So about two years ago, the online magazine
Inflatable Ferret (which alas, folded... although they still blog) asked me to write something on the twentieth anniversary of
Nirvana's
Nevermind. So I just basically vomited out about 4,000 words in a couple of hours and sent it to them. Unfortunately, they packed up shop right around that time and the essay never got published. Anyway, thinking about
Nevermind, grunge, and that whole alterna-rock nineties thing seems kind of hokey these days. Like trying to say nice things about James Taylor or Ace of Base. Still, given that soon it's gonna be twenty years since Kurt Cobain killed himself, I thought I would pull it out and publish it on my blog. It's a bit of navel-gazing of course, but I think gets to the reason (especially near the end of the essay) why music means so much to us when we are in our twenties, and why we carry those feelings ahead into our thirties and forties.
Nevermind: A Denial
Nevermind changed
everything! It sold 30 million copies and completely revolutionized the music
industry by ushering in an era of heavy guitar-based music into the mainstream.
It knocked Michael Jackson’s Dangerous
off the number 1 spot in the Billboard charts in a move that was the symbolic
death of the era of facile hair metal and R and B muzak. Angst became cool and
nothing was the same ever; it was the “voice of a generation.”
This view is so deeply entrenched in popular thinking—and
reproduced ad nauseum recently on the twentieth anniversary of the release of Nevermind—that it no longer makes any
difference whether it’s true or not. There is, however, one part of this story that is incontrovertibly true:
Nevermind did sell 30 million. According to Wikipedia, it is number
27 on the list of best-selling albums of all time. But it’s equally eye-opening
to excavate some other numbers from the 1990s. Guess what? Nevermind, it turns out, wasn’t even the top-selling album of 1991.
Here are the best-selling albums of the decade:
1991
Top seller: Michael Jackson – Dangerous (32 million)
1992
Top seller: Whitney Houston – The Bodyguard (44 million)
Next in line: Abba - Abba
Gold (28 million), Billy Ray Cyrus – Some
Gave All (20 million)
1993
Top seller: Mariah Carey – Music Box (32 million)
Next in line: Ace of Base – Happy Nation/The Sign (23 million), Celine Dion – The Colour of My Love (20 million)
1994
Top seller: Bon Jovi – Cross
Road (20 million)
1995
Top seller: Alanis Morissette – Jagged Little Pill (33 million)
Next in line: Mariah Carey – Daydream (25 million), Oasis – (What’s
the Story) Morning Glory (22 million), Michael Jackson –HIStory (20 million)
1996
Top seller: Celine Dion – Falling Into You (32 million)
Next in line: Spice Girls – Spice (23 million)
1997
Top seller: Shania Twain – Come On Over (40 million)
Next in line: Celine Dion – Let’s Talk About Love (31 million), James Horner – Titanic soundtrack (30 million),
Backstreet Boys – Backstreet’s Back (28
million), Spice Girls – Spiceworld (20
million)
1998
Top seller: Madonna – Ray
of Light (20 million)
1999
Top seller: Backstreet Boys – Millenium (40 million)
Next in line: Britney Spears – … Baby One More Time (26 million), Santana – Supernatural (27 million), Dido – No Angel (21 million), Cher – Believe
(20 million)
So what did Nevermind change? Not much it seems. Nothing at all. Awful pop, which ruled
the zeitgeist of the 1980s equally dominated the cultural currents of the
1990s. But numbers don’t really tell the whole story. Something did happen with Nevermind,
something maybe not on the level of a Mariah Carey album or Celine Dion’s utter
saturation of the airwaves, but something nevertheless. I concede already that
identifying that “something” is difficult, maybe even impossible. Given all the
baggage surrounding such an iconic album, writing about Nevermind is much like dancing about architecture (to invoke Elvis
Costello’s much-quoted one-liner.) It can’t be done. And if you try hard
enough, you’ll just come off looking silly. If it’s impossible to exactly
unearth what happened with Nevermind,
the other equally defeatist option is to try and rip the album out of its
historical context and evaluate its music on its own terms. Another foolhardy
exercise, that. This is not only because so much has been written about it, but
also because at this point, twenty years after its release, Nevermind has become entrenched in the
overarching narrative about the history of rock’n’roll (see above).
I haven’t listened to Nevermind
much in the past decade or so, and honestly had no plans to do so. But in
preparation to write this, I put it on a few times last week. I heard it on the
subway, at home, sometimes as background music, sometimes paying attention.
There’s a weird quality to it: not many albums make me feel nothing. Nevermind kinda makes me feel nothing.
I’m not saying that it doesn’t evoke a lot, or that it doesn’t remind me of
things, but it feels emotionally absent—more intellectually alluring than
emotionally stirring, if that makes sense. At this point, the album feels
neither good nor bad, it just is.
It’s like the monolith on the Moon in 2001:
A Space Odyssey—it seems awesome but you don’t really know why. This is all
the more odd since Nevermind used to
mean a lot to me. A lot.
I guess I should get this out of the way then. My first
memory of Nevermind is this:
listening to “Smells Like Teen Spirit” on KTRU (the radio station at Rice
University in Houston). To say that KTRU was eclectic is to understate the
issue. Back then (circa fall 1991) the station might play an hour of straight Bulgarian folk
followed by 90 minutes of the sound of a helicopter, followed by back-to-back
plays of the Swans’ Filth and Cop, and then finally topped off with a
full hour of the sound collage “band” Negativland whose biggest “hit” up to
that point was “Christianity is Stupid.” You never really knew what you were
getting with KTRU. So hearing a song like “Smells Like Teen Spirit” was kind of
odd. I’d barely heard of Nirvana at that point (late 1991) and they sounded,
well, almost tuneful. Why was KTRU playing a pop song? As the weeks turned into
months, I watched in bemusement as Nirvana suddenly got to number 1. Number 1!
From what I could tell, they came out of the “underground” scene, what most of
my friends would generally call “punk rock.” At the time, punk rock was a
sensibility that pretty much described everything that wasn’t (a) on the radio
or (b) classic rock. I studiously avoided both radio music and classic rock so
the fact that a “punk rock” band was at number 1 was totally weird. It just
didn’t make any sense. These guys were on MTV!
Gradually in early 1992, by which time I moved to the
cultural mecca of Houston, Texas, I started to listen to the album a lot. I had a
cassette tape with Nevermind on one
side and the Smashing Pumpkins’ Gish
on the other. I remember at a party talking to my friend Greg—a drummer in a band—and him declaiming in all seriousness that the Pumpkins were
the “real thing” and Nirvana was a “sellout.” This was news to me, since I had
only the dimmest idea of who Nirvana was. Either way, I was initially drawn to Gish and put off by the glossy
production on Nevermind, but
increasingly as 1991 turned to 1992, I kept forgetting to play Gish. Weird to think about it but at the
time Smashing Pumpkins had a lot of cred among the indie rock kids
(“alternative,” they used to call it). Gish
sounded full of muscle; it was agro and masculine. Nevermind sounded muddled, poppy, and androgynous. But somehow,
inexorably, I got sucked into the Nevermind
world. I have a strange kodachrome memory of me looking for a parking spot at a
grocery store one spring day, not being able to find one, and as I circled and
circled … and circled, “Come As You Are” built up into this hypnotic crescendo.
My unexpected first thought was, “Shit, this is awesome.”
But you haven’t labored this deep into a review to hear me
say, “Shit, this is awesome.” Actually, within the confines of 1992, the album was undeniably awesome. First, the songs
were perfectly composed, arranged, and played. These guys wrote twelve amazing
pop songs that had killer melodies. And there was one peculiar thing: Kurt
Cobain had an eerie mastery over how to sing
a vocal melody. Most pop songs are just constructions of successive chords with
a vocal melody that essentially matches the chord progression, maybe veering
off a little bit here and there. Cobain’s trick (and let’s face it, this was
part of his genius) was to sing at odds
with the chord progression. Take the penultimate song, “On A Plain.” There’s a
relatively simple pop chord progression. But you start following the chords and
the vocals are always going off in opposite directions, swooping up and down in
a way that is not intuitive at all—in fact, it’s entirely counter-intuitive if you’ve
only heard the chords. What this does is to create a three dimensionality
that’s kind of unique. It makes the song levitate, almost float by you. You
want to take a deep breath and fly away with it. It’s striking.
At the time, I loved all the songs on the album—and I mean
every song. Ripped out of its mega-star-cultural-moment context, “Smells Like
Teen Spirit” is a big dumb rock song. It rocks harder than anything made by
Black Sabbath but it sounds a bit like the Monkees. There’s something sinister
about the introductory bars to the song, just before the vocals come in; those
double-note ambulance-like notes ring out ominously over a driving bass. For
months, I had no idea about the lyrics (they were first printed as an insert in
the “Lithium” CD single) and in a way, I wish I still didn’t. The first couplet was apparently: “Load up on guns /
and bring your friends.” In concert, Kurt often sang them as: “Load up on drugs
/ and kill your friends” which I liked a lot
better. I liked the almost comical nihilism set up against this palatable pop
sheen.
Much has been made of Nevermind
following a loud-soft-loud dynamic perfected by the Pixies on Surfer Rosa, and sure, that’s part of
the charm (or annoyance, depending your perspective) of the record, but the
band work it to good effect. Undoubtedly, the loud-soft-loud dynamic made the
album especially exciting to bonehead jocks who could go get a beer during the
soft parts and then dump it over the heads of weakling nerdy kids during the
loud parts. But behind the “cheap trick” of the loud-soft-loud dynamic was a
real subversiveness to the album. If you were gonna introduce “punk rock”
(again, used very expansively) to the malls of America, then you couldn’t find
a better album with which to do so. If you look back on the pre-Nevermind year of 1990, other contenders
were Jane’s Addiction’s Ritual de lo
Habitual, Sonic Youth’s Goo, the
Pixies’ Bossanova, maybe Nine Inch
Nails’ Pretty Hate Machine, maybe
even Gish. But really, all those
albums were kind of conventional counter-cultural statements. Nevermind was completely unique. It was
a pop rock album that had songs with singalong choruses about bipolar disorder
(“Lithium”) packed in right next to manic punk rock (“Territorial Pissings) and
the relentlessly racing punk flight of “Stay Away” which ended with the
glorious exclamation of “God is gay.” (In the written lyrics, he added the
equally sophomoric and funny “Burn the flag.”) How many unsuspecting
middle-aged suburban moms knew that those lyrics were buried in the songs of Nevermind? And the coup de grace? Once
the album finishes, after about ten minutes of silence, the by-now dozing
listener is awakened from her stupor with the greatest abject noise-skronk
freakout (“Endless Nameless”) this side of the Stooges’ “L.A. Blues.” Now that was a tour de force.
And for all the subversiveness, there was also an emotional
wallop in the album. It didn’t feel distant, remote. It was warm. You could
hear the ringing three-note variations at the beginning of “Come as You
Are” like a lover’s come-on;
until, of course, Kurt starts singing “And I swear, I don’t have a gun,” and
you knew, right then and there, that he did indeed have a gun. “Polly” and
“Something In The Way” are the obligatory acoustic songs, the former a deeply
uncomfortable-to-listen-to song about rape from the rapists’ perspective, and
“Something in the Way” a grim reminder of some long lost memory. Even the
filler tracks are packed with candy and bullets: “Lounge Act” rocks away like
the greatest Cheap Trick song that never happened, while “Breed” rips out of
the speakers like a rush of blood, as you imagine yourself crowd-surfing over a
genius riff that has been embossed into your brain cells.
There’s a real dynamic quality to the album, both in terms
of its sonic qualities, but also in its range of emotions. This is an album
that over a period of 45 minutes makes you want to “fuck shit up” (as Juliana
Hatfield so succinctly put it in her song “Nirvana” from her 1992 album Hey Babe), curl up in a ball, raise your
fists like antennas to heaven, or smile with glee. And that’s the other part of
its appeal. It’s like an album made by committee to appeal to every imaginable
disaffected youth demographic: the jocks (the big dumb choruses of “Lithium”),
the punks (who could mosh with “Territorial Pissings”), the girls (who could
bounce up and down with “Come As You Are”), the sensitive poets (“Something In
the Way,” duh), the feminists (“Polly”), the Sonic Youth fans (“Endless
Nameless”), and of course, the mildly interested yuppie demographic (the whole
album).
Not too many people talk about the musicianship on the
album, but Kurt was a good guitar player; not just a competent one, but an
actually good one. He had a keen melodic sense and his rhythm guitar playing is
taut and to the point, not a note wasted. His lead runs are either sub-Sonic
Youth atonal bursts, or note-for-note reproductions of the vocal melodies,
which many people found strangely lacking in creativity. You could imagine that
the same songs, in the hands of Motley Crue, would have full-scale wanker
guitar solos, totally ruining the songs. Instead, the solos here are simple,
tasteful, and repetitive … in a good way. Dave Grohl was a beast on drums;
Butch Vig’s production makes his snare sound massive without being
overpowering. I dare you to not move
your body when he hammers down on the multiple snare hits at the beginning of
“Smells Like Teen Spirit.” It’s a bit like those hammer-of-the-gods
stick-pounding that begins Led Zeppelin’s “When the Levee Breaks” but sped up
and brought into ‘90s production mode.
So it was a good album, for sure. It was produced well, the
songs had mass appeal. In a weird way, the music on it enabled a kind of
popular imprinting. By that I mean, you could project anything you wanted on
it. It’s a rare album that makes that possible. For the 13 to 28-year old
demographic, this album was like an empty frame where you could paint in your
aspirations, frustrations, yearnings, and expectations. There are few albums
that succeed on that level alone. Some that come to mind: Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon or the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,
Michael Jackson’s Thriller, and Bruce
Springsteen’s Born in the U.S.A., maybe.
These albums, when they came out, were at the crest of a cultural consensus, albums which transcended the genre of music
fans and beyond into broader popular culture. Your parents heard of these
artists and albums. Your grandmothers too. But unlike these albums, the
cultural consensus of Nevermind was
principally a narrative of rebellion, youth rebellion.
The Clash once sang about the music industry and its habit
of “turning rebellion into money.” It’s an old story of course, the
commodification of dissent. Nevermind
came out at a time when the entire machinery of mass media was perfectly poised
and ready, cocked and loaded to sell packaged rebellion. There was a window of
opportunity in 1990-1991 for guitar-based angst-ridden music to break through
into the popular mainstream, a niche for “authenticity,” the kind of
authenticity that could be approved of in a board meeting and sold through the
appropriate channels. By the summer of 1991, the cultural project of
“authenticity” was given a big boost by the first Lollapalooza shows which traveled
all across the country with a diverse group of “alternative” bands. Again, a
slightly different course of events and Lollapalooza headliners Jane’s
Addiction might have ended up where Nirvana was. But Jane’s imploded pretty
soon after and the band was a little too glamed up for “authenticity,” too arty
if you will. Compared to the members of Jane’s, the guys in Nirvana were kind
of middlebrow but clued in. “Alternative” music was beginning to be a cash cow
for the major labels already before Nevermind—note
the major label successes of Sonic Youth and the Pixies.
So who was doing the commodifying of rebellion? Well, mostly
MTV. The music video channel had been around since the early 1980s and it had
gained in massive influence by the late 1980s where the network could make or
break bands. For marketing reasons, MTV began slowly shifting its programming
to “alternative” music in 1991, from a small trickle that became a massive
deluge by 1992. It’s hard to remember a time now when MTV mattered but in the late
1980s and early 1990s, shows like 120
Minutes were the only vehicle through which adolescent kids were exposed to
music outside the mainstream. Before the internet, if you lived in suburbia,
you had to be pretty industrious to be clued in. And for a 13-year old kid from
Palos Verdes outside of LA to be clued in was to have her mom drive her to Sam
Goody or the Wherehouse or—much easier—to watch MTV. A 13-year old is not going
to know the difference between rebellion and commodified rebellion. In fact, it’s
a distinction that is grossly unimportant. Add to that mix, the fact that
24-hour entertainment/news networks were finally becoming household names—think
CNN and its crucial role in bringing the (first) Gulf War to American homes in
1991—and you have a potent mix: a great album with pop songs where every
disaffected youth demographic could project their anxieties, a marketing
machine that sold Nevermind as an
“authentic” antidote to soulless hair metal and/or R&B, and the existence
of a powerful 24-hour machinery of conspicuous communication. And let’s face
it, it didn’t hurt that Kurt Cobain was a blue-eyed blonde-haired Adonis. You
mix up all of that and you get a mass cultural phenomenon that exploded into
the sensibilities of the white middle class.
So yeah, there were all these structural reasons, the
political economy of Nevermind, if
you will. But what did it really mean? What did it mean on an individual level?
Each person brings something to a piece of music that is intensely personal.
Why some albums resonate while others barely register have a lot to do with when one experienced that music. Popular
music, especially since the 1950s, has been, by-and-large, a phenomenon of
youth, and it strikes a person, it resonates deeply in the peculiar balancing
point between adolescence and adulthood. The best and most resonant pop music
is about being young, about the usually haphazard and contradictory awareness
of meaning and escape in one’s life. There’s something about listening to a song
when you’re 14 or 24—it could be Nirvana’s “Heart-Shaped Box” or Madonna’s
“Like a Virgin” or Guns and Roses’ “Sweet Child of Mine”—that gives it a
revelatory charge. It’s not that we can’t appreciate music when we’re 40 or 50
but that by that time there is an element of clinical and cognitive
appreciation in it. When you’re young, there’s no rationalizations, only
deep-rooted awareness. We invest our souls
in those moments when music makes sense. The music becomes larger than life,
assuming a kind of surrogacy, where your fucked up adolescent emotions are
given life in songs. That’s powerful when you’re young. It may happen for over
a span of years, it may happen with many bands. Serendipitously, I happened to
be in that window of time, actually on the tail end of it, and this album began
to mean something to me that was entirely larger than its practical import in
my life.
To say that I loved Nevermind
in 1992, 1993 would be an understatement. If my CDs and tapes of that album were
edible, I would have eaten them, that’s how much I loved them. Sure, I loved
the songs. They were, yes, awesome. And yes, I felt vindicated that my (my, my)
own little world of “punk rock” was selling millions of copies. But honestly,
there was little mystery as to why exactly my like for a band crossed over into
some sort of vaguely pathological identification: it was the cheap and
sophomoric distortions of youth telling me that I was just like the singer. I developed some ill-advised and idiotic
identification with Kurt that had no basis in rationality. Some of it was
certainly me swallowing the media’s perfectly presented image of a talented
punk rock guy who was going against the grain even as he was co-opted by the
very machinery which he was railing against. This is also not a new phenomenon:
when late 1960s counterculture musicians such as Jimi Hendrix, the Jefferson
Airplane, and the Doors were railing against the establishment (“the man”), I’m
sure it was not lost upon them that they were on major corporate labels owned
by “the man.” I was acutely aware of this fundamental contradiction in 1992 but
I didn’t care. The corporate package was, in fact, perfectly suited to me. I
liked the fact that Nirvana was both popular and yet constantly complained of
being too popular. This condition mirrored the contradictions of my own life
(well-read but constantly railing against intellectuals, etc.). And for sure, I
loved wallowing in my navel-gazing angst. I was the perfect demographic. I too
wanted to scream my fucking head off at the world and sing “Territorial
Pissings.” I too wanted to tell Rolling
Stone magazine that they were corporate shills. I even liked Flipper’s Sex Bomb Baby just like him!
I also bought into the dichotomies reinforced in packaged
interviews: the forced Beatles vs. Stones rivalry that was now played out in
Nirvana vs. Pearl Jam; my absolute and utter antipathy towards Guns n’ Roses
who represented the evil “other” even though as Steven Hyden so insightfully
identified in a recent series of articles on “alternative nation” on the A/V Club that Axel Rose and Kurt Cobain
were in fact much more alike than not; and finally, my constant need to defend
Nirvana against charges of “sellout” to my purist punk rock friends. All of
these right vs. wrong dichotomies were neatly personified in this mega rock
star who, let’s face it, was probably an asshole. This intense identification
with Kurt Cobain, while somewhat foolish, was at its core, briefly very
cathartic. It gave some sort of vague private space where I could exist outside
of the very evident inertia of my “real” life. (Naturally, when Kurt killed
himself in 1994, this deep and misguided identification caused all sorts of
unexpected, um, disruptions.)
So the music of my youth bred this kind of extremely
meaningful but highly contrived identification. But … at some point, for everyone, deeply personal investment in
music ceases to happen. It stops. It may be because you get busy with other
things or because you don’t have time or because you get into relationships,
have babies, or just get old. But it stops. And at that point, something else
happens: nostalgia, or more precisely false nostalgia, kicks in. Nirvana has
been the focus (or victim, depending on your take) of so much nostalgia, that
it’s hard to recover anything of value about it besides the actual act of
remembering. People now even remember how they remembered Nevermind. And the narratives are firmly calcified. You know when
John Stewart hosts a special Town Hall meeting on SiriusXM radio to commemorate
the twentieth anniversary of Nevermind
with Dave Grohl, Kris Novoselic, and Butch Vig, that we are a culture that
fetishizes remembering, nostalgia, the past, memories, tributes, anniversaries,
etc. The new Nevermind 4 CD/1 DVD boxset edition is but one symptom of how pop culture is now constantly
cannibalizing its past. Do we really need so much Nevermind? And the weird part is that when I saw ads for the box
set, I was drawn to it, like an adult being shown a long lost toy from his
youth, attracted by the alluring lost but yet treasured quality of it. But I
held myself back. I tried to remind myself of that feeling I get when I see yet
another Rolling Stone cover on Kurt
Cobain at the airport, or every time I see Nevermind
as the token 1990s album to make babyboomer lists of the top 100 albums of all
time. It just makes me nauseous.
The album doesn’t exist outside its history anymore. The
songs each have long footnotes that explain every historical detail about the
band; looming large over all this is of course The Suicide™. It has become
almost impossible to imagine Nevermind
without that most famous of footnotes, which looms larger than the text itself.
Now, twenty years later, without the meaning, without the youthful attachments,
without the superficial hero identifications, and without the footnotes, does
the text hold up? I just listened to it. It’s damn good. It may not be the best
album of the 1990s (hell, it’s not even the best album of 1991—that honor is
reserved for My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless),
but it is indeed a good-to-great album, full of fine songs, massive music,
tender moments, subversive commentary, and unintelligible lyrics. Sure, it’s
hard to find meaning in it anymore, but it’s hard to find meaning in anything
that happened twenty years ago. Like the album, I am also twenty years older
now and there are other things to devote attention to. But I know this for
sure: it’s aged much better than me.
21. Mica Levi - Under The Skin (soundtrack): Mica Levi (who often uses the stage name Micachu) is a 26-year old English composer, singer, and musician based in England who has done quite a bit of experimental and pop music in a lot of different genres. This soundtrack, to one of of my favorite movies of the year, Under the Skin, is the most unsettling film soundtrack I've heard in a while. Evoking the sound of 1970s horror and sci-fi movies, she uses massive strings and slightly atonal harmony to communicate menace and foreboding very powerfully. Even if you've never seen the movie (which is extremely unsettling) this is amazing stuff. Not perhaps suitable for casual listening but certainly rewarding if you're in the right kind of mood. Listen to the sample track "Love."
19. FKA twigs - LP1: Another English singer who's a woman (she must be in her mid-20s) and is most famous among teenagers because she is the girlfriend of that guy from Twilight. But she has a pretty great pop sensibility. There's a little bit of Bat for Lashes in her but more synthetic pop, with some R&B thrown in. Apparently she likes Siouxsie & The Banshees but I don't see that at all. Good intelligent pop though. Sample track: "Water Me." 
17. Caribou - Our Love: I've followed the career of Dan Snaith, electronic music artist extraordinaire, since the early 2000s (back when he was "Manitoba") through excellent albums such as Up In Flames (2003), The Milk of Human Kindness (2005), and Andorra (2007). He mines a kind of softness in the electronic beats he cooks up, part psychedelia, part euphoria, some melancholia, and full-on electronica. If before he was trying to merge Brian Wilson with (danceable) Aphex Twin, here he attains a kind of half awake, half asleep dream pop, just a little bit odd, yet undeniably dance music. Like all of his music, the video for the song "Our Love" is romantic but just a bit odd, even haunted, by the ghosts of past genres.
16. Peter Murphy - Lion: Probably not the hippest singer to like these days, but who knew Peter Murphy would ever make another album worth listening to? This sounds a bit like late period Sisters of Mercy, but you know, what redeems it is that Murphy had one of the best voices of the '80s post-punk, and he appears not to have lost any of his bite. And this album has a lot of bite. It weirdly kinda rocks. I'm not going to start wearing all black again anytime soon but it's nice to hear an old geezer come up with something good. Sample track: "Hang Up."
14. Phantogram - Voices: The band is basically two people who live in New York and do electronic pop. It's very atmospheric, hook-laden, and wouldn't be out of place in the 1990s. In fact, the most obvious reference is the 1990s semi-shoegaze band Curve (remember them?). You run into Phantogram music a lot, without really knowing it's Phantogram--their music is on a lot of 1-hour drama shows (like, I think Revenge or Scandal and stuff like that). The new album is song after song of perfect electronic pop, no weak numbers, just a steady stream of good stuff, suitable for the Top 40, right between Depeche Mode and Florence + The Machine. This album would probably be much higher on my list but for the fact that I just started to listen to it only a month or so ago. There's a pretty good recent show on-line (ignore the idiot host). See here.
13. Interpol - El Pintor: Well, well, well, who'da thought? I kind of lost of track of Interpol for many years. They put out one of the greatest debut albums of all time (Turn On The Bright Lights), then slowly but inevitably sank into mediocrity. Now they're a 3-piece band (Paul Banks plays guitar, bass, and sings) and appear to have rediscovered the muse. It's not a classic album but it is a good one, where you don't have to skip over tracks. There's still that tremulous sense that even when you're in despair, at least you can be dressed well for it. Here they are doing "All the Rage Back Home" on Letterman.
12. Real Estate - Atlas: This is the kind of music that would have fit in very well with American "college rock" in the late 1980s. They sound a lot like bands at the time (see Dumptruck) who were trying to emulate R.E.M., taking stuff from classic '60s pop like the Byrds but updating it for the times. Real Estate are a three-piece band from New Jersey (although I think they live in New York now). I've posted stuff by them before on this blog. They have produced a bunch of great sublime guitar-based songs, songs that remind me of being in college (in fact, remind me of the kind of songs I wrote back then). Slow, mellow, understated indie pop. Here they are doing "Talking Backwards."
11. Clark - Clark: Yet another electronic musician (full name: Chris Clark) on the Warp label who has been around for a while under a mind-bogglingly large number of guises. This is his first album actually under his own name. He's English but I think lives in Berlin now. The hipsters at Pitchfork say "[t]he world is ending, and Chris Clark is writing its soundtrack." I don't know if I believe that, but the album does feel like it's a soundtrack to things falling apart. It's basic techno dance music, but for a future that you know is gonna be much much less than you hoped it would be. The album itself is remarkably eclectic, moving from different sub-genres of techno, a bit of Aphex Twin here, a bit of Boards of Canada there. There are points where the album sounds really emotional, perhaps even a bit muzak-y, but it's all invested with real feeling. Apparently he made all this up in a barn in the English countryside. Check out this track "Unfurla."
