The Factual Opinion

The Best of 1992: #1

Pavement
Slanted and Enchanted

When you're talking about music that inspired entire generations, that either created or became the voice of a entire subset of Americans, the list isn't extraordinarily long: The Beatles, The Velvet Underground, Nirvana, Jay-Z, and The Beach Boys are a few that, arguably, might be up there.  Everyone has their personal band they claim sits on top, and that's if you exclude all the people who talk about Elvis. (And all those people who talk about Robert Johnson, too.) 

We don't live in that world anymore--the musical landscape found in popular culture (i.e. music that sells, bands that most people know) is one that is more tied up in money and celebrity culture than it ever has been before, and it shows no signs of stopping.  It's been commonplace for years for hip-hop to fully embrace the commercial aspects of their field, shouting out how many gold records they have, and it's nearly impossible to peruse anybodies CD collection and not come upon an album whose artist is somehow associated with a reality show program.  The argument for commercial art, done primarily for profit, versus art done primarily for...well, whatever reason art is done for isn't anything new--and as time moves forward, it becomes clearer that it's one that, for now at least, has been decided.  Discerning palettes aside, most people aren't bothered if their albums are associated with celebrities hawking wares in the Amazon street market, and most people will continue to pick up recycled genre pieces done by bands with as much creativity as they have desire to improve their sound: not very much. 

None of this was very much different in 1992--MTV was still a force to be reckoned with, as were the large corporate music empires.  1992 was also a big year for the studio owned groups: REM blew up even bigger than the surprising success of their previous "Losing My Religion" video had indicated, Tori Amos basically recreated the entire subculture of white songstress albums that wasn't felled until the last few years of Alicia Keys and her ilk, and all of this was still ocurring in the final years of the grunge era.  (One of the biggest successes of the year was the Singles soundtrack, full of 90's heroes like Pearl Jam, Alice in Chains and the Smashing Pumpkins.)  Most of all though, all the big sellers of the year where albums that, regardless of their long hair, were relentlessly produced "clean" albums.  As raw as they might have played at, grunge, REM and Tori made albums that sounded like they were made by people who knew what they were doing, and had some ambition to be doing it.

Meanwhile, in California, a group of thrift store looking dorks (and there's no better term) threw away a stupid band name, put instruments they had no business playing into their hands and recorded an album on their own.  Without any major label or the support that entails, the album, Slanted and Enchanted ended up to be a critical success, and due to it's incredibly cheap cost, a financial one as well.  Even today the album remains one of the most beloved of the 90's, and the entire indie-rock world can be said to have grown out of the all-too-brief seven years that they were around.  They weren't anywhere near the first to release a lo-fi independent album (the 80's are rife with those stories), but Pavement was the first to fully embrace the style of recording in the songs themselves: they don't seem to sound like they know what they're doing, or like they care to learn in the first place, but this doesn't sound like a joke band either.

The Best of 1992: #2

Aphex Twin
Selected Ambient Works 85-92

There was another popular electronic album that came out in 1992-Future Sound of London's Accelerator.  In 1992, both sounded different, futuristic, and dare i say the Factual's favorite buzzword?  Innovative.  Of course, now that we have broken electronic down into somewhere around three thousand different subsets, 14 year old albums wouldn't have that same level of impact when listened to today.  After all, laptops, Pro Tools and the Apple recording studio subset have all advanced so far beyond '92 that the range of music are equal to the difference between a one string bass and a six string guitar, right?  In the case of Accelerator, that couldn't be more true:  while Future Sound still deserve a tip of the hat for basically existing, there's no reason beyond nostalgia to listen to their albums anymore.

But you can't say the same for Richard James and his Selected works--you'd be a fool to even imply it.  14 years later, Selected Ambient Works still sounds like something beyond the reach of human beings, it still sounds like music that operates on your ears--this isn't music that you throw on to relax to, or stay out late dancing too.  Not to imply that you couldn't do those things, but the first time "Xtal" comes rushing through a pair of headphones (waves of gray sound, delayed than throbbing bass and finally, goofy overdubbed vocalizing) is also the last time that you'll attempt to turn this album into party music.  Unlike every other piece of electronica at the time, and still head and shoulders above since, the Selected Works doesn't limit itself to the sound of the rave, the tracks for the club: it's an incredibly personal relationship it striving for.  When you start recycling "We Are The Music Makers," you've reached the point it existed for: this is Richard James (under the Twin nom-de-plure) pulling off what he was shooting for when he made this stuff, music as language, language as challenge--getting distributed straight from his mind to yours.  In some ways Selected Works has also become the album used as evidence for James' genius when he chooses to act the fool and release weird, unambitious albums of burps and whistles.  Either way, this is one of the greatest pieces of music created in the last twenty years, and it stands head and shoulders above the rest of it's closest relatives.

-Tucker Stone, 2006

The Best of 1992: #3

Unrest
Imperial f.f.r.r.

If ever there was a prototypical album for what is currently referred to as "indie-rock," it's this.  Unrest started out as undistinguished hardcore band from Washington DC--so undistinguished that they didn't even have a Dischord record contract.  After some line-up changes, they started experimenting with a minimalist sound, shaving off vocals and exploring what else they could do.  As it turned out, Imperial is the only full-length album from that time that they released (although the bookend ep's to Imperial are excellent as well) from this period.  It wasn't until the late 90's and the most recent decade especially that this sort of music became to get wider acclaim: ponderous, soft-loud instrumental songs, artistic explorations of the power of improvisation in straight ahead pop terms--come on, you're getting there.  It's what we now are forced to call "post rock."  Unrest, in a lot of ways, got there first.  It wouldn't be quite correct to treat the album as if it "set the stage," or "inspired" any of what Constellation puts out, or Arts & Crafts; but Unrest shouldn't be looked at as some kind of obscure one-off either, especially now that it's been remastered and re-released.   So what is it?  The easiest thing to call songs like "Suki" is pop, and we'd do it no better to stick to that term: but Unrest seems to demand more.  I say "seems" because at no point does this album "demand" anything--it's so laid back that it's more comparable to bands like Low than Broken Social Scene--but Imperial remains an elusive and unique piece of beauty all these years later.

-Tucker Stone, 2006

The eleven songs on Unrest’s Imperial f.f.r.r. average 144.4 beats per minute. “Sugarshack” clocks in at a mighty 256 bpm. I don’t know what this means, except that the band has gone out of its way to quantify the speed of each song, as well as each song’s length, down to the millisecond. The “f.f.r.r.” in the album title stands for “full frequency range recording.” The album begins with a volume reference tone, so that you may determine exactly how loud you listen before the music even begins. Unrest is obviously in love with technical precision. In an era filled with rock bands supposedly heralding punk rock ideals—willfully not learning or unlearning their instruments; using lo-fi recording techniques; singing without regard to tonality—Unrest got everything precisely right.   

But Unrest is not a band about precision, and Imperial f.f.r.r. is not an album about technique. Unrest use their studio know-how in order to take care of their audience. They make listening to the album a shared experience. You become involved in your own listening. At first this occurs simply because they recruit you as a technician—that volume reference tone forces you to make a choice about how you want to listen. Next, Unrest break out their sizable musicianship, but not overtly. Rather, they create a simple, solid foundation of streamlined grooves. These rhythms offer little variation, and therefore become hypnotizing. This is an argument for the simplicity of punk rock over the blind adherence to punk rock ethics—why you should learn how to play. Music, Unrest says, doesn’t have to do a whole lot to be transformative. Finally, the real coup happens when singers Bridget Cross and Mark Robinson sing. Cross is the American embodiment of a Japanese songbird. Robinson is like an obtuse Gordon Gano, forever seeing the world through adolescent eyes, and embracing the teenage confusion that secretly remains with us our entire lives. He wrings stunning melodies out of the simplest parts of “Suki” and “Isabel,” but his voice never stabilizes, instead cracking and faltering. Essentially, Unrest have spent so much time and effort on the foundation so that Robinson and Cross can climb to the top and collapse without fear. This is vulnerability growing out of strength, and it makes for the most haunting album of 1992.

-Marty Brown, 2006

The Best of 1992: #4

Los Lobos
Kiko

Anytime you see an album that just about every genre-specific music publication is trying to claim as one of their own, you know that you've got something really special going on: sometimes that special may also mean that whatever piece it is, it's going to make for difficult listening.  Bridging gaps, fusing different strands of music--these aren't always things that make an album the most accessible piece of music in the Wurlitzer.  In the case of Kiko, an album that can be found all over the internet with listings like "Prog-Rock," "Latin Fusion," "Classic Rock," "Rock N' Roll," "Latin Country" and the current personal favorite, "R & B?"

If you happen to be one of those people who uses the computer for any extended period of time to determine whether you want to listen to an album, than you gave up on checking Kiko a long time ago: there's such a mountain of bizarrely conflicting reviews of the album that you're sure to have found one that matches a prescriptive ideal of "an album that you would not enjoy."  Of course, than you've missed out one of the two best kept secrets of 1992.  (Which, if you like foreshadowing, should indicate that you probably haven't heard one of the three albums coming this week.)

The first time you hear Kiko, it might sound vaguely experimental--but you'll probably reel back and forth, wondering why it gets treated with such hyper-textual reviews.  After all, this is a driving in the hot sun record, this is a cold beer record: this ain't Kid A.  Sure, some of the lyrics might be a bit beyond Don Henley, but if Los Lobos doesn't remind you of a Latino versed in Cream or The Byrds, than you've been drinking lattes for too long.  Kiko, as pretty as it'll become upon repeated listens, is a rustic piece of equipment--it's as extravagant as Cormac McCarthy's plots while hiding within a Pretty Horses sunset.  While it's deservedly compared to masterpieces of Americana like Wilco's Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, Kiko isn't born out of a nostalgic falseness (which, like it or not, is what every piece of the new American folk/country/rock is gestated in,) Kiko comes from a different place.  It comes from the same group who had made stars out of themselves because of La Bamba and responded by diving back out of the spotlight: that's where Kiko came from, and that's what it sounds like.  A group of musicians who had rejected easy success, accepted the horrendous criticism, and then made the sort of album most bands dream of--a subtle work of genius.

-Tucker Stone, 2006

Los Lobos took three years to follow up Kiko, and when they did, they released Music From Papa’s Dream, a children’s album with Papa Lalo Guerrero, “the father of Chicano music.” Music From Papa’s Dream ran from traditional Mexican music to “Wooly Bully” and “La Bamba.” But this only made plain what was evident on Kiko—that Los Lobos was a band in love with innocence, viewing a beguiling world through youthful eyes. “Kiko and the Lavender Moon,” from which the album takes its title, describes a boy (presumably) who sleeps until dark, comes out when no one else is around, and dances until he falls asleep again. The song itself creeps along with a Latin rhythm, keyboards and even accordion—essentially, it’s a lullaby, albeit a somewhat creepy one. “Dream In Blue” opens the album astutely, with singer David Hidalgoasking at one point, “Am I real or still in a dream?”

As great albums go, Kiko doesn’t do a whole lot to call attention to itself. When people talk about it, they either mention that it’s “wildly experimental” and that Los Lobos utilize the best parts of rock & roll, blues, and traditional Spanish music to create their unique sound. All of this is true—the mystical airiness that producer Mitchell Froom brings to the record can also be found in Wilco’s Yankee Hotel Foxtrot—but none of it is what immediately draws you into the album. No, it’s the sense of mythology and fairy tale. Los Lobos not only sing about nymphs and saints, but the songs themselves sound like otherworldly stories. On Kiko, Los Lobos push rock & roll out of the mundane and into the fantastic. They do so simply and profoundly. A casual listen might yield a description like the one offered by Los Lobos on their 1993 collection—Just Another Band From East L.A. But anyone who has listened intimately to Kiko, will hear it with the same mystery and wonder as when we all heard our first fairy tales.

-Marty Brown, 2006

The Best of 1992: #5

Beastie Boys
Check Your Head

Just so you can hear it for at least 4000 times before you die, the Beastie Boys started out as a punk band.  A really awful one.  Although there might be some arguement that they maintained a "punk sensibility" with their first two records, Licensed to Ill and Paul's Boutique.  When it came time to make Check Your Head, they'd pretty much exorcised any demons they may have had in referencing their idols, and they'd pretty much gone as far after Mr. Rabbit with the Dust Brothers, so it was about time for them to come up with a sound, something they could call their own.  In doing so, they constructed one of the strongest albums of the 90's, one of the weirdest hit-sellers of any decade, and, quite possibly their best possible "Beastie" album ever. (Credit has to be given to the Dust for Paul's, or it would stand alone.)  Without the overlord control of Mixmaster Mike or the visual stamp of Spike Jonze, and, most of all, without all the irritating Buddhist 'let's-all-be-pals' shit, Check Your Head is, to some extent, the last time we get to see the Beastie Boys: after this, they just grew up too fast.

Whether it was sticking dicks in mashed potatoes or nodding out to "Something's Got To Give,"  haunting thrift stores for the outfits in the "So What'cha Want" video, Check Your Head got a ball rolling in 1992 that hasn't stopped yet.  These tracks are still cooler than the rest, still as adventerous and dope-laden as they were when they first showed up on tape-decks.  The picture on the front said it all: they don't give a fuck about anything, and they're waiting on you to try to be as cool as they are.  After this, it's all babies and memories: so what do you want?

-Tucker Stone, 2006

Has any band ever released three sequential albums as diverse and successful as the first three Beastie Boys records? License to Ill lives somewhere in the CD collection of anyone under the age of thirty-five forty who owns more than three CDs. That album spawned nine [1] nine!) singles, all of which entered immediately into the cultural lexicon, and all of which are nearly flawless [2]  even though the Beastie Boys have since mostly disowned them. The follow-up, Paul’s Boutique, had nowhere near the commercial success of License to Ill, it makes up for that with sheer ambition. The Beasties and the Dust Brothers team up to transform more than 100 (legal) samples into what can only [3] be described as one of the sweetest works of postmodern art of any genre. After all of this—artistic success, commercial failure, and vice versa—in 1992 the Beastie Boys set out to reinvent themselves once again, as well as launch their own label, Grand Royal. They did this by creating an album even more ambitious, impenetrable, and commercially risky than Paul’s Boutique. Their backwards logic paid off. Check Your Head hit number 10 on the Billboard charts, and cemented the fan base that both the Beastie Boys and Grand Royal retained for the next decade.

Check Your Head is the kind of album that even casual listeners can recite backwards and forwards. The Beastie Boys picked up their instruments from their punk rock days and laid down thick, inimitable grooves—not strictly hip-hop, not strictly punk rock, not strictly funk, but embracing all three genres—and rocked them into as dense a sample-scape as on Paul’s Boutique. Some of the samples that they recontextualize—like Bob Dylan’s famous assertion from “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues,” “I’m going back to New York City/I do believe I’ve had enough”—take on even more dimension than in their original contexts. [4] That they managed to drop sweet, iconoclastic rhymes into this mix—is there a better line anywhere than “Don’t touch me/ ‘Cause I’m electric/ And if you touch me/ You’ll get shocked”?—is gravy. In a year of incredible genre-bending [5] and mix-taping [6],the Beastie Boys out-genre-bend and mix-tape everyone.

 

---

[1] Ten, if you count “She’s Crafty,” which was the B-side to “Girls.”

[2] With the possible exception of “Brass Monkey,” only because it’s 1) impossible to dance to, yet 2) an infuriating 80’s dance party staple.

[3] Actually, this is a lie, since Paul’s Boutique can really only be described as “bangin’.”

[4] I use the Dylan sample here because it’s a bold thing to say, and it may sound a little extreme, but I also believe it.

[5] See The Factual Opinion’s Best Albums of 1992 #6, 11 &12

[6] See The Factual Opinion’s Best Albums of 1992 #6, 17 & 24

-Marty Brown, 2006

 

The Best of 1992: #6

Sublime
40 Oz. To Freedom

You are a teenager in Southern California. In nearby Los Angeles, millionaires spend hours upon hours distilling the complexities of the human experience into their most easily digestible essences. Television is either Cheers or In Living Color. Radio is either rap or grunge. But you are a white kid going to Martin Luther King Jr. High School in a predominantly Hispanic city, and nobody knows who you are.

Laguna Beach is not Southern California. Friday is not Southern California. 40 Oz. to Freedom is Southern California. Never have so many cultures collided so fantastically in the span of one 74 minute album. Here, an unironic cover of the Grateful Dead’s “Scarlet Begonias” lives alongside Bradley Nowell’s list of the things KRS-1. Also: “Chica Me Tipo,” sung almost entirely in Spanish. Sublime lays bare in the length of one album what no one in Hollywood would ever attempt: Southern California as a culture clash where everybody wins.

Plus, dudes have got songs. “Badfish,” possibly the catchiest melody Sublime ever wrote, begins as a pick-up at a house party before transforming into an up-tempo ballad about addiction and mortality. The album opener, “My Ruca,” strips reggae down to a voice and a pulse—the beat could have come from the Clipse’s next album. “Ebin” justifies the entire third wave of ska. Everything gets laced together as an elaborate mix tape. They sample the Minutemen and Eazy-E and Led Zeppelin and George Clinton. And this doesn’t even take into account their cultural impact. Nowell holds KRS-1 responsible for his education, but how many kids in Irvine did Sublime hip to BDP? Or Jimmy Cliff? Or the Dead? How many finally felt that they could embrace Bad Religion AND Steely Dan? Hispanic culture AND black culture AND suburban white culture?

But it’s remembered for “Date Rape.” Wake up.

-Marty Brown, 2006

The Best of 1992: #7

The Pharcyde
Bizarre Ride II The Pharcyde

Listening to the Phacyde's debut LP in 2006, in light of the two solo careers it's spawned and the cocaine problems that caused them, should probably make for a bittersweet afternoon.

But this is Bizarre Ride. No depression is permitted. One wishes they could call this album a trailblazer: but that would imply that somewhere, there is some hip-hop artist following along in the footsteps of this merry band of lunatics, screaming at each other over jazzy beats about hermaphrodites and jerking off, insulting each others mother (and not killing each other over it), and that just ain't so. Bizarre Ride is the closest hip-hop has ever come to Frank Zappa, or the Fugs, or any other rock musician who makes music becauase they are goofy bastards who can't explain themselves without album art: beyond that, or hell, even before, The Pharcyde showed up in 1992, started picking fights with a (for-real!) crackhead producer and recorded a goofball sexified young men romp and then watched as every one of their contemporaries went with Raiders caps and surly grimaces. When the battle cry is "Keep it real" the Pharcyde reminded everybody that most of us, people in the projects included, don't really want to 'bust caps.' Most of the time, everybody just wants to have a good day: the Pharcyde just happen to enjoy their good days on Freddie Hubbard roller coasters while drinking Mai Tais and trying to find a tee-shirt with Mao Tse Tsung eating out a rooster on it. It may not be everybodies cup of tea, but if this is the soundtrack that lifestyle produces--then maybe a trip to Coney Island wearing a gymnastics outfit is in order.

-Tucker Stone, 2006

The Best of 1992: #8

Godflesh
Pure

To describe Godflesh’s music as movements of prolonged abrasiveness punctuated with moments of stunning beauty would be accurate, if a bit disingenuous. In truth, Godflesh’s Pure is not as uninviting as it may sound. Set against the backdrop of industrial metal at the time, it comes across as more forward-thinking than Broken, more timeless than Psalm 69, with stronger grooves than Meantime, and more accessible than any of them. Two years after the release of Pure, Justin Broadrick, Godflesh’s founding and only constant member, told Guitar Magazine, “Our music is about hitting an emotional core in people with brutal power. At first all we wanted to do was crush our listeners, but then we wanted to hypnotize them.” Nothing could better describe the band. The hypnotic qualities of, say, “Don’t Bring Me Flowers” far outweigh its potential abrasiveness.

Godflesh never achieved the success deserved by and expected of them. Pure meant to capitalize on the headway made by Nine Inch Nails in the mainstream, but the kids were too busy listening to downtuned guitars and dissonant vocals to hear the intricately crafted, gut wrenching songs Godflesh offered. They became influencers instead. You can hear them in, say, Godspeed You Black Emperor or Liars. Over the course of their decade and a half career, Broadrick got invited to join both Danzig and Faith No More, but denied both in order to pursue Godflesh’s singular sound until 2002, when he suffered a nervous breakdown and broke up the band. They remain largely unknown, but emphatically loved. Kirk Hammett was reportedly a big fan of Godflesh, which makes you wonder if Metallica would have chosen to make Pure if it could have.

-Martin Brown, 2006