5 Kinda Weird Albums From The Late 90's That Everyone Should Hear

1) In the Aeroplane Over the Sea by Neutral Milk Hotel. A peculiar piece of lo-fi indie rock, the disparate ingredients of the album seem like a recipe for disaster, or at least obscurity. Singer/writer Jeff Magnum's voice is quite unique, wailing as if he has no idea how to sing, and his songs are deceptively simple, albeit with incredibly obtuse lyrics. Add that the two other main band members are Julian Koster, a multi-insrumentalist whose speciality is the musical saw and Scott Spillane, who did the horn arrangements. Not exactly the three-chord rock or shimmering pop that dominated sales then and does so now. It'd be just another folk-rock curio if it weren't for one simple fact: It's beautiful. Magnum's voice, while useless for basically any other project, is perfect here, and it compliments the overall melodic feeling of the music, with some interesting bluegrass flourishes. The album moves from solo acoustic pieces to fuzzed out garage rock to almost orchestral arrangements with horns, singing saws and pump organs, none of it feeling out of place. One of the most uniquely nineties sounding records out, even though it doesn't really conform to any sound in the nineties. Except maybe the niche Sebadoh were carving, but even then, only just.



2) Fantastic Planet by Failure. They say grunge died in 1994. Shame, then, that the genre's best album was released two years after it died. Ken Andrews' songwriting star had been rising but with this record the band mixed walls of saturated distortion with a sense of texture and melody that had been sadly lacking from the years that dominated alt-rock previously. Like much of the artistic output that was coming out in that decade, it's all angst, alienation and heroin from a lyrical perspective. "Saturday Savior", "Dirty Blue Balloons," "Smoking Umbrellas," "Pillowhead," "Stuck On You"... all amazing songs about being on too much heroin to even stand. It feels very much like a young person's album from the 90's, but don't let the "snapshot of the times" vibe get to you, it's also a very, very good snapshot of a time once gone.

I'd be remiss to point out that the other 16 tracks on the album could all be Ken Andrews vomiting and making racial slurs and the album would still be a classic because of "The Nurse Who Loved Me," the song that should have been everywhere, been at least as popular and big-selling as "Smells Like Teen Spirit" and catapulted Failure into fame and fortune. It didn't, but it is a completely mind-blowing track, growing from a touching, quiet intro into an explosive middle section. A Perfect Circle covered it nicely (and more popularly) but Failure own that song.



3) California by Mr. Bungle. These guys are a divisive bunch, either being the most crazy-imaginative group of funk-prog-avant-metal-fusion guys ever OR being artless, noise-peddling dickheads. The truth is probably somewhere in between, but their final album in 1999 was about as artful, cohesive and, well, song-oriented they got before disbanding. I won't list the genres it touches on, mostly because it's all of them, but the funk, metal and experimental influences are probably the loudest. Songs like "The Air-Conditioned Nightmare," "None Of Them Knew They Were Robots" and "Golem II: The Bionic Vapour Boy" (all real titles of songs on the album) enter into the six minute range and take detours into places that no rock band has ever really gone. Screw it, listen to this and tell me if it's like anything you've ever heard.



(Sorry for the live versions, record companies are dicks.)

4) Around the Fur by Deftones. Metal is terminally uncool and I understand it's somewhat divisive... it carries with it a stigma similar to country music. "Oh, I'll listen to anything, except..." That sentence is only ever concluded with the words "what's on the radio," "country" or "anything heavy." As is no secret here, I'm a metalhead, but I'm also a music fan. I can't listen to anything that's just heavy for the sake of heavy, but it's like a love of chillis; once you develop a taste for it, it's hard to have anything without at least a touch of it. All that said, let's get a few things clear about Around the Fur.
Yes, it's meant to be played loud. Yes it features heavily distorted guitar and minor key tonalities and yes, it's a (gasp!) metal album. It's also nuanced, layered and affecting. I suppose the main thing that seperates Deftones from the dastardly nu-metal mire that infected heavy music in the late nineties in their focus on haunting melodies, or should I say lead vocalist Chino Moreno's focus on haunting melodies. He has no problem whispering, crooning, screaming or, and this is the real shocker, singing over the elegantly constructed waves of powerchords and bizarre, homemade samples the band excels at. Metal with a difference.



5) OK Computer by Radiohead. I know they're the most popular band in the world now, this album changed alt-rock forever, Beatles of our generation blah blah blah BUT! When's the last time you actually sat down and listened to this record? I mean actually, properly listened. Even for its time, this record is so out of step with what was going on around it. Downbeat even by nineties standards, with lusher production and arrangements that Dark Side of the Moon and two ready-made super singles in "Karma Police" and "No Surprises." There's nothing I can say about this record that hasn't been said, listen to it.