Inspired by this connection, this morning’s playoff is:
I managed to listen to them both while doing breakfast/pottering about / commuting this morning. It was really difficult, when I was choosing my top 128, to decide which Throwing Muses album to go for. I went for ‘The Real Ramona’ but it’s one of at least five TM albums that could have made it on the day. I don’t just love Kristen Hersh’s amazing song writing and vocals: TM had a really special rhythm section at this stage and their songs are more full of unexpected shifts and left-turns as a result. The Real Ramona is great: it’s got my favourite versions of some of my favourite TM songs on (‘Counting Backwards’, ‘Say Goodbye’ etc).
It does however, sag a bit in the middle. An instrumental dedicated to her son, ‘Dylan’, is a lovely idea but doesn’t go anywhere and Donnelly’s ‘Not Too Soon’ is a brilliant piece of high-octane indie pop that would have fitted beautifully onto yesterday’s winner but sticks out like a sore thumb here.
I don’t know how familiar DiS in general is with ‘Minor Pieces’ but I would strongly advise you to familiarise yourselves if you’re not. Ian William Craig is a superb songwriter with an angelic voice but, sometimes I find his solo records a bit frustrating. He has a tendency to drift off into improv and wibble when really I’d like him to focus on the songs that are clearly there. ‘Minor Pieces’ is his collaborative project with Missy Donaldson and for this project he knuckles down to the actual songcraft and comes up with 8 trracks (one written by Donaldson) that soar with the absolute peak combination of ethereal shoegaze, ambient and choral music. It’s a wonderful combination and the interplay between their vocals (male and female vocal interplay is a real favourite for me) mean that…
Outcome: ‘Heavy Weight of Dreaming’ by Minor Pieces makes it through to round two!
Well, I hear you… It’s not how I usually write things but it’s a conscious decision to emphasise the fact that I’m choosing between records rather than between bands. So it’s more important to me to judge, say, whether Disintegration is better than The Queen is Dead * than whether The Cure are better than The Smiths **
I dithered over my choice of Grouper record. Dragging A Dead Deer is probably still considered her classic, and for very good reason, but Ruins is the one I always come back to. It was a real shock at the time, hearing a singer who was always buried under guitars and reverb and gauze, sounding quite naked with just skeletal piano accompaniment. In another sense, she’s still far from exposed though, her vocals often lurk just under the piano line and seem to almost hide from close scrutiny. It’s a brilliantly recorded album too, owing as much to field recording as to singer songwriter, from the sounds of nature to the sudden beep of the microwave turning itself back on after a power cut: it’s beautifully evocative of place.
On the other hand, Knock Knock is a stone cold classic and has been a favourite of mine for over twenty years. When I was on my teaching practice for my pgce, a top lad called Tim (geography teacher) whose form I was shadowing, made me a compilation tape after we got chatting about music. There were several bands on there that went on to be huge favourites of mine and, amongst others, it was the first time I’d heard Smog. The song he put on my tape is the one I’m choosing to represent the winner of this round:
That’s entirely fair enough. One of the things I really like about DiS is that it’s definitely got me into a much wider variety of music, but historically… Yeah not so much.
Speaking of white, male, and from the past… This morning I’ll be mostly listening to
Was really good to go back to ‘Tarot Sport’. It makes for a very fine ‘blast out of your car stereo whilst driving to work on a hot day’ album. I really loved this record when it came back and it still stands up today. I used to really love how angry FB made people back in the day: originally because they were (mis)labelled as ‘noise’ in some places which made some true noisz lads jump up and down and wave their CD copies of ‘Venerology’ in the air angrily which was very entertaining.
The other big criticism I remember them getting was the ‘no-one realises how easy/basic this stuff is! They’re just using really simple plug-ins/whatever!’ but to me this is part of the appeal. I love the directness, the straight-ahead quality of a lot of ‘Tarot Sport’: it’s urgent and rhythmic and pounding and if it is made by very basic software then how is that different to a punk band using the same basic chords and primitive rhythms to the same end?
Tarot Sport, however, loses out to my winner of this bout: ‘Dog Man Star’. What a band, what a record, take a bow: Suede!
Suede’s first S/T record shares some of the more ‘straight forward’ elements I was talking about with FB, but their second opens the whole sound up to a much broader and more ‘cinematic’ pallet. You were no-one in the 90s if you were an indie band who didn’t use a string section, but Suede use a wide variety of extra instruments, samples, children’s choirs etc to create a much more vivid and varied sound world than almost all of their peers.
Then there is Brett Anderson’s voice and lyrics: stories of love and loss and hired cars and rented rooms and regret and longing. I could not get enough of this stuff at 16 and it still touches a nerve at 45. I was just starting to think about my own sexuality at the time and this record (and the furore about Anderson identifying as a ‘bisexual who hadn’t had a homosexual experience’) really struck a chord with me and perhaps gave me the confidence to try some things out in my later teen years that I would never have considered a few years earlier.
But I’m trying.
