Speaker 1hello it's the album years again yes we're back as the world turns to shit you can always rely on us to talk bollocks about lots of music that no one cares about anymore except us and hopefully the people that are listening to us so tim uh we're talking about 1998 is that
Speaker 2right 1998 yeah this is hip by our standards this is only 22 years ago this is
Speaker 1pretty with it isn't it yes for us yes so and one of the reasons that we were slightly trepidatious about revisiting the 90s is because i think when we did our previous 90s episode which i correct me if i'm wrong was 92 was it it was yeah 92 we really struggled didn't we to come up with you know a list of of albums that we thought were worth discussing um but we haven't had this probably 1998 so i think maybe we were you know our fears were unfounded in fact we've got a pretty pretty healthy list here i think they're pretty
Speaker 2healthy and pretty eclectic and i think you're right i think 92 i was kind of a bit worried and thinking are we going to find less and less that we like as the decade goes on but then i remembered at the time that you know 1990 91 was pretty great 93 94 had some fantastic releases so for whatever reason 1992 in terms of what it had to offer didn't really appeal to us and sometimes i wonder if that was kind of you know it was the year that we were sort of signed releasing our first albums and whether we were as aware but sometimes i think maybe it was just a pretty bad year you know if
Speaker 1nothing else it shows that we do kind of land on these years almost at random don't we we don't kind of think about oh this album and that album was in that year we just kind of say let's do and we kind of pick a year out the uh of the year don't we we did that with 1992 and kind of paid the price um and we've done the same here and i think we've been very pleasantly surprised as i say we haven't we haven't had a repeat of that particular experience this time there's been lots of interesting albums that we were very happy to talk about but before we do that it's as is customary we must have the complaints and errata section which is where i kind of hand over to you tim because you monitor all the comments and stuff well
Speaker 2actually i had a few really interesting recommendations uh from people this time around so albums from 69 that i'd not heard of and um one person was talking about uh the bgs he was glad we mentioned the bgs album they said well actually if you're looking for a mainstream band making experimental music during that time the four seasons made some kind of psychedelic album and so there were a few kind of interesting um recommendations from people generally speaking not as many errors though i've got to say uh they were all on your side the errors apparently and what a few people are thinking i mean i think they're thinking this is that whichever university granted you that professorship they should be requesting it back because you made you made a terrible error give me
Speaker 1give me the well i know one error i made i said that the neil young album everyone knows this is nowhere isn't a crazy horse album yeah and of course it is a crazy horse album but it's crazy horse before the bgs album and it's a crazy horse the classic lineup it's the danny witton crazy horse
Speaker 2to be fair that was the main one in truth about three people picked up on that one person it was a very specific mistake which to be honest i wouldn't have known whether you were right or whether you were wrong even though i know a lot about the artist but apparently it said that nick drake died of an overdose of sleeping pills when it was actually antidepressants
Speaker 1my research assistant will be fired immediately as a consequence of that is
Speaker 2that is that bowie the dog
Speaker 1bowie was my research assistant on the on the nick drake yeah yeah that's very poor bowie yeah um yeah
Speaker 2other than that a couple of complaints saying that um i sounded as if i was conducting it from my toilet weirdly i was in my special recording space which was not sounding at its best that day it must be said um a couple of people have said that they've been creating drinking games around the album years which i quite liked and um one person said that i have a drink every time tim or steven say sort of and then they calculate the amount of alcohol that i drink and then they calculate the amount of apparently you'd said it 48 times and i'd said it 32 times wow in the last one um another person said yes we have a drinking game in which we have one shot for every time tim says absolutely which i've got to say i do say and i noticed that myself yeah well it
Speaker 1just shows you how much you agree with me all the time tim which is a you know
Speaker 2what am i going to say i agree with you most emphatically mr wilson would that be better i'd like you
Speaker 1to i'd like you to do that every time in this episode you feel the urge to say i agree with you most emphatically mr wilson absolutely yeah well i'd like you to say i say i completely concur mr wilson no professor i completely concur professor wilson well said though you may be wrong about the tablets
Speaker 2yes i'll do that one um two shots every time they mention robert fripp even if he hasn't released anything during
Speaker 1the year right well that's you i've noticed that too you shoehorn robert fripp into every fucking conversation about every fucking album we've ever released talk about i loves him right
Speaker 2go on and what else uh three shots every time mr wilson mentions industrial music you shoehorn it in anything the four seasons nick drake the bgs
Speaker 1the bgs uh are we talking about industrial music today i don't think we are
Speaker 2but i will get robert fripp mentioned and i probably will say absolutely i think you
Speaker 1did put about eight robert fripp albums on the list and i
Speaker 2well we should have there's a look you've got to do come on he did the gates of paradise studio soundscapes and he did project two this year the
Speaker 1projects i took them off i took them off but you'll still manage to shoehorn him in i've no doubt i will okay so listen 1998 let's let's start now um i remember now i might be wrong this is my where my memory might be wrong and we might get some complaints about it but i think it's a good idea about this i seem to remember buying two albums on the same day that i was incredibly excited about so in my memory they came out the same monday because things were released on a monday at this time in in the 90s i changed to fridays now but it was always a monday wasn't it i seem to remember these two albums came out on the same monday and i went to the local hour price to buy them on the day of release because i was so excited about both of them one of them completely lived up to was a disaster but a fascinating disaster and they are the self-titled mark hollis solo album and goldie's saturn's return now see if you can guess which way
Speaker 2round well obviously it's going to be the goldie album that you thought was a masterpiece and hollis slightly disappointed you
Speaker 1the hollis album i think is a classic and it's very interesting because i was reading up about it on wikipedia and of course it was originally sent out to to the goldie album and i think it's to the press and to the media as a talk talk album um and i think it was called the mountains of mars or the mountains of the moon or something like that and it was only subsequent to to the press copies going out that mark presumably decided no that he wanted to wanted it to be uh presented as his solo record and of course it does beg the question where does a talk talk album end and a mark hollis solo album begin um it's a difficult
Speaker 2one i mean at the time because i bought both of those albums probably in the same week of release although i remember buying them on different days the hollis i remember being slightly disappointed by at the time i love it i think it's a classic i think it's timeless it's a beautiful piece of work but i remember feeling that it wasn't quite as brave sonically as laughingstock or spirit of
Speaker 1eden but but you not think that was deliberate it was almost like he was he was trying to go for something very understated um and timeless almost like i mean correct me if i'm wrong but i think the whole idea of that album was it was recorded direct to stereo there was no multi tracking involved it was literally just setting up the musicians in the space and recording the takes various takes of the songs directly to to stereo analog tape so there was no opportunity for that kind of extreme post-production that albums like laughingstock and spirit of eden had been through where they're kind of almost sculpting the sound that they've captured this is very much a different but i suppose in a way that's that answers my own question you know where does a talk talk album end and where does a mark hollis so out solo album begin and that is i think that's the main differentiating factor here isn't it that it seems very much like a live performance without any of that kind of ambitious studio trickery that's very much a hallmark of of the previous records yeah
Speaker 2i agree completely and i think that um you know we had this with say david sylvian and secrets of the beehive that that was a very natural sounding album that came after some hardly processed and experimental albums and it's now my favorite sylvian solo album but at the time i was slightly disappointed that he'd not taken on some of those radical ideas further and i guess that was my initial feeling in retrospect i think the mark hollis album is a beautiful timeless piece of work that i wouldn't change but at the time i think i wanted to be taken somewhere different and so there was a slight sense of disappointment even though of course i greatly enjoyed it and thought it was a powerful piece of work and you're right you know that is the main difference between the talk talk and the hollis the hollis is talk talk with all of the studio affectation stripped off
Speaker 1it's got a wonderful kind of tend to quality to it hasn't it almost as if they're not they're not quite completely inhabiting the songs they're still kind of finding them yeah particularly particularly with the kind of the way the woodwinds play it's almost like they play phrases and the phrases kind of end mid-thought uh it's almost like the the phrases aren't quite complete it's well i
Speaker 2think the woodwinds perhaps are the one distinguishing feature of this album if you wanted um one particular sound that differentiated this from spirit of eden and laughingstock it's the use of um almost a woodwind quartet throughout isn't it which is a clarinet quartet and it's very very beautiful and yes there is a tentative quality and the songs almost feel that they could fall apart at any moment it's
Speaker 1very fragile isn't it even the way he's singing it's almost like he's barely getting above a whisper and you you can kind of hear um the you know the hiss the hiss on the tape is sometimes louder than than the music because it's so quiet and it's so minimal it's so reserved um and of course you know history tells us that that was the last that was the last time he would ever make a record i don't think we ever thought that at the time we were thinking oh this is part of a this is part of a continuum of mark hollis you know recordings but of course it's it turned out that that was the kind of headstone the gravestone on his career he never recorded again so i suppose in a way we kind of look at it differently now to the way that we would have looked at it then where we were thinking oh this is the next this is the next hollis talk talk album well i hope the next one's going to be a bit different again but of course there never was a different one so it does feel almost like an epitaph to his you know to his career in a way doesn't it it's got that kind of simple fragile tentative beauty of someone that's kind of leaving something behind almost i don't know that's being too poetic no
Speaker 2i think you're right and i think that you can hear that in some senses mark hollis album is the polar opposite of the talk talk debut isn't it um it's completely different universe and you're only talking 16 years and it's i remember at the time people saying he's moving towards silence in a way and in retrospect that makes an awful lot of sense that he's moving towards some kind of purity some kind of silence and i guess he felt that he'd completed his journey and sometimes if that is you know your concept your approach to music he perhaps achieved it you know because i've always thought this with with you and i we sometimes move towards silence we sometimes move towards noise we sometimes move towards pop we sometimes move towards experimental and perhaps in some ways we have musical um adhd compared to hollis who seemed to have this amazing sense of focus throughout his career that's interesting
Speaker 1a couple things you picked up on there you've mentioned the fact that there's no noise element to this album and of course when you listen to to albums like laughing stock particularly say that the feedback solo on after the flood that there is a very strong influence of the aesthetics of noise isn't there yeah and that is that is completely gone on this record isn't it it's all about the beauty the space and also the other thing i think you mentioned there which i which i definitely resonates with me is it almost seemed like this album was the the logical step towards him being completely mute for the rest of his for his life you know that this is the step towards falling into complete silence which is a very poetic way of looking at it but i think that makes perfect sense when you listen to this record this is obviously him retreating and the next logical step is to simply say no nothing and to make no sound at all yeah it's incredibly brave you know but it's a wonderful record isn't it i think it's one of those records that just much much like a lot of the talk talk uh or the hollis catalog it just gets better and better with age doesn't it it's so it's partly because it's so removed from time in its own way it was an anachronism at the time and in a way that kind of serves it very well it remains somehow out yeah well i think i think
Speaker 2it is gonna you know it has gained in status and it will gain in status further and it deserves to i mean it's not my favorite hollis work i think i really like that trilogy of color of spring leading to laughingstock really the spirit of eden there's something in those three albums that manage to be communicative as well as experimental and i guess that's where my heart lies in music so this isn't my favorite of his albums so i suppose one comparison is with one of my favorite albums i think that pink moon has that leading towards silence you know in nick drake's career as well and it's a very stripped down very simple acoustic album i mean this is a lot more harmonically complex than nick drake of course
Speaker 1i think one of the things i'm really keen to get away from with this podcast is perhaps to try and persuade people in a way to stop thinking about you know an artist's catalog as oh this is the best album that's you know that's the weakest album that's the best album is to kind of see an artist's catalog as a body of work and the fact that every album in that catalog is different is kind of what makes it special yeah yeah um so you know we talk about mark hollis it's not your favorite i don't know it's my favorite too but i love the fact that it has a perfectly unique place in his oeuvre in his catalog i would
Speaker 2say at this point i concur with your observations professor wilson so
Speaker 1let's move on to the other album i remember buying the same day as mark hollis and i said i say this again i might be completely wrong about this and the memory has very has ways of playing strange tricks on you i seem to remember buying this album the same day and i was very excited about it because i had i had really loved uh the previous record and i'd love the ambition about it i was very much into drum and bass um i was a big fan of artists like faux tech at the time as well um who also released an album this year called form and function which is a classic but but i think we decided we want to talk about the goldie album satin's return because there's something about it that screams folly isn't it it's so it's a double cd and the first cd has two songs one of which is over an hour long um and it's kind of a fusion of drum and bass and orchestral music and these kind of bizarre falsetto vocals which i seem to remember by goldie himself is that right he does
Speaker 2sing some of it yeah he has other singers on it as well i mean i remember this because i bought this in manchester our price at the time and i may have told you the story before but i went into the store and um i said oh sorry have you got goldie sands return and um the woman at the counter then asked um who i assume was the manager and said um hey jeff have we got the goldie sands return and i said yeah i've got the goldie album hi and what's it like fucking shakes i knew that
Speaker 1was coming yeah i
Speaker 2was thinking here i am paying my money for the album which i've been told
Speaker 1was fucking shakes only in the north of england would you get that response well i love that i love that i mean unfortunately i could easily have been that shop because that that was my that was largely my review of the album when i got the goldie sands return and i was like what the fuck is this and i was like i don't even know what the fuck is this i don't even know what the fuck is this i don't even know what the fuck is this 60 minute piece that fuses drum and bass with orchestral sounds falsetto voice and it's it's like a it's like a a prayer to his mother uh shades of david essex in stardust there if you if you get my reference here tim i certainly do you do some hopefully some people listening to will will also get that reference um and everything about it sounded so pretentious in a way that i loved but the reality of it unfortunately was turgid um and just didn't work and and that's still my memory of it today and i've listened to it once i think about 10 years ago i thought maybe it wasn't as bad as i remembered it and i listened to it again and it was as bad as i remembered it um so tim you but you're gonna defend it you're gonna defend it go ahead defend it well you see
Speaker 2for me this is the topographic oceans of drum and bass this is the magnificent folly you know it's arvo pair with beats um i mean for people who've not heard this it begins with about two minutes of electronic buzzing it then goes into an almost eno soundscape the beats don't actually come in until about 27 minutes and so it has what sounds like frippatronics soundscape ah he's done it okay
Speaker 1that's the first drink there okay number one number one carry on
Speaker 2and then um there's a female vocalist initially singing mother and it's a beautiful sort of four note progression and um i've complained about the length of cds this is a cd being used to perfection 75 minutes one cd 75 minutes the other cd this is a quadruple album in old money and the first track is 60 minutes mostly it develops into a rhythm about as i said 27 minutes in and then towards the end it breaks down to the whole point of having the buzzing and the orchestral tones again quite beautiful my sad story about this one is that i saw a documentary because at the time it was you know it's quite an important album and there's a documentary on channel four and he did write this as a hymn to his mother and he's playing it to his mother and after about two minutes his mother's going hey got any fags lad i mean to be fair that's the experience i always had with my father as well with my music
Speaker 1but you know but i mean let's let's we forget there's a lot of other music on the album too there's a collaboration with david bowie which i also seem to seem to remember as being ridiculous and and just not very good
Speaker 2well so what okay come on you've got to get the listeners involved in this because so 60 minutes of as i said arvo peart goes drum and bass this heartfelt hymn to his mother followed by a seven minute track with david bowie and this is over really warped keyboards no rhythm whatsoever there's some dissonant almost free jazz piano and bowie i think is singing a suicide note that goldie had written when he was a teenager and it's Bowie at his most tuneless, but it's fascinating singing. That particular album, if you like, disc one, closes with about four minutes of Goldie's voice in reverse. It's absolutely fearless. And then side two is slightly more conventional, opens with a track with Noel Gallagher called Tempo Tempo, which is a furious, quite discordant drummer bass piece, but has an amazing 16 minute kind of, if Weather Report were a drummer bass band, a track called Dragonfly. Very, very beautiful melodies, harmonies, great playing.
Speaker 1I mean, listen, Tim, don't get me wrong. Everything about this album I loved on paper, but the reality, unfortunately, was very, very disappointing. It just seems so much of the ambition, so many of the ideas just fell flat and just didn't work. And you could admire it. You could admire it on an intellectual level. But if it just doesn't come across as very good in the end, then, you know, then it doesn't really matter. Doesn't matter. Does it? That's the issue. And, you know, this whole thing, this music by the yard. I mean, the previous album had also been a double CD, remember? And it was also too long. There was also Ronnie Size's New Forms album, which came out around this time, too, which I did like. But again, it was a double CD over two hours of music. Too long. Just too long. Music by the yard.
Speaker 2Well, this is one of the things I'm going to address in 1998. One of the things that's quite interesting is that that kind of spirit of progressive and jazz rock pretension that you thought had been buried by, punk and post-punk, came back with a vengeance. You know, a lot of the drum and bass artists were making quite conceptual works, in a sense, and very ambitious and using space. I mean, you know, yeah, this is an album that goes way beyond something like Topographic in terms of its excess. And I admire that. You know, I admire Goldie for following his vision completely. The same with Ronnie Size. And I do agree with you in the sense that these albums were often overlong. The ideas overstayed. They're wealthy. They're welcome. But I was actually really quite pleased that they existed and there were artists who were prepared to go down in flames with their ideas and with their beliefs, because it sort of followed a period that was more mundane to my mind, in my view. Grunge and Britpop. And I kind of wonder if this period of excess that you saw, OK, computer represents it to an extent. Certainly some of the drum and bass artists do, whether it is a reaction to that. I mean, I think it was a reaction to a more mundane, more rootsy MTV unplugged grunge and Britpop sensibility that was around in the mid-90s, you know, early to mid-90s.
Speaker 1I think you're right. But there's something there was something particularly about the drum and bass movement. I mean, drum and bass was a movement that seemed to come and burn itself out relatively quickly, I would say, within the space of, you know, two or three years. And I really liked it. But there was something about the drum and bass artists that seemed to hanker for that excess, that age of excess. Because another album from this year, Four Heroes, two pages, another double CD that's like over two hours long. And there were some great moments on that record, too, but it was too long, you know. And it's almost like drum and bass artists did see themselves as the natural successors to the kind of progressive jazz fusion artists of the 70s. You know, Fotech also, all his albums weren't double, but they were always 80 minutes long. Too long, too much excess. And I think they kind of. It was like a big souffle that kind of, you know, flopped in the middle. It didn't quite stand up. It didn't have the rigour to make it stand up as a great album. And I don't think many of those albums have stood the test of time as classic albums as a consequence.
Speaker 2No, you know, I think they're fascinating follies, though. And I think sometimes it throws up ideas. And that was what I was kind of interested in. And obviously, you know, drum and bass kind of entered the mainstream in a way in that Bill Nelson had done a drum and bass album in 96 that was actually pretty good. And David Bowie had done Earthling in 97, which was strongly influenced by drum and bass. And one of my favourites actually was Walking Wounded, Everything But The Girl, where actually they did make a beautiful album that seemed to come out of both drum and bass and bossing over, weirdly. But it was a really nicely shaped album with gorgeous melodies, heartfelt sentiments. And yeah, you know, if I think of the drum and bass era, weirdly, some of the things that I carry with me now are the more mainstream interpretations of it. And there's a lot of things that I carry with me. There's an album this year as well. Unfortunately, I cannot pronounce his name, but the album is Leveros, and he's a Brazilian artist. Catano Veloso? That's the man, Veloso. And he'd been around since the late 60s, a part of the kind of experimental Tropicalia movement. And in 98, he produces this album that does indeed involve bossing over, but also drum and bass and 12-tone ideas.
Speaker 1Something about drum and bass must have appealed to people who'd grown up with Jazz Fusion. You know, and obviously we've got Squarepusher as well coming out around, well, a couple of years ago. He'd been around for a few years by now, but he's obviously someone that again came out of the drum and bass movement and was clearly someone who'd grown up loving Jazz Fusion. He was a bass player after all. And in fact, I want to sort of take us into the world now, perhaps more of electronic or an IDM now, because Squarepusher made arguably his first almost pure, pure jazz-influenced album this year. Music has rotted one note, but it's the other side of jazz. This is the very dark, claustrophobic side of jazz. Things that you might have heard Miles Davis doing in the early 70s. That very kind of luminous sound of electric pianos and slightly fragmented beats, dissonant tones. And this is coming out on Warp Records. This is coming out on a label that is known, you know, purely at the time, certainly known purely. As an electronic music album, it's fascinating how, and I suppose the Goldie kind of taps into this idea as well, that this is a time when electronic music is starting to abstract. It's starting to almost kind of consume other forms of music and bring them into its sphere in order to be able to move forwards, which I find really fascinating. So we're going to talk about some other albums that perhaps come out of this kind of world as well a bit later on, but maybe we should just talk about, or I should talk because I'm not sure how familiar you are with these albums. So we're going to talk about some other albums that perhaps come out of this kind of world a bit later on, but maybe we should just talk about, or I should talk because I'm not sure how familiar you are with these albums. me of sort of public information films from the 70s or kind of 70s horror cinema or or even children you know those children's tv shows from the 70s like children of the stones children of the stones yeah to me there's something about about boards of canada that's completely cut from the same cloth as those kind of things so um i kind of i guess kind of connected a little way to this world of electronica is the world of beats and trip hop you know it's not a massive jump to go from say what boards of canada were doing to what massive attack were doing and i think i don't know if you agree with me i think massive attack made their masterpiece this year which is mezzanine um their third album again another band that didn't they weren't prolific and it's only their third album i think in 10 years the first four four songs i think are flawless after that the album does tail off a bit for me but those first four songs um you know angel rising sun teardrop and inertia creeps i think are the pinnacle of their catalogue and arguably the pinnacle of the whole trip hop catalogue so i know you're also a big fan of this
Speaker 2album so yeah no i love it i agree with you i think it probably is the best album in my know so my favorite is um hundredth window the one that followed it which i think is even darker it's almost like inertia creeps taken to the nth level really and it's got a much more um post-punk gothic feel but absolutely reinvented in trip hop textures yeah great album and what i kind of liked about mezzanine was the attention to detail i mean it's a great album it's a great album it's a great album when you're talking about boards of canada i think it's the attention to even the bass drum sound i mean i always kind of hated in a way when we would be in the studio in the 80s and people would spend 20 years seemingly on a hi-hat sound but actually it really paid off with mezzanine that almost every single sound seemed unique to the album you know they'd thought about everything and i think that's the thing that as well as having these sort of you know great songs with powerful atmospheres um you just have such an atmosphere and i think it's attention to detail sonically and also
Speaker 1uh it's funny i spoke to a producer quite a well-known producer who will remain nameless about this album because he was a big fan too and i said what is it that makes that album so much and he said distortion almost everything has some kind of distortion on it harmonic distortion so even the bass drums are put through things like amplifiers so they have they have they don't have that kind of clean you know clinical sound that you associate with a lot of electronic music it's everything's kind of a little bit dirty a little bit of a bit grubby and i suppose this is also where it does it you know this is something it does have in common with the boards of canada again everything is slightly manipulated to sound a bit low fine a bit grubby but i think mezzanine simultaneously sounds massive doesn't it i mean it's massive it's a lush production um and i think you're right i think hundredth window probably is actually so i've revised what i said i think it is their best album but at the same time i don't think hundredth window has anything it doesn't quite have the peaks that mezzanine has teardrop me is one of the greatest songs of all time it's a song i've tried to rip off so many times um and of course liz fraser on on that on that track is just sublime you know their choice of singers their choice of female singers particularly was always impeccable wasn't it for you know from um uh i've forgotten her name the sharon nelson on the first album uh tracy thorne on the second and then of course we get shanae o'connor on hundredth window and on this record it's liz fraser one of the most extraordinary voices in the world and it's a song that i've tried to rip off so many times
Speaker 2is though i do love angel is that horace andy on angel horace
Speaker 1andy on angel yeah which is
Speaker 2just a fantastically epic piece of work i mean so sinister isn't it yeah absolutely uh good god i've said it
Speaker 1you said absolutely it's okay you haven't said you haven't you haven't said the f word only you've said the f word only once so far though yeah this time so and also there was you know there was a lot of really interesting records coming out i don't think portis had released anything around this time but certainly they were a peak at this time but we had the uncle science fiction uh meet beat manifestos actual sounds and voices so this whole notion of of you know trip hop and and um again it felt like a lot of these artists were really consuming other genres and bringing them in to their world you know so massive attack that mentally now has a very has a very post-punk element to it hasn't it well i think this
Speaker 2is the interesting with both uncle and massive attack there's a strong arty post-punk element but also there's a kind of grandeur in both of them really that i can hear um and i always thought with massive attack you know angel is a great example of this that a bit like pink floyd they were one of those bands who could make a little go a long way so angel musically is very very simple but it sounds massive it feels massive um and i think the same goes for a lot of the uncle work that it almost had a kind of stadium rock pomposity in there and i mean this in a positive way sense with both um uncle and massive attack and the collaboration with tom york on that album i think it's rabbit in the headlights or rabbit in your headlights which is really haunting and one of the best tom york related pieces i've heard um and i remember yeah being quite excited with these albums i think that you're right they seem to be bringing in elements from the past but completely reinventing them in a 1990s fashion it felt as if the music was going somewhere fresh and um the distortion point is interesting because i think that from acting baby onwards the 90s partly becomes characterized by distortion so a lot of bands when they're changing their sounds basically added distortion to everything it almost became that sound whether it was a brian eno production whether it was a mitchell froome production you know i think of his production on american music club's mercury or his production for suzanne vega it seemed that an awful lot of distortion was used but also different tape grades i remember mitchell froome talking about the fact that he would love to go into um a huge 48 track pristine studio but then actually impose a sort of four-track tascam sound within it so he'd fuse um hi-fi and lo-fi really in quite interesting ways but there was this real kind of this sort typifies a lot of the sounds of the um the 90s really this move towards distortion and of course the mark hollis album sounds completely outside anything that's happening during this era
Speaker 1and i suppose that is you kind of refer to it there it kind of is a reaction almost against the previous decade the 80s where sounds became very clean and very processed um and here now they're becoming processed but in a different way they're kind of processing it through through dirt and through distortion to give them more character to get away from that kind of very clinical 80s sound um yeah i was gonna say sometimes i think that was used um maybe too
Speaker 2i kind of felt that you know with you too and to insert an extent bands like rem and maybe even eels that these were bands who were really essentially great rock bands and great composers but in order to feel fresh and relevant you know i'm thinking of um certainly the mid-90s new adventures in hi-fi was it from rem where effectively to indicate a change they just pour lots of distortion on every instrument and the vocals and they're not going to be able to it seems to sort of lack subtlety it's almost a self-conscious nod to what's going on i guess it's the equivalent of neil young's landing on water you know in 1986 which i don't mind as an album but it seems to use every 80s production technique going and i think that was what happened to an extent during this time you know the flip side of it was negative is that in order to appear different bands would just load distortion on the work and essentially they were producing two or three years earlier well
Speaker 1let's let's talk about rem because you you've put them on the list i this is a band i know very little about i have to say they've never been on my radar i've never heard anything that that interested me at all i'm sad to say not that i disliked it just never particularly appealed to me but you wanted to talk about an album they released this year called up um because you you felt it was significant in their catalog in some
Speaker 2way well i think it's significant it's the first um album they made after the drummer left so this was the first album they made after the drummer left so this was the first album they made after the drummer left so this was the first album they made after the drummer left so this was the first album they made after the drummer left so this was the first album they made after the drummer left it seemed a real self-conscious nod to the 90s it was rem trying to prove they were relevant and it seemed over long it seemed as if it was making too much a tip of the hat to what was happening around it whereas in the 80s you know if you listen to albums like murmur there was a very natural rootsy sound yet something that still communicated in that post-punk era there was quite production and so i think that as a band they grew very very nicely up to the success of automatic for the people which i think is a very strong piece of work um after that it almost seems as if they feared losing relevance and i think that happens with a lot of artists obviously and in order to regain that relevance they kind of immerse themselves in whatever are the techniques or the ideas of the age or they're maybe not fully understanding why it works and with this album it was just the three of them and it was more naturally experimental you know the influences in there were much more people like brian eno or leonard cohen this was almost them going back to what they personally liked and not only that um they're using drum machines in place of the drummer in a lot of cases so it had a very different sound for an rem album it had a lot of electronics there's even a kind of kraut rock element to this i think it's a a slight nod towards Kraftwerk cluster um and it's just a really nice intimate album and the only reason i kind of mentioned it is because i think it's one of their best albums but it's one that completely gets ignored because it's not as self-consciously experimental as what preceded it and nor was it as successful as many of their albums so it's a band that have been talked about many many times but this album falls through the cracks and i just think there's um a few very strong very emotional pieces and um you know they seem to be sort of just enjoying making music
Speaker 1okay interesting so i suppose this comes back to this idea you know again that we talked about that sometimes it's better to look at an artist's catalog as you know as as a whole career and not necessarily sort of try and pick this is a good album this isn't so good but just to be fascinated by the journey you know and so it sounds to me like what you're saying is this album does have an interesting place in their catalog um in that it does you know it has got a distinctive quality of its own and i think that's something that's so underrated i get so bored with artists that they make a great record and then they just might keep making that record over and over again you know mentioning no names and i'm always fascinated by the artists i suppose more so that do almost try and react against what they've done before and i've tried to do that myself in my career you know i hate the idea of repeating myself and i know we feel the same way you know when we work together in no man's world we're always looking for a way to make every album have a purpose to exist what is the point of just making part two of an album that you've already done even if it's the most popular album in your career um and so it sounds to me like what you're saying is that rem is a band that kind of you know didn't do that they always try to do something a bit different well i think so
Speaker 2and again it's a band of that stature i think it's one of the reasons why you know you two never been one of my favorite bands but i've always appreciated the fact that they've challenged themselves yeah
Speaker 1radiohead of course being the poster child for that you know doing something taking a u-turn from what you've done before and doing something completely
Speaker 2different well they kind of hang heavy don't they in 1998 because 97 to an extent in rock has been dominated by ok computer and in 98 you get the debut eps by muse and coldplay two bands who are going to take that radiohead aesthetic into a certain direction and of course radiohead by 2000 they do exactly what we talk about kid a is that brilliant u-turn that wrong footed everybody and i remember at the time i was you know i loved the bends and i really liked ok computer but i didn't think it was this um truly innovative work and strangely enough kid a is exactly what i think people thought okay computer was because this really is an uncategorizable innovative rock band doing something completely fresh with a rock band template i completely
Speaker 1agree i mean i will love radiohead forever for just that career move even if i don't like it all their records and i and i do ultimately i do feel sometimes like they get a free pass to do almost anything and get and get critical acclaim um i think that that move they made from when they were about they were poised to become god forbid the new you too after ok computer and they did completely wrong for everyone with that that that pair of albums kid a and amnesiac um i will love them forever for doing that um so and i think that's when you you start to you know you start to use words like integrity about an artist it's a word it's a word you would use about mark hollis no question it's a word you would use about someone like kate bush no question peter gabriel these people don't care about pleasing their fan base or repeating themselves or maintaining commercial success they simply don't care they are on an artistic path and they follow it yeah well it
Speaker 2was extraordinary as well as the kid a and amnesiac which you know i think are two of the most extraordinary albums they've released they were number one in america let alone britain you know these were hugely influential and successful works and absolutely no concessions to commerciality whatsoever well again
Speaker 1and it goes back to you know an album you've already mentioned an album like tales from topographic oceans or jethro tolls a passion play also being number one records you know clearly clearly off the back of earlier you know more accessible or more mainstream orientated records but it's fascinating when something like that can happen isn't it that that a band an artist has so much momentum behind them that they can release something willfully uncommercial and still sell bucket loads and i suppose in a way rem are another example of a band or you two another example of a band that kind of dabbled with more experimental experimental music and still managed to take it to a mainstream audience although i think much less convincingly personally speaking yeah
Speaker 2i know you mean you know bowie i suppose as well is the ultimate poster child fact you know when you realize that he produced low within five years of ziggy stardust
Speaker 1yes and people forget of course that low was considered a commercial disaster at the time it's interesting well i think we can maybe dovetail nicely into the fallout from ok computer because one of the things that we are going to talk about is um you know we always try and talk about what's the state of progressive music in any given episode and of course ok computer did cast a long shadow on a lot of what we might now consider to be um progressive music and i think that's what's going on with progressive music or post-progressive music what's interesting is how we do have this influence of the old ideals of conceptual rock music coming into kind of coming into the into the sort of in contact with kind of the fallout of brit pop in a way isn't it so you do have bands like radiohead making ok computer but we also have some interesting other examples and i think the preeminent sort of folly of this year that's kind of a mixture of brit pop and progressive rock is the manson album six which still sounds mad to this day and i love this album and i love the fact that it is you know a willfully uncommercial move for an artist to have made having had a number one album in the in the previous with the previous record return the great lantern which in its own way is quite epic but here we have an album that barely has what you anything you would describe as a song on it it has these long um modular pieces that have all these different sections to them and i think what's fascinating is that and i've spoken to paul draper about this i don't think he was necessarily aware of the kind of influence or the heritage of the kind of progressive rock you know approach to making music this kind of modular way where you can take different sections and string them together
Speaker 2yeah i totally agree with that i mean i bought it again i think from manchester r price jeff at this point didn't give his opinion i have to say and um i was struck one by the similarity the cover had to genesis marillion and so on and two as you say by these connected short and long pieces that were entirely you know was it a reinvention of the progressive wheel but it had a very strong progressive rock language i mean partly because it has quite a beautiful and lush sound and um what i liked about this album i probably ultimately preferred the goldie out of the two follies this year and i think it's a very good year but what i really liked about this album was um draper's got a great sense of melody even if the songs aren't obvious he has a tremendous epic tuneful approach to melody but the guitar i thought was really interesting this is one of the first albums for a long time where i'd heard sounds where i was thinking okay what's that how did he do this you know this was when i'd listened to guitarists in the 70s 80s and that kind of post-punk vocabulary people like john mcgeoch they do something completely fresh and unexpected and i thought the guitar playing on this was really quite remarkable in places um so i really i enjoyed it and i enjoy it i just think it was um a really rich folly and as you've said maybe it was entirely kind of reinventing the progressive wheel and that's how they managed to do something different with it and the same maybe could be said of the likes of ronnie size and goldie because you know how aware would they have been of anything from stan kenton to yes or what have you i don't
Speaker 1know i think i think that's key it's like the one of the reasons the manson record is so progressive in the true sense of the word is i don't think it was influenced by the original generation of progressive rock i think it was more influenced by people like prince or or bowie or roxy music or or radiohead and and that's key because they've created something which has got true progressive rock ideals and true progressive music and i don't think it's referring to any of the old-fashioned stuff at all it seems very modern the production is very modern i mean this is a big budget record but at the same time it's got like for example the middle of the record which is split into two you know pretension friendly suites it's got a four minute piece for harpsichord and spoken word interlude by tom baker i mean it's none more pretentious and pompous and i loved i love that about it um it's interesting you you mentioned your story about when you bought the goldie record i mean i remember buying the manson six record from sister ray in barrack street and i remember when i went up to ask for it he said that the guy behind the counter said to me i think you have to do this in a northern accent even if it's london don't you because it just sounds better he said do you want the free poster with that and i said well what's the poster of and he said looks like a fucking marillion poster with as much contempt as he could muster and they would do yeah yeah and i think that's it even the front cover has got the whole and again i think completely unwittingly it looks like an old school progressive rock album cover doesn't it with all the little details
Speaker 2everything you know and i think that i mean i saw them on this tour as well and they they kind of shied away from doing Six. They did a lot of the hits, really. And they had a great communication, a real sense of communion with their audience, actually. You know, quite an interesting band, very devoted audience.
Speaker 1They are fascinating because they had such an incredible, sort of ardent fan base and still do, you know. And I think they were very much seen as outsiders, even as they were having the number one albums and they were kind of lumped in with the blurs and the, you know, whatever else was going on at the time, the sort of menswear, you know, the real also rants. They were one of the best-selling artists of all from that group, that generation of sort of Britpop groups. But they managed to carve themselves out a really unique place that I think gave them longevity. It's given Paul longevity. I mean, people still, you know, adore his whole kind of songwriting approach and he has a fan base in a way that I suspect that the lead singer of menswear doesn't, you know. Or even Damon Albarn, perhaps doesn't have quite that level of fandom about what he does.
Speaker 2Yeah, the fanatical support. Well, I think what's kind of interesting about what you say, though, is that maybe they reinvented that wheel through listening to the likes of Prince Radiohead. Whereas Radiohead, on the other hand, I think knew the back. When you hear elements of King Crimson or progressive ideas in Radiohead, you sort of know they've heard that.
Speaker 1That is your second Robert Fritt reference, by proxy, but I'm just counting them up.
Speaker 2Yeah, people will be drunk at the end of this, there's no doubt. Yeah, carry on. So, you know, you can hear the Crimson, the Queen, the Gabriel, the fact that they are aware of classic rock. And in some ways, OK Computer, which had a very fresh and unique visual identity, they've learnt from it. So, you know, if Paranoid Android in some ways is 1997's Bohemian Rhapsody, it also has qualities that are completely different from Queen. I think they've studied rock history and they know what not to do. Manson, they're inventing it themselves. So they're going for everything because it's almost as if it's never happened before. So they don't know where to stop. That's what I kind of like about it. And the same, I suppose, with the Goldie. The Goldie, they do not know where to stop. They do not know what is ludicrously pretentious. Because I think, you know, one of the problems with you and I, we always follow our muse, but to an extent because of our listening and maybe because of our sensibility, we may sometimes pull back.
Speaker 1That's a very interesting point. I think we are aware of what might be seen as ridiculous because I think what you're saying is, you know, if you're aware of the historical precedents, then that makes you perhaps shy away from doing things that you kind of understand will be seen as ridiculous. But sometimes that's not always a good thing. Sometimes it's nice to be kind of ignorant of what's cool and what might be seen as going too far. And I think this is a great example. Isn't it? You're right. The Goldie is another good example of that. Goldie's Saturn's Return on Manson 6 are so ridiculous. They seem to be almost completely unaware of their own ridiculousness. And that kind of makes them fun. And you kind of love them. You love them more for it. Whereas I think Radiohead, for me, Radiohead clearly modelled themselves on the Pink Floyd kind of approach, that kind of intellectual cool, you know, not putting a foot wrong. But sometimes it's fun to put a foot wrong, isn't it? Sometimes it's nice to go, you know, for the absolute ridiculous folly and risk falling flat on your face.
Speaker 2Yeah, and I enjoy that. And I think that sometimes, as you said, perhaps we were always too aware to be that ridiculous. And so this is one of the reasons why Draper and Goldie, for me, you know, deserve an awful lot of praise this year because they're bringing back, as you said, that fun, that unexpected excess.
Speaker 1But I think in 2020, it's very, very hard to pull off something like that. Yeah. The audience bands are so much shorter. The focus on new music is very much more sort of refracted with so many records coming out every week. People only really listening to little, you know, bite-sized chunks of music these days. I think it would be hard for a record like Manson Six or Goldie's record to even, you know, resonate in the mainstream these days. I might be wrong. Anyway, but let's move on. So let's just name check a few other. We mentioned the Mark Hollis record, a few other solo artists that released albums this year. Tori Amos from The Choir, Girl, Hotel, Joni Mitchell, Taming the Tiger, Rufus Wainwright, self-titled, presumably his first album, I guess I might say. Yeah. Jeff Buckley's posthumous sketches from For My Sweetheart the Drunk. Elvis Costello's collaboration with Burt Bacharach, Painted from Memory. It's a lovely album. Robbie Robertson's Contact from Underworld of Red Boy. Something you want to say about that album, Tim? Because I didn't know about that, but you wanted to know.
Speaker 2Well, that's another interesting album where he, he's an artist I quite admire because he's completely reinvented himself several times. Several times.
Speaker 1So then also we talked about R.E.M., but other big mainstream artists to release albums this year. Madonna's Ray of Light, I would say probably her best record produced by William Orbit. And I think it was a great, great collaboration for her. Ayers Moon Safari, their first album. I'm a big fan of Ayers. Yeah, very good album. It's a beautiful record. I mean, they're an interesting artist, aren't they? Again, they're coming from kind of DJ culture, but they've got this element of kind of easy listening. Burt Bacharach, Serge Gainsbourg, and they're kind of putting the two together to make this very kind of easy listening or perhaps queasy listening kind of modern electronic take on those kind of artists, aren't they? And the sort of Gallic quality, I think obviously lends it a very exotic quality too, doesn't it? The kind of Frenchness that they have to the point that they even describe themselves as a French band is kind of like part of their name, isn't it?
Speaker 2Well, it's a sweet album because it's very accessible and very frothy, but it has just the right air of melancholy at times. And I think at times, and there's also a Floydian element, of course, which becomes more prominent in the later albums.
Speaker 1But again, it's also got that kind of slight arch radio headness as well, which makes it seem just right, doesn't it, for that era?
Speaker 2Absolutely. Absolutely. I concur with you, Professor Wilson. But what's interesting, because we were talking about obviously how Manson and Goldie are almost reinventing the sort of fusion or progressive wheel. But then the actual artists who invented it, people like Hamill, Wyatt, and dare I say it, Robert Fripp, they've produced albums this year, but they seem increasingly unmoored and unbothered by the mainstream. You know, Wyatt did Don't Stand Revisited. Hamill did an album called This, which is a really nice album. Fripp did The Gates of Paradise and Project 2, I think their first space groove. But these albums, aren't really following the currents of what's around them. It's quite interesting how, you know, artists that once defined, if you like, progressive and created shoots that people would follow are suddenly almost adrift.
Speaker 1Other mainstream artists, Manic Street Preachers, This Is My Truth, Tell Me Yours, Garbage Version 2.0, Pulp, This Is Hardcore, Beck Mutations. Now those last two are interesting artists, again, aren't they? Because they're also artists that don't seem to be interested in repeating themselves. I mean, Beck's Mutations was a follow-up to Odelay, which was very much his breakbeat album, his sample, you know, sample-icious album. And Mutations is bringing in elements of Tropicalia. There's some gorgeous ballads, you know, on that record. That track, Nobody's Fault But My Own, is absolutely beautiful. And Pulp, again, with This Is Hardcore, they're very much turning their back on their kind of common people, glossy, shiny, glamorous pop personality, aren't they? This is a much, much darker, more pervy kind of edge going on here, isn't it?
Speaker 2Yeah, well, I think Pulp never really fitted in with the Britpop. They were always coming from, you know, they were older than a lot of the Britpop artists. And I think you can hear the influence of Roxy music, you know, even on their, in their big period. They don't sound like Roxy music, but there's something of Roxy music sensibility that kind of informs Pulp. So they always seemed slightly artier, slightly more removed, even when they were having the hits during Britpop. And yeah, this was, a confirmation that they were different from a lot of the bands. I think we always bring up the likes of menswear at this point. Probably very unfunny. You know, menswear might be brilliant. I'm not actually sure.
Speaker 1They're kind of the poster child for the sort of dredge of the Britpop scene that didn't. Gay Dad would be another one.
Speaker 2I saw them live as well, because I think they supported Manson when I watched Manson.
Speaker 1A bit like Northside would be seen in terms of the sort of Manchester scene, you know, coming really, the arse end, you know, of the scene, you know, and sort of.
Speaker 2So Pulp was saying, Pulp was saying, we're not menswear.
Speaker 1So let's wrap up a couple of other genres to just briefly touch on. So heavy music that's going on around this time, Fugazi, end hits. I don't know this record, Tim, but you wanted to mention it.
Speaker 2I know, I know Fugazi. Fugazi are an interesting band, because again, they kind of come out of the, I guess, the American, punk scene, and they get artier and more interesting as they go on. And they have this kind of interlocking, minimalist guitars approach. And I find that, you know, as the band evolved, they were much more post-rock than they were this hardcore punk band. And it's the thing that you were saying earlier about certain art, you know, Boards of Canada. I completely take your point that when that came out, that's the birth of a genre. But maybe for me, somebody like The Caretaker takes some of those ideas so much further in a way that then interests me and I thought I always found this with post-rock to an extent as well that Tortoise was seen as this great innovator and I like Tortoise you know I really I've seen them live I like the albums but it never fully thrilled me but then some of the post-rock that came after it
Speaker 1I got it okay I just want to pick you up on one thing too you said Caretaker and Brzezinski take Boards of Canada ideas much further they take one very small aspect of Boards of Canada and take it further I mean Caretaker and Brzezinski are loop-based ambient artists Boards of Canada were much much more than that yeah but
Speaker 2I suppose that's what interested me in Boards of Canada for me it's their use of textures yeah
Speaker 1okay also heavy music we have from this year Marilyn Manson's Mechanical Animals Opeth's third album My Arms Your Hearse Meshuggah's third album Chaosphere Boris Amplifier Worship their first album and Swans are Dead which was their last album before the hiatus which is actually a double live album but a double live album with virtually no repertoire from their studio records on some interesting records there we've talked about Swans before maybe because you've touched on Fugazi I had them in the heavy music category because I don't know too much about them but maybe I should have put them in one of the other categories I have going on here which is the post-alternative rock category so Tortoise released their third album TNT this year I remember being slightly disappointed with that I think one thing I agree with you on I was always slightly disappointed with the reality of Tortoise I bought the first couple of albums and I was like oh my god I should have bought a couple of albums I did like the previous record Millions Now Living Will Never Die and I kept buying the records I think for at least a few more years and I remember always sort of putting them on and thinking I should really love it but kind of sort of really secretly inside I was thinking it's all right it's pleasant you know it's it didn't really do that much for me so I can completely understand where you're coming from you know it's lovely you know it's lovely music
Speaker 2thrilled me or excited me in the way i thought i should and i'm not quite sure that it's my expectations or a failing in the music uh sparkle
Speaker 1horse good morning spider mercury revs deserter songs now that's interesting record isn't that that is a beautiful record and that's an example of a band that really did reinvent themselves and it's really interesting that the so-called alternative post rockers are embracing old school americana old school country rock to the point that the mercury rev album deserter songs has leave on helm from the band playing drums but
Speaker 2that has something different i mean i love that album deserter songs it's so different from what they they've done before and i like the early mercury rev albums but they're more experimental they're more rock they're certainly more shoegaze this has got an open emotional vulnerable sound but um there's something about it which almost has a kind of disney prettiness it has a process sound there's something in the production that's almost psychedelic so it has the roots of americana but it has a kind of emotional vulnerability and um and a textual quality which is very different from americana artists and obviously flaming lips you know with the album that followed the next year um do something similar but without the americana there was a kind of a shared sonic language between those bands it was almost like they were reinventing aspects of psychedelia actually and that you know there's a there's a beautiful emotional and fragile quality about both those bands and they shared the same producer
Speaker 1yeah it was definitely a shock i remember when that album first came out a lot of people you know considered mercury rev to be kind of shoegazer also rands and then suddenly just came out with this masterpiece and i suppose in a way that's kind of what happened with radiohead isn't it because radiohead's first down was kind of dismissed in a way as kind of you know um indie alternative brit pop also rands and then the bends just completely transformed the album transcended that and took them out of that and i think that's what happened with mercury rev with this record too isn't it so also in alternative rock another album a bit more obscure but but a band that we we really liked i haven't listened to them for many years but i remember loving loving them at the time it's it's it's um david grubbs and jim o'rourke's band gastro del sol yeah and the previous album was wonderful i forget the name of it now but this is an album this year called camoufleur now what's interesting about gastro del sol is it's alternative rock which has come from a band that's been around for a long time and it's a band that's been around for a long time from the tradition of experimental avant-garde music and we're talking about um jim o'rourke's kind of history as someone who worked in drone music or treated guitar music avant-garde classical music making something which is has got enough in common with what's going on in the world of alternative and independent music to to give them a bigger audience but those influences are still there aren't they they're still you're still hearing within the sort of tapestry of the music you're still hearing a lot of these techniques of avant-garde experimental music within the context of quite pretty um there's also that john fahey thing going on very strongly in yeah isn't there yeah well i
Speaker 2loved this album at the time and i still do love it it's it's very i think one of the things they managed to do is produce quite avant-garde music that is very accessible very pretty melodically there's a kind of beach boys meets robert wyatt quality at times as you say in the guitar there's a john fahey music that's very accessible and very pretty there's a kind of beach boys meets robert wyatt quality that's very accessible and very pretty influence they use a lot of field recordings throughout so you'll have the sounds of nature in the background um and also on this album i remember thinking that they'd listen to laughingstock and spirit of eden there's a hollis influence on it so it was perfect for me at the time and weirdly going back to tortoise i feel terrible criticizing them because they're probably wonderful people and they're great musicians but this album satisfied the itch that the tortoise albums didn't for me and i think
Speaker 1john mcintyre from tortoise is on this album i might be yeah i seem to remember there is there is a connection yeah he's the drummer on the i think what's what's really nice about them and this is again where where it has a lot in common with say talk talk is it's very unpredictable music isn't it in the way it unfolds so it'll start off with this very pretty acoustic guitar voice you know kind of duet um and the melodies are often very i mean you kind of mentioned robert wyatt and i think but i think it's also worth saying the melodies are very about henry cow would have come up yeah in the 70s very kind of you know not the obvious melodic shifts um and so it's very unpredictable in that sense but it's also unpredictable in the sense you don't know what's coming next a song will start off with this sort of beautiful little acoustic guitar duet with a voice and then these sort of strange orchestral atonal um instrumentation arrangements will come in and then it'll break down to as you say field recordings or electronic sound and then something else completely different and then it'll break down to as you say field recordings or electronic sound and then something else completely different will build out of that and the pieces sometimes are quite long so there's an element of it always being very much you don't know what's coming next it has this kind of cinematic sweep to it whereas almost and the music is like scenes playing out in front of you very very pretty but quite peculiar a quite peculiar melodic vocabulary and and it
Speaker 2fits what's interesting about it is you know it kind of fits in with what was going on with bands like tortoise and mercury rev it's not a million miles away from if you like what was the zeitgeist in 98 but i think you're right in pointing out as well that the unusual harmonies and the unusual your unusual chordal shifts are far closer to that kind of early to mid 70s experimental english almost canterbury scene but you know i'm specifically thinking of the the wyatts and and henry cow though i know there weren't a canterbury band they were sort of lumped in with it to an extent there's a real kind of unexpected playfulness and prettiness and
Speaker 1and i think there's a sense of humor there too and you know if only in the way the music sometimes unfolds you know there's very surprising there's almost like pranksterism going on in the music in the way that unexpected things will kind of wrong foot you um and i like that you know i like that it's almost a kind of dadaist approach to to making uh what is actually quite easy to enjoy music quite accessible music at the end of the day anyway so just a few other shout outs for other albums this year some more uk mavericks the last one is a songwriter i
Speaker 2think it's a great songwriter really interesting lyricist and vocalist and i loved his sense of arrangement and he's always been an eccentric and luckily during that period he was an eccentric enjoying commercial
Speaker 1success definitely yeah i need to listen to more of his work actually um bell and sebastian the boy with the arab strap um and arab strap uh ironically uh philophobia came out this year so all interesting kind of um artists that were kind of i guess taken away from the music industry and the music industry and the music making some of what we talked about with these american artists you know um bands like gastro del sol and and mercury river it's kind of almost a uk take on the same idea isn't it that there's this wonderfully kind of rich history uh of pop music easy listening music um intellectual rock music um the kind of aesthetics of lo-fi um electronica uh sample based music and and bringing it all together in a very kind of um a way that really speaks of the locality that these artists come from and when you listen to bell and sebastian it sounds very scottish doesn't it
Speaker 2well and no more scottish than arab strap as well absolutely too yes so i was going to say it's kind of interesting isn't it that when we did the last year in 1989 that we saw that the 80s was kind of expanding as the decade was ending there were more kind of freedoms more influences there's more eclecticism and i think that's also the case if we get into the latter part of the 1990s that influences you thought had been dead and back and buried are being reinvented whether it's you know people like manson reinventing the progressive wheel or um in certain respects drum and bass reinventing the fusion wheel okay
Speaker 1so let's uh let's start to wrap up now tim i mean there's one other genre i just want to give a quick shout out to which is a genre that's very close to my heart which is ambient music and minimalism uh which i know you're obviously a fan of too um there's some good records this year there's there's a couple of re-recordings philip glasses coin is cut see he finally recorded the full score unedited score for the first time which is just a masterpiece bang on a can again another reinterpretation this time of brian eno's music for airports it's really
Speaker 2nice that one actually i mean that's one that i do come back to because it's got a slightly more acoustic vulnerability if you like i mean i like it for sure and the
Speaker 1original is of course a classic fantastic um thomas kerner released carmos this year again i'm a big fan of thomas kerner um but the one i just want to give perhaps a little bit of a mention to is mj harris and martin bates murder ballads which was a really really unique piece of music which was a really really unique piece of music which was a really really unique proposition this is essentially um isolationist very dark ambient music with made by mick harris who had previously been the drummer from from napalm death but had moved into electronic music with bands like scorn and lull but here he was collaborating with martin bates who'd been the singer in eyeless in gaza doing traditional english murder ballads in a way that just invested them with something that was always there but just really bringing out that sinister aspect very dark ambient music with martin basically just singing songs these lyrics which date back to things like the 17th century about the most heinous crimes and it's for me it's an incredibly powerful combination and it really works it seems like it shouldn't but it really does so i want to give a shout if you're curious please do check out um the the mj harris martin bates murder ballads it's three albums yeah no
Speaker 2it's interesting and i think martin bates always had that slight folkish quality to his voice when he was in yeah post-punk um artists eyeless and gaza but they always had something of the old english folk and he sings this perfectly it just suits his voice and so yeah it's it's it's amazing that you have things that could be three centuries old completely reinvented in the present day and sounding thoroughly ominous and beautiful at the same time it's you know it's a really interesting um combination because i think the sonics on this it has it has a very sort of bass resonance throughout it doesn't
Speaker 1it well that's mick sound yeah so mick mick mick harris's sort of ambient sound is is very subterranean lots of low end very very oppressive well it's also great isn't
Speaker 2it how the english folk tradition and many folk traditions can be so successfully and naturally invented and obviously i guess you think of the folk rock era and fairport convention were taking tunes from the 19th and 18th century and doing something completely different in a rock language and it's it's fantastic when you find a new voice for something old that seems to suit both so naturally i think that's
Speaker 1one of the reasons why i think the english folk song and i'm sure with also true of american folk music too is there something about those songs that is timeless because they are concerned essentially with things like injustice um and you know and crime the sort of things that human beings do to each other the really horrible things that human beings do to each other there's something universal and timeless about those concepts so they are you are able to constantly reinterpret them and um and you know filter them through through contemporary sounds and contemporary influences and this is a great example of that i mean these albums were quite obscure they were released on fairly obscure labels um there was three of them made over a period of time i think the one from this year was the last of the three and they're very much part of a past i think you can get the three in a so um so let's round it up there tim we're there we're actually doing our traditional thing um where we count out how many times you've mentioned robert fripp and king crimson and i counted six this time uh maybe the folks out there can correct me the tim mentioned king crimson robert fripp six times now i don't know if that's uh par for the course or whether that's slightly less than normal slightly more than normal uh how many times did i mention industrial music then that's right folks that's right folks nil point you know i didn't mention industrial music once you know i didn't mention industrial music once favourite album and perhaps most forward-looking or most influential album from 1998 tim what would what would your picks be i can tell what my
Speaker 2favourite song was weirdly enough it was um loveless for hero i found that so hypnotic album i'm stuck between four really i think deserter songs is just a really satisfying piece of work as is the mark hollis solo album the gastrodale sol is something i still come back to and the same with mezzanine i just think i was a great bold statement but i'm gonna go in the end with deserter songs as your
Speaker 1favourite yeah okay interesting i wouldn't have expected that i mean i i think that album is really lovely um so um that i think that's a very very noble choice um i'm gonna go i think my favourite well my favourite song of this year would be no question teardrop by massive attack uh one of my favourite songs of all time by anyone um but i think as a whole mezzanine does fall in love with mezzanine and i think it's going to be off a little bit after the first four songs so i don't know favourite album the hollis album is gorgeous manson six is mad and i love it but i think you know the murder ballads album uh the mick harris martin bates and also the boards of canada music is the right children i can never get tired of of that record um so i'm kind of pussyfooting around a bit there and no folks that's not a robert fritt reference um pussyfooting a bit there but uh that's the way it's going to be most forward looking what would you say arguably the most influential record from this year has been you know over the course of time i mean this
Speaker 2is really difficult isn't it um because i think something like the goldie album has so many ideas in it that you're probably going to hear them in music you know for years to come see i just throws everything i would i would completely
Speaker 1refute that i think i think that album was actually conversely i think it was the death of drummer bass drummer bass disappeared off the radar pretty soon afterwards and i don't think
Speaker 2what a way to go down though what a well true you don't he
Speaker 1definitely went down with with all guns blazing yeah i'll give him that
Speaker 2i suppose you know boards of canada you can hear in a lot of music that comes i think that would be afterwards i think that would be my pick um so i i guess i'd say that although it's certainly not my favorite i think
Speaker 1also there's an argument to say that the mezzanine did did impose quite quite an influence not necessarily on music but certainly on the kind of things you would hear on tv you know sync sync music i mean those songs themselves were used so many times in sports programs thrillers you know just background link music but i think it definitely is something you hear a lot in modern soundtrack music the influence of massive attack on what they were doing with orchestral textures and beats and distortion
Speaker 2i suppose because i'm looking at it from a 2020 perspective where r&b very specifically seems to be the music of the moment and in that respect you can't hear much boards of canada or massive attack in i mean that that is
Speaker 1true i don't necessarily like i did say i don't think you necessarily hear the influence of a band like massive attack in a lot of contemporary pop music but just turn on netflix and you will hear the influence of artists like massive attack and trent resna and atticus ross as well i mean i think they also cast a very big shadow over most of today's soundtrack music that combination of distortion almost industrial there you go i've said it uh rhythms uh textures use of samples use of kind of disembodied voices um it's very very much prevalent in in modern tv and modern cinema i would say that influence from from from medicine yeah and i think you're
Speaker 2in a particularly angel and teardrop really that brooding angel and then the fragmented beautiful teardrop so i'm going to revise my opinion i'm going to say most influential yeah of course it's
Speaker 1massive attack medicine okay great so we're kind of unanimous on that i i think i think that is a it's been a big influence on on our music over the years hasn't it certainly me yes okay wonderful um thank you very much for listening and we look forward to your corrections and uh complaints uh to this episode um and i hope you're thoroughly pissed those of you who were playing the robert fripp uh uh drinking game uh by now and i'm sorry those of you that were waiting to get drunk uh based on my references to industrial music that it was a very poor very poor showing uh very poor showing this week very poor this episode just that one at the end there which i just couldn't help sorry and uh we'll be back hopefully very soon with another episode if you have enjoyed have enjoyed listening to the podcast please please please please do go and give us a rating or a review even better thank you very much for listening and goodbye from me and goodbye from tim goodbye you
PodcastTranscript AI