In among all of the classic rock retreads of grunge that was raging at the time, Garbage seemed like a breath of brisk air and they hit immediately. It helped they debuted with a trove of radio-friendly ware. And despite the overly unctuous hunger for the slicing and dicing of ProTools, these production veterans – unlike many of their studio tanned peers – discovered more of its potential: Note the guitar break on Only Happy When It Rains.
Also interesting to note that Manson had never written a song before joining up. Clearly, she was a natural.
275) XTC, Travels in Nihilon (1980): Harder and longer than just about anything else in their extensive catalog, this song nearly strays into jam band territory. Composer and singer Andy Partridge often reveals himself as a passion advocate in the singing of his songs, but here he’s shown in rare power. The guitars worm in and out of power chords, funky riffing and the droning provides muscle to the tension. Nihilon adds another facet to the already well cut and polished jewel that was XTC.
279) Pointer Sisters, Going Down Slowly (1975): For those not alive at the time, The Pointer Sisters would become mega-sellers in the 80s (13 Top 20 sellers). By that time they’d mostly wiped clean most of their early soul-shouting edge to improve their market prospects, though stains of the church remained. Some of their early vocal rave ups – Yes We Can Can, How Long (Betcha’ Got a Chick on the Side) – are now classic including this Allen Toussaint roundalay.
280) Bulgarian State Television Female Choir, Kalimankou Denkou (The Evening Gathering) (1990): Sometimes, cultures across seas and continents can discover joy in similar sounds. Strains of Middle Eastern, East Asian, and some Celtic sounds seem to have been birthed from a similar umbilical cord, united across time and space. I find the strains here remind me of North American indigenous chants. There’s also a soul-scraping quality that communicates beyond language, it’s more like the code of experience—not a word but a sound in a voice, an emotional salt. Language may be superfluous to the ancient vibe they’re elevating here. Just under three minutes in you can even hear some Westside Story dance choruses.
282) Tanya Tagaq, Aorta (2016): To distill the pain and trauma of a people in song, you can do no better than Tagaq. Her voice is a bleeding flag to be planted into the center of our skull.
283) The Fall, Theme from Sparta F.C. (2003): Screams that siphon the flames of every trauma you’ve endured, words twisted to become brilliant effigies of every revulsion and rage that was visited upon you – those would both be wonderful ways of squeezing raw emotion into the kinetic earspace and many of the songs I’ve enthused about here in Music That Matters over the years. But there’s something extraordinary about Mark E. Smith’s utter disdain for melody and the acid-drenched spew of his upper-class insolence (whether he was ever upper class, I don’t know, but he’s got the arrogant disdain down like a pedophile princeling) delivered whenever that voice is paired with whatever version of The Fall is behind him. The revolving door of Fall bandmembers must be like the staff of a fast food franchise. (The working conditions must be insufferable.) Too bad for those itinerant kids. For us, Sparta FC is the dividend of their pain and discomfort.
Bonus! George Clinton, Bullet Proof (1985): Here, Clinton captures some of the jagged juice missing from P-Funk in the late 70s-80s. Forget about the sound’s datedness, the passé synths, the MIDI beat. When it’s alloyed with such an impervious melody, vocal interplay, and hard energy riveted to gated drum thunder like this, it’s a joint as sharp and timeless as anything on this list.
275) XTC, Travels in Nihilon (1980): Harder and longer than just about anything else in their extensive catalog, this song nearly strays into jam band territory. Composer and singer Andy Partridge often reveals himself as a passion advocate in the singing of his songs, but here he’s shown in rare power. The guitars worm in and out of power chords, funky riffing and the droning provides muscle to the tension. Nihilon adds another facet to the already well cut and polished jewel that was XTC.
276) The Decemberists, The Wanting Comes in Waves (Repaid) (2009): The Decemberists had already proven themselves able modern advocates for the legacy of murder ballads. Songwriter Colin Meloy’s blend of gothic folk, Grand Guignol pathos, and crunchy guitars is given a rocket burst with the muscly guest vocal of My Brightest Diamond’s Shara Nova. Altogether, the mix enforces this Repaid like a loan shark’s debt. Nova’s final breath of repaid at the close pushes the song into an entirely other dimension. This song demands to played on a loop.
277) Thin White Rope, On the Floe (1990): Rootsy faux Nashville riffs and a hard trucker groove matched with a gravelly voice that’s worn like an 80-year-old long shoreman’s tattoo. It all begins with filigreed delicacy and transitions into a full bats-on-oil-drums groove when the chorus kicks it up. The final out-chorus organ sweeps add a deathly ethereality as the song disappears into a cold horizon.
277) Thin White Rope, On the Floe (1990): Rootsy faux Nashville riffs and a hard trucker groove matched with a gravelly voice that’s worn like an 80-year-old long shoreman’s tattoo. It all begins with filigreed delicacy and transitions into a full bats-on-oil-drums groove when the chorus kicks it up. The final out-chorus organ sweeps add a deathly ethereality as the song disappears into a cold horizon.
If you don't know, a floe is a sheet of floating ice. In this, broken-hearted losers left to wither on a floe like elderly Inuits of legend going to meet their gods. (And it’s not entirely legend.) In the barfly version, the ice floats in a double bourbon with a Budweiser back.
There is a song so hard to steerI thought it would capsize in bitterness and fearI look to the sky when I'm tired of the seaConstellations are moving, they're useless to meAnd it seems we've been stranded on the floeWatching distant shorelines as we go
278) Peeping Tom (featuring Mike Patton & Massive Attack), Kill the DJ (2006): It’s the opinion of the team at Jelly Roll that Mike Patton has collaborated on more vitally interesting work than just about anybody over the last 35 years. His deep résumé combines both the avant garde (Mr. Bungle, John Zorn, Fred Frith) and the more mainstream-ish (Faith No More, Björk, Fantômas) and Peeping Tom fits somewhere to the right of middle. The album was a one-time project taking six years to create and Wiki says this about it: [...Peeping Tom]...is a tribute to Michael Powell's 1960 film Peeping Tom. The album was created by swapping song files through the mail with collaborators such as Norah Jones, Kool Keith, and Massive Attack, among others.
This joint’s got more than enough mood for the darkest game soundtrack, dynamics enough for serious head bang on a movie chase scene, and spunk enough to shake dance floor bound asses —a total package.
279) Pointer Sisters, Going Down Slowly (1975): For those not alive at the time, The Pointer Sisters would become mega-sellers in the 80s (13 Top 20 sellers). By that time they’d mostly wiped clean most of their early soul-shouting edge to improve their market prospects, though stains of the church remained. Some of their early vocal rave ups – Yes We Can Can, How Long (Betcha’ Got a Chick on the Side) – are now classic including this Allen Toussaint roundalay.
In this singing family slugfest, they brought the brass knuckles. I can’t think of another vocal group, family or otherwise, that ever went this hard and long.
280) Bulgarian State Television Female Choir, Kalimankou Denkou (The Evening Gathering) (1990): Sometimes, cultures across seas and continents can discover joy in similar sounds. Strains of Middle Eastern, East Asian, and some Celtic sounds seem to have been birthed from a similar umbilical cord, united across time and space. I find the strains here remind me of North American indigenous chants. There’s also a soul-scraping quality that communicates beyond language, it’s more like the code of experience—not a word but a sound in a voice, an emotional salt. Language may be superfluous to the ancient vibe they’re elevating here. Just under three minutes in you can even hear some Westside Story dance choruses.
And yet it’s also completely it’s own thing, which the best music, not matter where or when, always is.
281) Captain Beefheart and His Magic Band, Bat Chain Puller (1978): This is a sound found nowhere else on the planet: Nightmare rhythms of lurching mummies and the anthraxed footfalls of death-spiraling animals mixed with nursery rhyme bursts of melody, the blues, the anxious vibe of horror movies, souls leaping from bodies, and all capped with the voice of Howling Wolf intermittantly having psychotic episodes and an announcer reading ad copy. Not a bad way to spend 5 minutes and 27 seconds on a sleepless pre-dawn Saturday morning.
From the French Chorus television show ca. 1980:
281) Captain Beefheart and His Magic Band, Bat Chain Puller (1978): This is a sound found nowhere else on the planet: Nightmare rhythms of lurching mummies and the anthraxed footfalls of death-spiraling animals mixed with nursery rhyme bursts of melody, the blues, the anxious vibe of horror movies, souls leaping from bodies, and all capped with the voice of Howling Wolf intermittantly having psychotic episodes and an announcer reading ad copy. Not a bad way to spend 5 minutes and 27 seconds on a sleepless pre-dawn Saturday morning.
From the French Chorus television show ca. 1980:
282) Tanya Tagaq, Aorta (2016): To distill the pain and trauma of a people in song, you can do no better than Tagaq. Her voice is a bleeding flag to be planted into the center of our skull.
283) The Fall, Theme from Sparta F.C. (2003): Screams that siphon the flames of every trauma you’ve endured, words twisted to become brilliant effigies of every revulsion and rage that was visited upon you – those would both be wonderful ways of squeezing raw emotion into the kinetic earspace and many of the songs I’ve enthused about here in Music That Matters over the years. But there’s something extraordinary about Mark E. Smith’s utter disdain for melody and the acid-drenched spew of his upper-class insolence (whether he was ever upper class, I don’t know, but he’s got the arrogant disdain down like a pedophile princeling) delivered whenever that voice is paired with whatever version of The Fall is behind him. The revolving door of Fall bandmembers must be like the staff of a fast food franchise. (The working conditions must be insufferable.) Too bad for those itinerant kids. For us, Sparta FC is the dividend of their pain and discomfort.
Bonus! George Clinton, Bullet Proof (1985): Here, Clinton captures some of the jagged juice missing from P-Funk in the late 70s-80s. Forget about the sound’s datedness, the passé synths, the MIDI beat. When it’s alloyed with such an impervious melody, vocal interplay, and hard energy riveted to gated drum thunder like this, it’s a joint as sharp and timeless as anything on this list.
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