923. Giant Sand - Chore of Enchantment (2000)

Track Listing

1. Overture
2. Dusted (For The Millennium)
3. Punishing Sun
4. Extra Wide
5. 1972
6. Temptation Of Egg
7. Raw
8. Wolfy
9. Shiver
10. Dirty From The Rain
11. Astonished (In Memphis)
12. No Reply
13. Satellite
14. Bottom Line Man
15. Way To The End
16. Shrine

Review

This is a pretty nifty album. Clearly drawing inspiration from loads of other stuff but managing to keep their own individual identity. Drawing from some pretty great stuff, from Lou Reed and Neil Young to Thelonious Monk and loads of crap in between.

Sometimes people who draw inspiration from other stuff might be derivative, but when this is done well, mixing stuff in a new and original way you get an album like this. That's the difference between being derivative and having discerning taste in music.

So this is a pretty fun album, the music is alternately chilled and hard, with great lyrics and great playing. A really fun album to listen to, that never gets boring or old. Highly recommended.

Track Highlights

1. Shiver
2. Temptation of Egg
3. Satellite
4. (Well) Dusted (For The Millennium)

Final Grade

9/10

Trivia

From Wikipedia:

Giant Sand is an American rock band, based in Tucson, Arizona, USA. The name is shortened from the original Giant Sandworms, a reference to the creatures in the Dune books. Overseen by singer-songwriter Howe Gelb, its membership has shifted over the years—at times with each album. For a long while the band's rhythm section consisted of John Convertino and Joey Burns who left the band when their side project, Calexico, grew more widely known than Giant Sand and, as Gelb characterized it in 2004, Calexico "began to work against Giant Sand and eat away at what the band was".

Shiver:

922. Goldfrapp - Felt Mountain (2000)

Track Listing

1. Lovely Head
2. Paper Bag
3. Human
4. Pilots
5. Deer Stop
6. Felt Mountain
7. Oompah Radar
8. Utopia
9. Horse Tears

Review

I first saw Goldfrapp live before this album came out. They were supporting Moby in his Play tour at the Manchester Apollo. Next week the album came out and a friend of mine immediately got it, we spent that night partaking in illegal drugs and listening to this.

Suffice it to say that we weren't listening to Moby's Play. This album was something totally new and that you only had to hear once to know there was something unique here. A few weeks later I saw Goldfrapp again in a tiny room at the Manchester University students union, front row in a room that fit some 50 people.

The time I saw them after that it was already in the Black Cherry phase, a great but vastly inferior album... also in the front row for that one, where Alison Goldfrapp made a very interesting dance with a portable theramin on her crotch in front of my face while covering "Yes Sir, I Can Boogie". It was special. From then on I lost interest in them, this was their great album. Cinematic, weird, beautiful and deranged, a work of art which is hard not to love.

Track Highlights

1. Lovely Head
2. Pilots
3. Deer Stop
4. Horse Tears

Final Grade

10/10

Trivia

From Wikipedia:

"Lovely Head", Felt Mountain's opening track, features high lonesome whistling and heavily processed vocals. The song was described as influenced by Shirley Bassey and released as the album's lead single. The second track, "Paper Bag", is about being obsessed with someone and not being able to have them. It is followed by the third single "Human", a track with a mambo-style beat. The fourth song, "Pilots", which describes travelers floating in the atmosphere above the earth, was inspired by John Barry's James Bond theme songs. In the United Kingdom, a remixed version of the song was released as a single and charted within the top seventy-five.

The ballad "Deer Stop" features childlike vocals and sexually suggestive lyrics. The title track was influenced by Goldfrapp's "idea of a wolf being whipped in this little Tudor house overlooking a snowy landscape". "Oompa Radar", the seventh track, was inspired by Roman Polanski's film Cul-de-Sac. The cabaret influenced song uses a flugelhorn and a cuckoo clock to switch between tempos. "Utopia" was released as the album's second single. The album closes with "Horse Tears", a minimalist piano ballad with filtered vocals.

Lovely Head:

921. Eminem - The Marshall Mathers LP (2000)

Track Listing

1. Public Service Announcement 2000
2. Kill You
3. Stan
4. Paul
5. Who Knew
6. Steve Berman
7. The Way I Am
8. The Real Slim Shady
9. Remember Me?
10. I'm Back
11. Marshall Mathers
12. Ken Kaniff
13. Drug Ballad
14. Amityville
15. Bitch Please II
16. Kim
17. Under The Influence
18. Criminal

Review

Ok. This album is not only substantially better than the previous one, but it helps put the previous one in context. Eminem does some interesting things here, his use of three different characters, the insane murderous Eminem, the insane joker Slim Shady and the "constructed" author Marshall Mathers.

The Slim Shady tracks are almost immediately ignorable. The Eminem ones are often disturbing, but it is in Marhsall Mathers that more interesting things happen. Eminem reveals himself as revolted against the hypocrisy of middle-America's attitudes to music and as a raging homophobic, but also as a humane songwriter.

He is still thoroughly annoying, and this isn't an album that I'd like to listen to again, but the way in which he re-contextualises '97 Bonnie and Clyde in Stan and Kim as well as re-contextualising Stan itself in Who Knew makes the album a less superficial experience that it might at first look. Eminem is a "shock" singer, his whole point is to cause a reaction and in that he is very successful, even if the reaction is to turn off the radio.

Track Highlights

1. Stan
2. Kim
3. The Way I Am
4. Who Knew?

Final Grade

8/10

Trivia

From Wikipedia:

In 2002, French jazz pianist Jacques Loussier filed a $10 million lawsuit against Eminem, claiming the beat for "Kill You" was stolen from his song "Pulsion". He unsuccessfully demanded that all sales of the album be halted and any remaining copies destroyed.

Stan:

920. Red Snapper - Our Aim Is To Satisfy (2000)

Track Listing

1. Keeping Pigs Together
2. Some Kind Of Kink
3. Shellback
4. Don't Go Nowhere
5. The Rake
6. The Rough And The Quick
7. Bussing
8. I Stole Your Car
9. Alaska Street
10. Belladonna
11. They're Hanging Me Tonight


Review

Another interesting but not amazing album on the list, the last in a sequence of three. Red Snapper is a kind of Jazzy Electronica which never really took off and seems to have by now died down somewhat.

The album bears affinities not only to Jazz but to R&B and club music generally. It is, however, a quite dark and brooding album with some erotica thrown into the mix. In fact the last three albums all kind of blend into each other.

This happens because even if Common and Red Snapper are completely different, Mike Ladd in the middle there creates the bridge. Common's is a hip-hop album, Ladd's a hip-hop/dark electronica album and Red Snapper goes further into the dark electronica, making this an interesting experience. So it is only fair that it gets exactly the same grade as the previous two.

Track Highlights

1. The Rough and the Quick
2. Keeping Pigs Together
3. Belladonna
4. They're Hanging Me Tonight

Final Grade

8/10

Trivia

From Wikipedia:

Red Snapper are a British instrumental band founded in London in 1993 by Ali Friend (double bass), Richard Thair (drums), and David Ayers (guitar).[1] The three core members are also joined by various guest musicians and vocalists on different records. According to music journalist, Jason Ankeny (Allmusic) "the British acid jazz trio were notable for their pioneering synthesis of acoustic instruments and electronic textures".

Belladonna, sorry for the tacky video:

919. Mike Ladd - Welcome to the Afterfuture (2000)

Track Listing

1. 5000 miles west of the future
2. Airwave hysteria
3. Planet 10
4. Takes no more than 41
5. Bladerunners
6. No.1 street
7. To the moon's contractor
8. I feel like 100 dollars
9. The Animist
10. Red eye to jupiter (starship nigga)
11. Welcome to the afterfuture
12. Wipe out on the wave of armageddon
13. Feb.4'99 (for all those killed by cops)


Review

Slightly more interesting than yesterday's album is Mike Ladd's Welcome to the Afterfuture. Peppered with cultured references this is a good kind of alternative hip-hop. Unfortunately there isn't much joy to it.

Full of interesting dark electronica and jazzy moods the album works pretty well but it just doesn't "pop" as much as it should. So it is a bit so-so with me. I can, however, recognise a bunch of qualities to it.

So yeah a good album full of interesting stuff that just didn't works for me. I can't quite put my finger on why not but it just didn't. Sometimes it happens. Some of the tracks here are, however, pretty nifty, give it a go.

Track Highlights

1. 5000 Miles West of the Future
2. Planet 10
3. To The Moon's Contractor
4. Airwave Hysteria

Final Grade

8/10

Trivia

From Wikipedia:

Mike Ladd is a hip-hop MC and producer. As an MC, he practices spoken-word and is known for his poetic lyrics. As a producer, he is known as the owner of the Likemadd label.

Airwave Hysteria: