prev | list | next
Tim Midgett's Chugchanga-L Poll 2000 Entry
here's what i sent to pazz and jop poll in village voice
-------------------------
Maybe I'm getting old--well, OK, I'm _definitely_ getting old--but for
whatever reason, little of the modern music I run across truly moves me. I
like to think it's a function of not working in a record store anymore and
only having AM in the car as much as anything else. Then again...all this
bleepy electronic shit. Kraftwerk may envelop me in coldness, but I put on
one of these computer CDs people send me, and I feel the airy embrace
of...nothing. What is this music about? Why does it exist? Who feels
compelled to make it, record it, put it out, listen to it? Is it still
popular? Was it ever? I think people just buy the t-shirts. I feel like
my dad must have felt when he'd hear Minutemen and Husker Du records
wafting from my bedroom.
Anyway, here are seven LPs that meant a lot to me in the last year, in the
order that they occurred to me:
Goatsnake, I (Man's Ruin, 1999)
Nina Nastasia, Dogs (Socialist)
Shellac, 1000 Hurts (Touch and Go)
Cobra Verde, Nightlife (Motel, 1999)
Joel R.L. Phelps, Blackbird (Pacifico, 1999)
Outkast, Stankonia (Arista)
Silkworm, Lifestyle (Touch and Go)
12 each, with extra point as the angels' share.
Goatsnake is a cache of dudes from Los Angeles. Their music has weight and
impact. The weight is moved and the impact is made with rapidity and grace
and a lack of the “endearing” slop that handicaps most average rock music.
Goatsnake's commitment to being a great and truly hard rock band must be
admired, for it is a commitment that few are able or willing to make. _I_
crushes its would-be competition and renders laughable the tags of lazy
critics ("stoner rock" chief among them). Haven't had a chance to absorb
2000's _Flower of Disease_ yet.
Nina Nastasia is a winning musician from Manhattan. Her debut is one of
five discrete albums she has already written. The marvelous, transparent
arrangements on _Dogs_ are unalterably wed to the songs, and the songs
themselves are so guileless and open that I want to talk back to them.
Don't do that. Why are you staying with that creep? In addition to being
a dope fiend, he isn't very nice. Sit up straight. Stop playing with your
hair. Everyone has to die some day. That was a beautiful song, just the
right length. You know, you have a very nice voice.
Three guys in Shellac. Each of them is indispensable. I have read a lot
of catty reviews of _1000 Hurts_, and all of them share a reluctance to
discuss the music that results when the album is put on a functioning
stereo system and played through speakers. Said music is usually brutal,
occasionally touching, often real funny, and worth playing a lot.
Cobra Verde are bent on returning some kind of glam whatzis to rock, as if
it ever left, but aesthetic concerns don't overwhelm all the great songs on
_Nightlife_, easily the band's finest record to date.
On _Blackbird_, Joel R.L. Phelps puts his powerful voice on cruise control,
where it has always been most effective, and the Downer Trio largely
forsakes its draggy tendencies as it knocks out nine songs as good as
anything JRLP has written in his long tenure in rock. Throw in a stunning
version of the Comsat Angels' "Lost Continent," and you have a flatly great
album, probably the best record on which Joel has ever been.
Outkast's _Stankonia_ is a hip-hop record to be loved as well as admired.
Its clear-eyed dissections of birth outta wedlock, unabashed love of "hos,"
and the disenfranchisement of black America (among other things) are witty
and learned, and the (actually played) music is egalitarian funk that
fondly recalls Sly and the Family Stone rather than sampling them. I like
its brains, I like its ass, I like its heart, and the double vinyl is
cheaper than the CD.
I'm voting for my own record because I've listened to it a hell of a lot,
and I love it. I know it's unseemly.
prev | list | next