferred the approach. Both of these forms of electronica spawned masses of copyists, true, but the sound had more substance and freshness that the big wash of clones at least made for a luxuriantly textured carpet.
Apart from exchanging home burned CDs with friends I discovered the new stuff through looking it up on Allmusic or UBL and moving laterally from any of those points. Later in the 90s this also involved going on peer-to-peer and getting anything you wanted. As there was less of a sense of time sensitivity (put age in there, as well) the searches went in all directions. 1996 thus became the most eclectic of all the decades I'll be looking at. Vide!
Beck - Odelay
More sophisticated and mature than his breakthrough Mellow Gold, Odelay remains an enjoyable listen by a randomist trickster with serious composition skill. Mellow Gold remains stronger for the force its rawness lets through. Beck changed direction almost immediately after Odelay, fitting comfortably into a singer songwriter role by which he found a new audience and left his first behind. I was among the latter. Odelay was fun but Mellow Gold was funner. Still, the mash em up and glue em down method worked again and until you heard a CEO ruin it by using the term lo-fi in an address it was pretty good fun.
Lamb - Debut
Trip hop was entrenched by the late 90s. You could take it anywhere and heard it everywhere. Techno doofed the festivals and clothes shops, happily minding its own business. The difficult one was jungle or drum and bass as, while everyone admired it, no one got what it was meant to do. This duo from Manchester had the idea of programming all the severity you could eat in the rhythm but make it serve real songwriting. The fractured samples, multi-layered choruses and strong jazzy lead vocals showed us we could connect with the alien genre the same way we did with Tricky or Portishead. Of course, once established as the underdarlings of the boutique and cafe, Lamb were unpersonned by the gatekeepers of jungle and forced into the wilderness of the mainstream where they had hits 'n' stuff. The whole album is still strong, resists the saturation problem with most pop by keeping the hooks low profile. And then there's Gorecki, a long crescendo of celebration of twig and branch beats, sampled symphony (from the 3rd symphony of the title composer's works) and a prayer-like declaration of love and wonderment calling out from the bliss. Still fresh.
Morcheeba - Who Can You Trust?
At the cooler, wounded end of the trip hop street was this London trio of two brothers and a lass at the mic. A rich mix of electronics, bottleneck guitar and smoky vocals over break beats is far less impeded by time than many of the cash-ins that followed Portishead and Massive Attack out of Bristol. The following year's Big Calm is the easier gateway with a flashier pop sensibility and hooks but this afterparty chill can still fill the exiting thrill on an early Sunday morning.
Mazzy Star - Among My Swan
The double act from Rainy Street emerged from three years of touring and radio silence with a set that followed the formula of the two previous albums, big spacey opening track, a fragile acoustic number, a noisy whisper fest, and a handful of aching near country near psychedelia textures. This sounds like I'm about to dismiss it but Among My Swan is a fine album. It's a little sludgier in texture than either of the first two but this just feels further along the road. Less pops out but there are real aches in Still Cold, Rhymes of an Hour. Still works a treat, in fact, the whole thing.
Swans - Soundtracks for the Blind
From unsettling childish prattling to real FBI stakeout recordings to terrifying confessions and deceptively sweet techno ballads Swans' exit after one and half decades of local blitzkrieging gathered all its experience and ordered it like a series of William Cornell boxes. Not one of them was pure but mixed with the traits and even material from other phases. Tapeloops, massive one-chord storms, and more and more still create a rich and complex texture that can be visited for tens of minutes but not cherry picked. The whole thing in one sitting is too much. You're getting everything they were capable of, crammed into every last nook of sound. This was their last will and testament. Following the live album with the joke title (Swans are Dead) there would be various solo efforts until Gira's resurrection of the name with mostly new personnel this decade but no Swans. Jarboe ventured further and further out on her own branch, getting darker and stranger until the dark and the strange was she herself, free of the evisceration of the band she'd struggled and shone in. This massive landscape of pain and analgesia had to stand. So it does.
Dead Can Dance - Spiritchaser
The plainest and least bombastic of all the DCD albums, Spiritchaser comes and goes pleasantly and doesn't outstay its welcome. I like the bombastic stuff better. Then again, they were is a strange position in the mid-90s as the strain called world music emerged and spread o'er the globe. At one end of its spectrum it was innovative and at the other it sounded like updated Martin Denny muzak (which I like, btw, just sayin'). Dead Can Dance could try to protest that they'd clued into this a decade earlier and with much greater originality. So, they couldn't win. Make it bigger and brasher or slim down for a near unplugged approach. They tried the latter. Well,
Tricky - Pre Millennium Tension
I've already written a main post about this one and explained why I can only listen to picks rather than the whole thing. Those, though, are still fresh.
Tricky - Nearly God
Hissing, whispering and crying with gooey electronics, this anthology of collaborations between Tricky and various pop vocalists variously wows and numbs. I don't mind it now and then but if I realised what I'm listening to I'll usually last only a few tracks before going somewhere else.
Beth Orton - Central Reservation
The decade of articulate soloists brought forth a healthy spirit of experimentation. While they might have started out with just a book of biro-ed lyrics and an acoustic guitar in their bedrooms new folkies like Beth Orton were happy to mix it up with breakbeats and electronics. I first heard Orton's hit lead-off for this album, She Cries Your Name, as a scratchy realaudio ten second sample. That was enough to sell the album to me. I don't love it now but can still hear it if it's sourced for a VOD show.
The Handsome Family - Milk and Scissors
There are some real standouts on this second album like Winnebago Skeletons and the dizzy 3/4 nihilism of Drunk by Noon but it doesn't hold together as a set as it feels like they haven't decided whether to be indy but a little bit country or all out country. They found a clear path by the next one, the extraordinary Through the Trees, and never looked back. It demonstrated the difference between the country leanings of Winnebago and the indy cuteness of Three Legged Dog (given to the main singer's brother to sing). I cherry pick tracks from this one. Everything after it varied from greatness to a notch above just ok.
Sneaker Pimps - Becoming X
I worked in Bourke St and my stroll home would often involve a step into Gaslight Records to see what had come in. This had grown sparser and I was really just down to flipping through the soundtracks to see if anything like Near Dark or Suspiria had come in. One afternoon I found myself to be the only customer. I was about to make the usual flip through the movies section and leave but started taking notice of the music that the lone guy behind the counter had put on. It had a lot of the mood and atmosphere of the best of trip hop but there was a lot more energy in the songs. A magnetic female vocal rode the waves of electronica and a rock sensibility that worked because it wasn't centre stage but just another texture. And then came the final track, a rattling and pulsing rendition of the seduction song from The Wicker Man. Man. It was something new that I liked. I asked the guy what it was and the name was so odd that I had to have him repeat it, slowly. Before I could get to that part of the shop he volunteered that the one he was playing was the last copy. I went home with a kind of levitation autopilot and played the entire thing again. Everything fit, song after song, drama, cinema, melody and a glorious pallet of sounds and textures. It rocked, it boogied, it slunk and skulked. It went from Friday night to Sunday morning to the 3 a.m. of a day so confusing it could be anywhere in the week. I still play it.
...
It was at the end of this year that I went to the final of a friend of mine's Xmas afterparties. He lived in the city and held these superb gatherings for everyone who had to endure family xmas duties or those who had more pleasantly gone to orphans' dos. His afterdos went from breezy in the late afternoon to stompin' in the early morn. At one stage while it was on the turn from one state to another he asked allowed what music he should go to. I suggested Portishead and he scoffed and said: "Nah we need something newer than that." Then he went and put on the most recent Oasis album. Dummy was only two years old and still sounds current. Morning Glory was also two years old but still sounds like it was released in 1983. It was just another point of relief. I might not have been cured of rock music but when mediocrity like Oasis was being hailed as its saviour it was time to leave the room. I went and had a conversation that sounded louder than the music.
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