Norman Cohn, Nik Cohn, Revelations, Goya, Baudelaire, and Eric B & Rakim - the spirit of golden age Melody Maker persisted, yea even unto the late '90s.
Pricey here makes me want to give P-MT a relisten, having never managed to get into it at the time.
Rather like my Van Morrison opinion (Astral Weeks and that's it), I'm of the "Maxinquaye is all you need, all that's worth bothering with", viewpoint.
Well, apart from "Makes Me Wanna Die".
Nearly God, Starving Souls, P-MT, Angels with Dirty Faces, Juxtapose - it's one of the most anticlimactic arcs of an artist after a mind-blowing and epoch-defining debut.
Trying to think of similar inexplicable droops....
Well, there's Goldie.
Mark Fisher - being much more auteur-loyal despite his avowed defacialisation/impersonal-machinic-processes/anonymous collectives stance - rated both Saturnz Return / "Mother", and Tricky's post-Max albums. And in fact repped for Tricky around the mid-2000s albums too - Knowle West Boy.
I'm much more inconstant and fickle, I fear... I tend to move on rather rapidly.
On the subject of pre-millennium tension.... one thing that I puzzle over a bit, when looking back to this period, is the extent to which I and others would be blathering on about apocalyptic dread, darkness, doom 'n' gloom. Like this piece on jump-up / techstep jungle.
But compared to now - indeed compared most of the 21st Century bar the first year or so of the Noughties.... 96-97 seems like a relatively calm, stable sort of period. Prosperous too, right? The Tories were still clinging to power but you knew they were doomed, it was only a matter of time. Republicans were making mischief but Clinton was chugging along.
A complacent time, a stasis time, yes... but where did all the premonitory "Hell is Round the Corner" stuff come from? (I know in my personal life I was incredibly happy... work was going well too).
One final thought about this moment - 1996 (which Nothingelseon is trudging through at the moment - that's where I got the Simon Price review) is just about the most dead-arsed year in UK music. Looking at the covers of MM, it's an endless procession of post-peak Britpop acts - Cast, Bluetones, Ash, 60 ft Dolls. Ladrock's reign interrupted only by the unexpected appearance of DJ Shadow on the front cover.
Mind you, I seem to remember being excited and happy with music this year and into the next.
But then again, I had barely any contact with alternative / indie by this point. I had stopped writing for MM that summer - not on purpose really, it just seemed to happen - and I got out of the habit of picking up the paper as an import (living in NYC as I was). I was just totally immersed in dance music, which was ticking along excitingly on multiple fronts simultaneously. That and the mainstream rap / R&B was leaving the guitar-y stuff for dust.
"one of the most anticlimactic arcs of an artist after a mind-blowing and epoch-defining debut.
ReplyDeleteTrying to thing of similar inexplicable droops"
Psychocandy? (Although its not really clear where the Mary Chain could go after their debut) ...and while it's their second album, PL's post -"Metal Box" career is inessential to put it mildly.
Still neither of them have been chugging away in the same wheelhouse for as long as Tricky. Indeed, PMT stands as a useful microcosm of his career - front ended with gripping, innovative tracks, before devolving into endless semi-random stoned muttering over irregular, lo-fi beats....the concept of entropy was invoked a lot in reviews of this album.
Nevertheless, "Maxinquaye" remains a masterpiece- the best album of the 90s IMO.
Oh yes I would agreed about Maxinquaye as the best album of the '90s.
DeleteOr at least it's right up in a tight cluster - like maybe Aphex Twin's two Selected Ambients... a few other possibles
Agreed re J&MC... 'Sidewalking' was exciting but that's about it from them. Automatic is dispiritingly ordinary sounding.
Ouch! (Vis-a-vis PiL, although mostly true, I'm afraid.) I'm now waiting for Simon to come to defense of at least Flowers, if not of some of Wobble's post-PiL output.
DeleteI do love a couple of tunes on Flowers, the title track and "Under the House" but generally it's a bit of an underdone mess. The Ian Penman review of it nails it I think - combination of over-confidence, laziness, hubris - "anything we do will be interesting, so here's... anything". Also having interviewed Keith Levene, it was clear that he didn't know how to proceed in the absence of Wobble - the crucial X factor, the yeast in the bread.
Delete1994-95 was such a productive time that I think some of that momentum sustained the scene of 1996, but only just.
ReplyDeleteIn a similar way, the parade of magnificence in 1980-81-82 gave some benefit to the otherwise ordinary 1983.
I actually heard an old song by The Bluetones, the other day, and found it charming. Without the weight of expectation it would have had to bear at the time, it seemed perfectly fine on it's own modest level.
"one of the most anticlimactic arcs of an artist after a mind-blowing and epoch-defining debut.
ReplyDeleteTrying to think of similar inexplicable droops"
I would say you could make this argument for Nas. "Illmatic" is widely regarded as one of the best hip hop albums of all time. Everything post- "Illmatic" has been meh.
"Illmatic" is a really good example; I'd chuck in De La Soul's "3 Feet High & Rising" as well. Also the Strokes' debut.
DeleteThe rest of their career was mercifully brief but I *have* to mention the anti- climax of the Stone Roses second album.This dovetails with Simon's discussion of 1996, as the Roses split up after their catastrophic performance at Reading '96...has there ever been a comeback so completely star-cross'd from the get-go?
Yes, Nas is a great example. Although to be honest I don't have the initial 'wow' reaction to Illmatic. Can't quite hear it.
Delete'Meh' is what Jay-Z says in the Nas-dissing first half of "The Takeover", right? Or some kind of similar dismissive grunt-like sound.
It's the second half of "The Takeove" and the bit I'm thinking of is:
Delete"Four albums in ten years nigga? I can divide / That's one every let's say two / two of them shits was doo /
One was nah / the other was "Illmatic"/
That's a one hot album every ten-year average"
I'm not sure I would transcribe the sound he makes as "nah". It's more like some weird smeared sneer sound in between "blah" and "meh" .
It is quite the devastating put down:
"Had a spark when you started, but now you're just garbage
Fell from top ten to not mentioned at all"
Illmatic is #39 in the Apple 100 Best Albums List.
DeleteJay-Z The Blueprint, ie. the record with "The Takeover" on, is #!3
I agree with the opinion Maxinquaye is all you need to listen to. It's so singular and kinda perfect as is. Nothing else by Tricky comes close.
ReplyDeleteBut as for Van Morrison, well, Veedon Fleece is up there with Astral Weeks. Where he gets into the mystic again. You Don't Pull No Punches, But You Don't Push the River, I would suggest, as good as anything on Astral Weeks.
Saint Dominic's Preview is another album that's great in its own right and features two of Van Morrison's best compositions in Listen to The Lion and Almost Independence Day.
I think there's a good songs and good singing, but on the post-Astral albums what's missing is the glorious, so-unusual/ so-original sound. The actual musical backing on that run of early '70s album seems ordinaire in comparison.
DeleteI don't know. For me, there's only a small drop in quality on the rest of Tricky's albums for Island. He didn't make a second masterpiece, but he didn't really lose the plot till he left Island.
ReplyDeleteThe backlash against IT WAS WRITTEN has faded; by now, its reputation's almost as strong as ILLMATIC. It's much more pop/gangsta-oriented, but I don't think it's any worse for it. Nas has gone through many ups and downs, but he has a body of work as solid as any 50-year-old rapper who's been recording steadily.
Some early 80s Van Morrison is actually pretty good. Tracks like "Dweller on the Threshold" & "Wonderful Remark" used in Scorsese's The King of Comedy are stand outs for me personally (and songs I'd rather listen to instead of "Brown Eyed Girl" or "Into the Mystic" frankly.
ReplyDeleteAlso, Van's stint w/ Them is great and represented the harder, darker edge of the British Invasion era (along w/ The Animals, Pretty Things). Them's cover of Dylan's It's All Over Now, Baby Blue is sublime and far better than Dylan's original (usually the case with artists who cover him in my book). And part of the reason it's great is Van's voice on that cut.
ReplyDeleteI sort of followed Tricky from his earliest appearance with Massive Attack, on the brilliant Daydreaming.
ReplyDeleteHaving followed Massive Attack from their predecessor releases as The Wild Bunch, alongside associates such as Smith and Mighty.
I might say that Tricky is similar to Van Morrison, inasmuch being someone brilliant but inconsistent.
As I thought he lapsed already with the Black Steel cover. I didn't see the point of rendering peak Public Enemy as indie, however distinctively.
His live rendering of Eric B and Rakim's Lyrics of Fury, with ambersunshower rapping, is far better, and is exemplary of how to cover such classics that way.
The only music I would compare that to, is Dean Blunt's outstanding Black Metal album(s), the first of which is the subject of one of my only two reviews to date on Amazon.
Nas and Jay-Z are from a period when I'd lost interest in hip hop, apart from a select minority, and as much as I became more engaged again, I've never understood the enthusiasm for either of them.
However, I've always thought that De La Soul's peak included De La Soul is Dead, as I it was brilliant the way that having established a certain aesthetic, which was in danger of becoming an albatross, however lucrative, they trashed it in the best way possible, with an album that was as bleak in parts, as the debut was upbeat.
Alas, after that, it was difficult for them to become anything better than an intermittently interesting group alongside variable others.
I've commented on the bafflingly overrated, derivative likes of J&MC, in a comment on the Steve Albini tribute post, but it's rather fitting that such a ridiculous character as Bobby Gillespie started off with that band.
Although I would certainly rate Primal Scream higher than J&MC, it's only because they, or some of their producers, such as the late, great Weatherall, have at least engaged more with some of the music around in their own time.
Notwithstanding, Flowered Up's Weekender did in twelve minutes or so, what Screamadelica took nearly ten times as long to do.
Plus, given the testimony of Martin Duffy's son at his inquest, and similar remarks by the late, great Denise Johnson, being Gillespie's band-'mate' is not recommended, especially if you're musically far better than the chancer he is.
Addendum:
ReplyDeleteNot that 3 Feet High & Rising is without light and shade, for instance, the narrator in I Can Do Anything is on crack.
Addenda:
ReplyDeleteThere are some good Tricky-related documentaries around; at least two about the prehistory of Massive Attack, with one featuring the late Mark Stewart of The Pop Group, and one about Tricky, which I think was made whilst he was making the second album.
The last includes his returning to his senior school, and music lessons there.
It was shown on Channel 4, and subsequently released on dvd.
Bristol is ripe for more documentaries, such as about Adrian Sherwood and the On-U Sound System, and the association of groups including Flying Saucer Attack, Movietone (who I mentioned in a comment on the aforementioned Steve Albini tribute post) et al.
As per those previous comments, I'm not from Bristol myself, but Birmingham, which is still more ripe with music documentary material.