Wednesday!
Still stuck in 1992.
There were a handful of albums that came out that year that were good enough to keep coming back to every few years or so and a smaller handful of those that were so strong and so rich that you’d find yourself finding new tidbits and gems within songs that you’d heard the last time you kept the tape in constant rotation in the car.
Faith No More’s Angel Dust is the album that’s currently occupying that place in my brain.
An amazing album, start to finish. No filler. Every song pushing limits and refusing to rest on the laurels given by the band’s previous mega-selling “The Real Thing” (you’ve heard their song “Epic” a billion times) and they wanted to play with a lot of fresh ideas. For example, the album used a heck of a lot of samples. Like, a lot a lot. It’s like they listened to The Beastie Boys’ “Paul’s Boutique” and said “We should do that with hard rock…” and they went on to see what was possible.
The album opened with the doubly percussive punch of Land of Sunshine and Caffeine and wandered through some seriously weird territory in “Crack Hitler”, got seriously back to basics with “Kindergarten”, and anticipated Gwen Stefani’s “Hollaback Girl” by about a dozen years with “Be Aggressive”.
The song I keep going back to, though, is one that you probably remember if you watched MTV at all that year. “A Small Victory”.
Absolutely brilliant, even today.
So… what are you listening to?
I’ve been thinking about this lately. I don’t think The Album (capitalized) survived much beyond 1992, for a few reasons, the most prominent of which was Napster. The last rock album was probably Jagged Little Pill. I can’t imagine we’ll ever see them return.Report
Love Solfege has a few decent albums.
If you’re going to do an entire rockopera, you pretty much need the full album.
(The Note of Satanism stands out, in particular)Report
I kinda saw “Chinese Democracy” as The Last Rock Album.
Pity that it was such a hot mess.Report
Oh, I got it. American Idiot, 2004. I don’t think much of the album, but it’s got to be the one.Report
While Napster had something to do with it, I think that CDs gave oceans of time to work with also contributed. (Or extra long tapes, for that matter… you could put The Wall on one tape instead of two vinyl records.)
Moving from Vinyl to tapes/CDs was the original 140 characters to 280.
Sure, some people worked magic… but most of them just had room that they didn’t know what to do with.Report
It actually came out in ’93, but Exile in Guyville. Sounds as fresh today as when released.Report
That album merits a series.Report
New Miserable Experience, of course, but that pretty much goes without saying.
But my nomination for the best 1992 album you’ve never heard is Confession for Exist, the sixth and final studio album from Japan’s greatest rock star, Yutaka Ozaki. Unfortunately, you won’t hear it today, either, since it’s not available on US streaming services, and Sony has done a pretty good job of scrubbing it from YouTube. They left up his live performances, but since Confession was released posthumously, he never performed any of those songs live.
So…retrospective! Ozaki’s breakout hit, released in 1983, was “A Night at 15.” Thematically, it’s what “Bat out of Hell” might have been if Jim Steinman and Meat Loaf had been Japanese. Young man flees a dystopia, riding to freedom on a stolen motorcycle, except instead of a crime-ridden hellhole, it’s the rigidly conformist Japanese school system.
His two biggest hits in Japan, “I Love You” and “Oh My Little Girl,” also came from his debut album. They’re good enough for what they are, and you can find them easily on YouTube if you want, but they’re far from his best work in my opinion, so I’m not wasting links.
My favorite track from his second album, 1985’s Tropic of Graduation, is “Shelly,” is not so much the love song you might guess from the title as a soliloquy about self-doubt and struggle for success.
His third album, Through the Broken Door, also released in 1985. It’s a solid album overall, but doesn’t have many tracks that stand out as especially great. My personal favorite is Forget-Me-Not, but the Springsteenesque “Rules of the Road” (epilepsy warning!) is quite good, too.
I’m not a huge fan of his fourth album, Roadside Trees. Too many of the tracks on that album were either straight ballads or relentless hard rock, and Ozaki was at his best wandering the border between the two, as in “Eternal Heart,” arguably the best song from his two-disc fifth album, Birth (1990). “Rosanna” was another solid contender.
But it was his swan song, the 1992 Confession for Exist that was his real magnum opus. Again, though, I got nothin’ to link to.Report
@brandon-berg Wow. I’m surprised by how much I can enjoy a musician in this style when I have no idea what he’s saying.
Thanks for the links.Report
Celtic Frost released Parched with Thirst in ’92, a career retrospective with a few unreleased songs (which kick ass). It would have been a masterpiece by any other band, but it seemed kind of weak coming out after Vanity/Nemesis.
Two songs that I played with every band I’ve ever been with: “Falling in Love” by the Scorpions, and “Heading Out to the Highway” by Judas Priest. We may or may not have played them live, but they were staples in the rehearsals. I listen to that stuff, and think it sounds better a bit faster, down-tuned, and with more overdrive. But it feels good to walk back, be able to point, and say, “This is where the fire started.”
Listening to a few select cuts from Queen Live Killers over the most recent days. “Let Me Entertain You” is much better live, as is “Brighton Rock,” et al.
Some old Deep Purple stuff, the Gillan years.Report