sound off
Salon's Arts & Entertainment critics pick
their favorite records and musical
moments of 1999.
Dec. 14, 1999
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Stephanie Zacharek
(In no particular order.)
Beck, "Midnite Vultures" (Interscope)
Innovative and deeply pleasurable, Beck's Salvation Army R&B takes a chance on the forgotten idea that women still like to be talked into sex -- and wins. He's Andrew Marvell, with wider lapels.
Fountains of Wayne, "Utopia Parkway" (Atlantic)
Adam Schlesinger and Chris Collingwood, now teamed up with guitarist Jody Porter and drummer Brian Young, write grown-up pop songs that remind you exactly how it felt to hear for the first time the words "Wouldn't it be nice if we were older?/Then we wouldn't have to wait so long." Paradise regained.
Tindersticks, Simple Pleasure (Island import)
A moody urban forest of devastating love songs, for those days when nothing less than full-fledged obsession will do. Stuart Staples' lush, breathy vibrato is like a shudder that comes from somewhere deep inside. And it stands out against the verdant foliage of velvety strings, Hammond organs, and sun-kissed horns, no problem.
George Jones, "Cold Hard Truth" (Asylum)
Artists like Jones may want you to believe it's a great act of bravery to admit what a bastard you've been. But it's not the confessional tone -- and not even the clean arrangements and solid songs -- of "Cold Hard Truth" that makes it great. It's just that Jones, one of the greatest of all pop singers, period, doesn't sound like an old guy giving it up for one more decent record. He makes us believe that this is the voice -- more sonorous, more attuned to nuance, bloodier -- he's been growing into all these years.
Flaming Lips, "The Soft Bulletin" (Warner Bros.)
A record that made me come running into the room when my husband first put it on. "What is this?" I demanded upon hearing the first track, "Race for the Prize," a song about scientists that glides by on a floating pillow of strings. By the time I'd gotten to the staggeringly mournful second number, "A Spoonful Weighs a Ton," my hair had miraculously arranged itself in a wild pre-Raphaelite tangle. This record, massive, dramatic, love-soaked and weird as all get-out, is that good.
Moby, "Play" (V2)
As a whole, elegant, hyperkinetic, transcendant, hypnotic: electronic music that's so organic you can feel the dirt around its roots.
Pete Ham, "Golders Green" (Rykodisc)
Badfinger's tragic prince walks among us again in this second collection of rough, majestic demos. (The first was "7 Park Avenue" in 1997.) Unvarnished and beautifully crafted, these songs speak more quiet truth than a Shaker chair -- and that goes even for "Richard," Ham's ode to his penis.
Jack Logan, "Buzz Me In" (Capricorn)
Jack Logan has no idea what kind of singer and songwriter he wants to be: an outright pop guy, a country crooner, a sailor-adventurer-balladeer? It doesn't matter, because Logan has no need for purity. His instincts are so good that all you have to do is put your little hand in his, and go. "Glorious World" is the most exhilarating pop song I've heard all year, and I love it both for its forthright and highly practical admission of how crappy the world really is and for its eminently more sensible dismissal of such practical considerations. A guy who knows heaven when he finds it should never be underestimated.
Sleater-Kinney, "The Hot Rock" (Kill Rock Stars)
Tyger, tyger burning bright, record after record, and each one so different. "The Hot Rock" is more expertly made, more ruminative, than any other Sleater-Kinney LP, and maybe runs deeper. Corin Tucker, Carrie Brownstein and Janet Weiss are, as they claim here, "the band from the end of the world," and they didn't get here a minute too soon.
Everything But the Girl, "Temperamental" (Atlantic)
When Tracey Thorne, who's been one stellar half of Everything But the Girl for nearly 20 years now, sings "I just wanna love more," you believe with every fiber of your being that even with all she's given, she's still got more lurking. Thorne and her husband Ben Watt reinvented themselves as a techno prince and princess a few years back, and they've found the fountain of youth in the process. "I'm not immune, I love this tune," Thorne tells us, adamant. There's always room for more love.
Honorable mentions:
Kelly Willis, "What I Deserve" (Rykodisc); Mandy Barnett, "I've Got a Right to Cry" (Sire); The High Llamas, "Snow Bug" (V2); Tom Waits, "Mule Variations" (Epitaph); TLC, "Fanmail" (Arista).
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Charles Taylor
1. Everything But the Girl, "Temperamental" (Atlantic)
Seventeen years into their career, the British duo came up with their best album, a contemporary pop masterpiece. Inspired by the vitality of dance music and the particulars of city life, appalled by the stasis that has taken over their near-midlife contemporaries, Ben Watt and Tracey Thorn turned in a set of songs that are hard-edged, compassionate and acutely observed. Their triumph here is wedding the solitary reveries of romantic pop to the sonic atmospherics and communal sensuality of electronic dance music.
2. Sleater-Kinney, "The Hot Rock" (Kill Rock Stars)
Not as immediately ferocious as its predecessors, but with a deeper sense of the contingencies of everyday pain and betrayal. When Corin Tucker, Carrie Brownstein and Janet Weiss head into the wind on "Banned From the End of the World" with the taken-for-granted determination of the line "the future is here, it comes every year," they don't only seem like the greatest current rock band, but the most fearless.
3. Moby, "Play" (V2)
Ethnomusicology for the dance floor. Imagine the folk singers and misfits and oddballs discovered over the years by Alan Lomax and Harry Smith rising from the grooves of their scratchy old records, making their way to the dance clubs, and turning them into Chautauqua tents.
4. Beck, "Midnite Vultures" (Interscope)
Remember the kids who put, "If you can dream it, you can be it!" under their pictures in our high-school yearbooks? Beck must have read that and dreamed of being Barry White. Integrationist and egalitarian in spirit, funny and sexy in execution, this is vintage-shop blackface, a great, affectionate joke on how American pop culture becomes a marketplace of identity for its savviest shoppers.
5. Pet Shop Boys, "Nightlife" (Sire)
The huge, unstoppable beat of classic disco as the backdrop to a set of songs about mature romantic disappointment. Titled "Nightlife" but more about the bookends of going out for drinks and good times, the expectation of getting ready, the letdown of coming in afterward. In a nutshell: "Never been closer to Heaven/Never been farther away."
6. Fountains of Wayne, "Utopia Parkway" (Atlantic)
As an expression of longing to be cool (and fearing that you aren't), the lines "Red dragon tattoo/Is just about on me/I got it for you/So now do you want me?" are just about unbeatable. It's easy to imagine Adam Schlesinger and Chris Collingwood singing them before combing their hair in a thousand ways, and winding up looking just the same.
7. Flaming Lips, "The Soft Bulletin" (Warner Bros.)
Like a sci-fi opera written by Brian Wilson, this Flaming Lips record is lush, weird, stately and haunted by the traces of genius about to go unrecognized. A gorgeously conceived and executed suite of oblique pop songs that pulsates with the out-of-time feel common to those brilliant albums destined to be discovered years later. Perfect for an autumn day or a trip to Mars.
8. Cecelia Bartoli and Bryn Terfel, Myung-Whun Chung and the Orchestra dell'Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecelia, "Duets" (Decca)
Every moment on this meeting of opera's two great hams, the Italian mezzo-soprano and the Welsh bass-baritone, feels as if it had been conceived and sung with our pleasure in mind. This selection of Mozart, Rossini and Donizetti provides some of the same joy as listening to Elisabeth Schwarzkopf sing operetta, but with a giddier, lighter air. By the time Bartoli and Terfel get to the "The Magic Flute," opera has begun to sound like the highest form of vaudeville.
9. Tom Waits, "Mule Variations" (Epitaph)
The rantings of the neighborhood drunk or perhaps an unsung prophet, heard through a sonic murk that sounds as if a blues 78 had been dug out of the earth after being buried there for decades. At the start, the lurch of the music feels like that of a man on his last legs -- by the end, he sounds as if he's going to outlive us all.
10. Kruder and Dorfmeister, "The K&D Sessions" (!K7)
There were two other excellent electronica albums this year, Underworld's "Beaucoup Fish" and Basement Jaxx's "Remedy." But the nod goes to these two discs of remixes from a pair of Viennese DJs, all-purpose hipster background music suitable for the bedroom or the runway.
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Jeff Stark
1. Magnetic Fields, "69 Love Songs" (Merge Records)
The cynic in me says that Stephin Merritt should have called his omnibus collection "40 Love Songs" and edited it down from three discs to two. That's, of course, missing the point. Conceptually, the greatness of "69 Love Songs" is its excess, the creative audacity it takes to write dozens of numbers that expertly move through genre set pieces like choreographed dancers. But if that idea provides the outline, it's the finer points -- Merritt's new voice, subverted clichés, the gender play -- that make the songs sing.
2. Wilco, "Summer Teeth" (Warner Bros.) and Beulah, "When Your Heartstrings Break" (Sugar Free)
If consolidation and satellites have melted regional American music into a plastic lump of "Total Request Live," it's heartwarming to hear two bands with geography pressed into them like wax seals. Wilco is a Midwest band: hard-working, modest and genuine. Beulah is a California outfit, travelling from mining towns to Hollywood back lots with charmingly baroque bric-a-brac pop. Both look to music's past for its future, but neither confuse historical reverence with destructive nostalgia.
3. Tom Waits, "Mule Variations" (Epitaph)
Spooky and hysterical, beautifully ugly, slack without a slack jaw. The paradox collection of the year.
4. Flaming Lips, "The Soft Bulletin" (Warner Bros.)
"And though they were sad, they rescued everyone/They lifted up the sun ... the sound they made was love."
5. Built to Spill, Live at Irving Plaza and "Keep It Like a Secret" (Warner Bros.)
Built to Spill shows can be disastrous. Without the glorious, twining overdubs and perfect segues that brighten "Keep It Like a Secret" and the other three Built to Spill records, the band can sound frightfully thin. And frontman guitarist Doug Martsch can be moody and indifferent to an audience: He often refuses to play his best songs, and I've personally seen him wank for 10 minutes on one song, then walk away and leave the roadie to finish the jam. But at Irving Plaza earlier this year, there were three television cameras on the band, and Built to Spill wasn't going to look bad. Producer Phil Ek was behind the soundboard, two guitarists joined Martsch to fill out the band's dense songs and the set list surfed the entire Built to Spill catalog.
6. Prince Paul, and The Handsome Boy Modeling School, "So ... How's Your Girl?" (Tommy Boy)
Hip-hop is a singles medium, which makes the total-package records like former De La Soul producer Prince Paul creates delightful anomalies. His first is a "hip-hopera" where the songs and jokes service a story that satirizes pipe-hittin' rappers with funny pin-prick jabs. On his second, a project with Dan the Automator, the humor is ancillary to the songs, but the ace production, guest-star rhymes and out samples are essential.
7. The Mountain Goats, "Bitter Melon Farm" (Ajax)
Maybe it's not a great record, maybe it was recorded on boomboxes, maybe the backing vocals are out of tune, maybe John Darnielle's chord progressions are frightfully similar, maybe 27-track single and B-side collections are not a great idea. But the songs on "Bitter Melon Farm" are about love, and going, and reconciliation, and purple skies, and the way cranberries taste in your mouth. And it was the only record that made me cry.
8. Beck, "Midnite Vultures" (Interscope)
"Mixing business with leather."
9. TLC, "Fanmail" (Arista)
The summer heat wave, as cool and precise as a snowflake.
10. Chemical Brothers live at Woodstock
Woodstock 99 was, in every way, a disaster. It's hard to understand, if you weren't there, just how disgusting it was. Imagine one of those documentary films of homeless people picking through the dumps outside Mexico City. It was that dirty. Listen to Limp Bizkit's "Significant Other." It sounded worse. And I left before the riots even started. But on Saturday night, Metallica drew the drunken thugs away from the smaller stage, and the Chemical Brothers had a massive sound system and a happy crowd of dancers all to themselves. Add to that a perfect set that tore apart their studio tracks without destroying them and a burst of warm rain at the end. For a few minutes, Woodstock 99 felt like the fable.
Also: Various Artists, "'Rushmore' Original Soundtrack," (Atlantic); Various Artists, "'Book of Life' Original Soundtrack," (Echostatic); Moby, "Honey"; Sleater-Kinney, "The End of You."
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