1998 at 20

The year began with the kind of job I was holding down all decade became a career. I strode into the open plan floor which was bright with the spectacle of the Old Court Building through the windows. The job itself was good and only got better. I was still working a walk away from my job. I flirted with vegetarianism successfully enough for it to eventually take the lion's share of my diet. The previous year's smoking quit continued until it was effortless (not a single cigarette since October 1997) Homelife was troubled by two flatmates I like so little I contemplated moving out and leaving it to them but then one of them left and we got a good one. I started my second anthology comic which was about anger and so given to its theme in practice it became a largely incomprehensible mess. The year ended with the funnest fling I'd had in many a year. And the music was good.


MEZZANINE - MASSIVE ATTACK:

The strongest set by the outfit that partially invented the sole source of pop music innovation of its time, trip hop. There are standout tracks like Teardrop and Rising Son but the idea is to put the album on, press play (for authenticity's sake it should be a CD in a digipak), lie back in the dark and absorb. From ethereal whispers to machinery to Jimmy Page style metal guitar and gigantic bass this is a trek through the heaven and hell of the ekkied-up late '90s. The Apotheosis of its year and probably its decade. Still a favourite. Still played.







BLUE WONDER POWER MILK-HOOVERPHONIC:

My favourite find of the year before followed up the frequently compelling debut with something that moved away from the Bristol triphop they'd begun with and across the channel to the continent to work on their own stream of Europop. They were between lead female vocalists and when none were available the two composers provided pitched gutteral whispers. But as the tracks progress the full throated joy of Geike Aarnet's silken voice surfaces and spreads across the gorgeous strings and beats. It wove together much better than the previous one and augured well for the future. Though it was later I can never forget the joy of strolling around Lake Burley Griffin on a lunch break at a conference listening to a loop of Eden with its plaintive French horn figure, yearning guitars and brokenhearted vocal. Spring sunlight had never felt so cooling.

BIG CALM - MORCHEEBA:

Possibly the last album I bought from hearing it in a record shop. The gorgeous opening track, The Sea would have been good enough to get the album for alone but every single track plays somewhere between triphop, delta blues and great European cinema. The finale, the brooding horror movie setpiece of the title track might have fallen flat on its face with the rapper eventually just repeating the band name but the drive of the riff and momentum rise above it. Another still played album.








VERSION 2.0 - GARBAGE:

Someone had to do it and quickly. The internet was galloping toward the mainstream and studios were increasingly places where software apps out gunned tape so the nerdspeak of calling the improvement version 2.0 fit. It would never fit again without an increasingly feeble irony. Well, it was a good listen the first time. The best tracks after that were stripped down mixes on B-sides like the quieter Medication which should have been how the whole album sounded. When they weren't trying to rock up techno it was really more of the same, more version 1.5 beta. I still have this one but don't revisit it.






MOON SAFARI - AIR:

We all piled into De Los Santos on Brunswick St after seeing the wonderful Dark City at Hoyts one Saturday night. Fresh from the exhilarating film we sipped whatever we were affecting at the time (with me it was Fangelico) and this album came on the system. I asked what it was and bought a copy the next day. Still a winning mix of lounge and electronica. Beautiful moods all the way through.










YOU'VE COME A LONG WAY BABY - FLAT BOY SLIM:

One of those discs that everybody had, played for a month and never played again. Hooky and clever but saturated.
















IN THE AEROPLANE OVER THE SEA - NEUTRAL MILK HOTEL:

Discovered this a little later than its release date. A winding journey through singer songwriter ditties and epics that can chill and exult in the same verse. There are other recordings by Jeff Mangum and co (whatever co he happens to have assembled) but nothing reaches these heights. Brass sections that appear underneath lines where you never expected to hear them, a singing saw and a writer who can take you from high pitched joy to pulling your coat more securely around you.








THROUGH THE TREES - THE HANDSOME FAMILY:

Also heard a little later than the release date. I was at a band practice and someone handed me a cd that had come with a magazine. It was called Alt Country and had about twenty tracks of then current acts trying the old genre. I listened to all of it but really only heard the first track. "That's why people OD on pills or jump from the Golden Gate bridge. Anything to feel weightless again." Sung in a solid bass voice at the top of its range over a slowly thumping country backing, the song reached into my spine and held on. I Napstered the entire album and then bought it when I found a copy online. And then I made sure I saw them every time they came out. Husband and wife duo, Brett and Rennie Sparks create liminal country feasts where the dark and the gleams often look the same. Ethereal and filling all at once. A lot of country can be stark and chilling but this is eerie.

1968 at 50: A SAUCERFUL OF SECRETS - PINK FLOYD

Calling a famous band's album transitional is almost a guarantee that most fans will drop it after a single listen, if that. We want to hear all of our favourite music at full strength. Some, like New Order's Movement or Led Zeppelin's Houses of the Holy can get repatriated by the fanbase over time. But Pink Floyd, who really only made transitional albums between Piper and Meddle seem doomed to a section of its timeline as lost years. If you listen from Piper onwards you will hear nothing but continuity building to a clear development. Then again, when you have and then suddenly don't have one of rock history's great human enigmas that can kind of get in the way. So, this is a post-Syd album (even though he's on it) in a way that Obscured by Clouds or Atom Heart Mother aren't. Until that's dealt with the record gets slotted into the post Morrison Doors albums as a curio for the completist. But there's a lot more here than that.

Let There be More Light opens with a pacy R&B guitar riff weirded by a chromatic organ wash. It settles into a half pace thud before Waters enters with his soft vocals in a chant that breaks into a more panic-ed acid rock blast. And back and on. It's a sci-fi story of an alien race descending on earth to inspire us to evolve. After a namecheck of the Beatle's Lucy the track continues to a fairly formless instrumental fade that cannot peak.

Remember a Day features Syd on slide which adds worlds of atmosphere. Ex-Beatles engineer Norman Smith, returning to produce from Piper provides the tom tom thump that Nick Mason couldn't arrive at which lends a solid loping quality. A cinematic piano part is gently lowered on top by Rick Wright who also lends his smooth and airy vocal to this song about childrens' play and imagination. This is the song from the album that appeared on the Relics compilation and, until the record rose from its obscurity as half of a twofer (A Nice Pair) to a decades later release in its own right, was the sole evidence of the set. The eerie beauty of it promised an album composed entirely of it but it's the only moment like it here.

Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun begins with a murmuring bass line, ceremonial tom toms, vibraphone and a near whispered vocal fro mWaters. The cryptic lyric suggests a kind of legendary link between the ancient world and space travel (but really it might as well just be nice phrases following each other). There's no real development to this one but the atmospherics from the continued interplay of the organ, bass and whispered repetition of the phrase "the heart of the sun" give it a dark and pleasing flow. This is the only track that all five members played on. That doesn't mean they were all there at the same session (it was recorded between Piper and this one with Syd and finished off with Gilmour).

Corporal Clegg bursts to life as a guitar heavy dose of psychedelia mixing yelling guitars and a theatrically nasty lead vocal (Nick Mason in his only sung vocal in the band's recording output). The irony of wartime heroism and the personal devastation it wrought in families is typical of the themes of late '60s Britpop where the creative controls had been given to the bands themselves instead of their management. We go from Clegg's pathetic achievement to a choral presentation of his mother's gin-soaked pride to a kazoo-heavy knees-up. Overlong but well played and mark-hitting.

 The title track begins after you've given up listening for it and then lifts into a sci-fi landscape of chromatic organ shimmers and low level noise. This fades under a rising tribal tom tom onslaught which brings its own atonal soundscape. That folds under a lengthy choral and wonky noise fest which closes with a major third. This might have been avant-rock but it was already well behind progressions in orchestral music like Stockhausen's or the freer jazz movements and, even within the greater rock area, already snagged by the like of Zappa and Beefheart. For all that it's an easy twelve minutes of atmosphere  created by well engineered recording. Like Interstellar Overdrive on the debut this was a kind of mid point between the jamming live shows and the freedom of the studio. If the tale it told had no plot that wasn't going to stop the band revisiting this territory and would take years and albums until the sublime Echoes on 1971's Meddle established the strengths of blending explorative textures with confident musicianship. For now it was the bit of the album where the tab you took on side one kicked in and every squeak and thrung made perfect sense.

See Saw shimmers with jazz chords, piano, vibes, mellotron, the big late '60s bass and guitar. Rick Wright's pleasant lead vocals (like Syd in a torpor). Siblings growing up and drifting apart after the closeness of the realm of the family. Occasional jazzy interventions in the rhythm never jar and the flow is maintained. While the lyric lifts it above a mood piece the swamp of audio effects like flanging, tremolo and massive reverb keep this one in the late '60s never to emerge. You can hear the way to great gig in the sky but it's too buried in its times.

And now we must address it, the Effervescing Elephant in the room. Jugband Blues is the only obvious indication that Syd Barrett was still there. From its stark opening with guitar and echoey vocals, through a thumping refrain to a real Salvation Army band and back down to a fragmented mess this is a capsule of Syd's progress from the cheery wit of the opening about him being there but not being there to rhymes that sound like he's making them up on the spot. Then there's a brief wistful moment where he seems lost and then there's a ragged jolly bit about not caring and then the Salvation Army band comes in with a splodgy refrain and then there's a wandering psychedelic dissonance which ends as though cut with a scapel. After a little silence the acoustic guitar drifts back in with Syd asking questions and ending on: "And what exactly is a joke." He's not smiling. He means it. Does that make it funny? We're left with silence. Nothing like the self appreciative calls and laughter that would interlard the White Album later in the year which told listeners that everyone should be in on it. But here it's nothing, the same silence that Syd heard the evening that the rest of the band decided not to pick him up on the way to the gig.

And then it's over and the wild-eyed scarecrow with the fright wig has left the building, stumbling without direction into forty years of night. Actually, Syd heads off back to his Chelsea loft and paints. And strums chords and writes lyrics, recording two LPs that veer from brilliance to distintegration before he heads back home to Cambridge and his family who help him manage his schizophrenia. The rest of the band, to their eternal credit, ensure that he is looked after financially, getting a guernsey on every Floyd compilation album and royalties from his songs they still play live. Invaded by journalists and then knuckle-headed fans who are quick with cameras but slow with learning about privacy he goes to the shop and makes bizarre furniture in his house and then dies at sixty, affluent and voluntarily obscure. The record label keeps releasing legacy-violating albums of outtakes and failures from the Black Lagoon but anyone who loves a bit of Syd leaves them in the shop.

After that The Pink Floyd becomes just Pink Floyd and they get into it, experimenting and carving off everything that fails until you get to Meddle's crafted songs and epic and then the one that hangs them on the stars of the firmament, Dark Side, after which time they will be able to endure the ridicule of the punks and indifference of the post punks and receive visits from the newly curious for evermore. But for a moment here there was real conflict and through a couple of LP sides of assured psychedelia you can hear the instant of severance, the cracking of execution and the silence that made the promise.