Top 5 Albums of the 90s

IN THE SPIRIT OF THOSE FACEBOOK top 5s, the avclub, and of course High Fidelity, I’m offering an attempt at decision-making.

Here are my top 5 albums of the 90s, meaning albums I heard and loved during the decade (not got into later,  a la Emergency & I, or even just on the cusp of the decade–I think I first heard Modest Mouse in late ‘99), albums that I think are great but not necessarily the Best, albums that I think may go unnoticed by history, albums that I have remembered in the last few weeks–for surely next week or even tomorrow I’ll remember one and realize it just HAS to be on the list.

This is in no particular order:

1. The Scofflaws–The Scofflaws
I’ve been digging through all my old ska tapes and digitizing them lately. This was really the first one I wanted to have. It’s just a classic. Groovy, great arrangements. I’m digitizing a tape of the first “Skarmageddon” collection right now, and thinking about this album versus the songs on that makes me feel like the Scofflaw’s first album doesn’t even really belong under the “3rd Wave” of ska label (which I guess I associate with distorted guitars and more fast-paced/punk rhythms–the guitar is not a prominent instrument on this one).  It’s almost more of a lounge album. There aren’t many originals, but the covers/re-arranged tracks are really the standouts: “A Shot in the Dark,” “The Man With The Golden Arm,” and of course “Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure.” I think in the 90s I was drawn to the fun stuff –”Pee-Wee,” “Paul Getty,” but as time went on it was really the instrumentals that I loved, especially one of the CD bonus tracks, “Rudy in Paris.” Thinking about it now, The Scofflaws probably gave me a good excuse to keep playing the saxophone, or at least feel cool while doing it.

2. Soul Coughing–Ruby Vroom
This was my brother’s CD that I found, I think in the basement, while he was away at college and I was in high school. I remember I must have been close to leaving for a band trip to Europe, because the tape of it (with Beck’s One Foot in the Grave, and album that I should probably put in the runners-up down there) is one of the few I brought on that trip, and I think I didn’t actually listen to it until I was traveling. What a fucking mind-blowing experience! Sure, Soul Coughing’s sound probably seems kind of old hat to most people now, but I was 16 (which I remember was old at the time but is young now, at least in terms of music-exposure), I had no idea who these people were, it was a weird name, the album had a collage of a woman in an old-timey astronaut suit and a Ren-like weasely guy holding a pitchfork and a pipe, and it sounded like someone dropped their entire record collection in a blender, put some beats to it, and sang/rapped/spoken-worded over it. I guess it wasn’t long before I was in heaven, memorizing lines like “I could get lost in a lunch box/lie low in the mittens in the lost and found” and “gone savage for teenagers who area aesthetically pleasing/in other words/flyyyy” and every ridiculous one of “Sugar Free Jazz.” I eventually named my first email address after one of the songs, my computer monitor in college had “…if you were the Baltic Sea and I were a cup, uh huh…” scrolling across it for a lot of months.  Ruby Vroom lives on a lot of bases, from the bouncy, loose opening track “Is Chicago, Is Not Chicago” (The Soul Coughing Underground has for years had some “song explanations” by M. Doughty, one of the best of which is for this one.) to darker, full songs like “Blue-Eyed Devil,” to some pretty devestating sparse tracks. The best, for me, are “Screenwriter’s Blues,” “True Dreams of Witchita” (“I’ve seen your hand turn saintly on the radio dial/I’ve seen the airwaves/pull your eyes towards heaven…”) and, of course, “Down to This.”

3. Grant Lee Buffalo–Mighty Joe Moon
One of my favorite bands that no one else likes or ever mentions, it seems. I know Grant-Lee Phillips gets some recognition by my music-snob pals out in LA where he had (has?) deep roots at the club Largo, but that’s it. I think I’ve known one guy who ever heard of or liked them, and my (unrelated to GLB) recent attempts to contact him have drawn only silence. This is perhaps why my listening to the GLB collection Storm Hymnal a week or so ago was so depressing and enthralling. (I’ve never had their first and third albums, so tracks like “Fuzzy” and “Jupiter and Teardrop” are still really effective.) Mighty Joe Moon is really a great piece of “americana,” one that to me stands up there with albums by The Band and Neil Young. It starts with a searing guitar line, in a searing song about, well, the Branch Davidians in Waco (“Lone Star Song”). There are a couple other rockers on it, including “Sing Along,” a sort of cornucopia of man’s accomplishments that features one of my favorite stand-along lyrics of all time:

“Evel Knievel and the legacy of John Wayne
Gacy, Gacy…”

…then crashing into the chorus. They reference Tecumsah, the Cumberland Gap; there’s a whole song about Johnny Cash. But like I said, most of this came later for me. At first it was just the haunting, huge-sounding music, Phillips’ voice going from deep-pit hollows to eerie falsettos, the tracks bouncing back and forth between the guitar crunchers and restrained, sparer mid-tempo numbers. It’s definitely a sad, heavy album, and I’m sure I spent a little too much time with it going into college (“I’m bad at this thing, happiness/if you find it, share it with the rest of us”). But then again, it’s also got one of the sweetest songs I know of, “Honey Don’t Think,” about a feeling anyone who’s ever fallen for someone they just know they don’t deserve but get anyway has had.
So yeah. Good album.

4. Built to Spill–There’s Nothing Wrong With Love
Hmm. I could ramble, but instead et’s just say:
“In the Morning,” “Car,” cello, Doug Martsch’s voice, “Twin Falls,” “I’m all right, said the man to his wife,” guitar, guitar, guitar, “Big Dipper,” okay, every song on it and everything about it. This one’s actually on some of the professional Best of the 90s lists.

5. Pavement–Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain
Since the early 00’s, Brighten the Corners has pulled up alongside and tied Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain as the Pavement album for me. I’ll admit I was never the hardcore early-years Pavement guy; although I love Slanted and Enchanted, Pavement started with CR for me. Brighten the Corners is somehow a little more developed, I like the tempos, I love the lyrics. But this is a list of 90s albums, and to me nothing says 90s like Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain. (I’m also ashamed to admit I somehow completely missed the boat on Wowee Zowee, I remember Andy D having/playing it in my car on the way to school once, then Johnston made a tape of it for me, and…I dunno, maybe it got engulfed by Archers of Loaf roaring onto my radar? I didn’t buy a CD of it until last year, and I’ve still only listened to it two or three times…) I have a feeling nothing Malkmus or the rest of the Pavement boys makes for the rest of my life will top this album. I had at least two tapes of it, one CD that skips during the climax of “Cut Your Hair” now. Credit where credit is due: I think I’d heard “Cut Your Hair” on HFS and spent a month trying to remember the name of the band, then somehow I ended up with a CD that was given to my brother but he already had a copy of it, I think by his girlfriend, and he made me promise to thank her for it. I think I did (I remember knowing to look for her in the journalism room at school), but if not, thanks, Shannon. At any rate, I remember playing it everywhere, playing on a boombox in my grandfather’s old Dodge, playing it at home, singing it while running, etc. Now that I think about it, I guess I knew of Pavement before Built to Spill, because I remember looking forward to their set at Lollapalooza (in WV, where they walked off stage) but also “discovering” BtS there.
So yes, Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain is what everyone says it is (everything good, anyway). There might be a track or two I can take or leave if I’m just driving half an hour and know I gotta get to one of the last songs, but they’re all excellent one day or another (a few weeks ago I found myself thrilled to have “Hit the Plane Down” stuck in my head while walking around at work; that was probably a first). I have at least two excellent “Fillmore Jive” moments: one during the summer between high school and college, when my friend Dr. Ive and I drove my brother back down to Blacksburg, VA, where he was, with several college friends, to depart carless to the wilds of San Francisco and the rest of his life. She and I drove down one afternoon, dropped him off, and drove back the same night. I think I had something like 18 or 24 hours between shifts at Little Caesars; at 4 in the morning, under a cloudy moon, I stuck my head out the window as I blew over the bridge at Loch Raven Reservoir, singing “I need sleep…I need sleep…I need sleep, why won’t you? why won’t you let me?…” The other was a night in college, possibly on or near my birthday, when I got suddenly drunk and surreptitiously sick at the place of a friend of a friend (most likely due to a shot of old, nasty whiskey from his “Little Pisser” statue; it should also be said that these were the days when I was smoking filterless cigarettes and only had a tolerance for three beers, max). I somehow found a very unexpected copy of Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain that I proceeded to play, I think even skipping to the song I felt just like, “Fillmore Jive.”

Runners-up (also in keeping with my new [4/16] title for this blog that I’m too lazy to change, Top 5 90’s albums of the 90’s):

Soul Asylum–Grave Dancers Union
Beck–One Foot in the Grave
R.E.M.–Out of Time
Counting Crows–August and Everything After
Ben Folds Five–Whatever and Ever Amen
Lemonheads–It’s a Shame About Ray