China: 20 Years of The Dismemberment Plan Is Terrified

The Dismemberment Plan – The Dismemberment Plan Is Terrified

Released March 17th, 1997 on DeSoto Records

The Dismemberment Plan are the perfect band to dance like no one’s watching to. Hell, that’s pretty much how they played music. With a couple of exceptions, the songs on The Dismemberment Plan Is Terrified are either played with abandon – nearly random guitar squiggles, songs that explode out in every direction at once, and then suddenly veer off in another direction – or played as moody proto-indie songs that come out as confessions. Occasionally, as on “The Ice Of Boston” (still the best New Year’s song out there), they’re both. In an interview with Stylus singer Travis Morrison described it as “the most dedicated to hip-hop record we have.” I feel like this is sort of what Christgau was saying when he said that The Dismemberment Plan Is Terrified sounded “sort of the way Primus might if Primus enjoyed a normal sex life.” It’s an album that writhes spastically in odd directions but is still completely relatable, as though you just discovered that your accountant was in a noise rock band. While it was eclipsed by it’s followup, the sublime Emergency & I, it’s a recommended listen for anyone into noise rock, or post-hardcore, or inventive post-punk in general.

China: 20 Years of The Boatman’s Call

Nick Cave And The Bad Seeds – The Boatman’s Call

Released March 3rd, 1997 on Mute Records

BestEverAlbums: #387

Nick Cave is easily one of the most enduring artists in the history of rock ‘n’ roll. In the 1980s he staked his name on crawling, disturbing post-punk that encapsulated the violence and Biblical darkness of a mythologized American South (this despite growing up in Australia and basing himself out of England). From 1994’s Let Love In onward, he tempered the abrasive potentials of his songs with a renewed focus on texture, including piano and gentler tempos. Despite this, both it and 1996’s classic Murder Ballads reveled in the darkness, spiking moody atmospheres with moments of bone-chilling terror and loud musical moments. The Boatman’s Call, then, is an anomaly in his catalog. Everything before and after is shot through with darkness, full of revenge, murder, and sinners in the hands of an angry God. While 2001’s …And No More Shall We Part continued on with the exploration of gentler tones, The Boatman’s Call is also a musing exploration of spirituality and love.

“I’ve felt you coming girl, as you drew near,” he sings on “Are You The One That I’ve Been Waiting For?”, “I knew you’d find me, cause I longed you here.” This is a somewhat atypical Nick Cave lyric. Also atypical is “Just like a bird that sings up the sun / In a dawn so very dark / such is my faith for you,” the opening line from “There Is A Kingdom”, a song that feels as New Testament as Cave’s other work is Old Testament. “West Country Girl”, “Black Hair”, and “Into My Arms” are all about PJ Harvey, whom Cave dated briefly in the middle of the Nineties. “Into My Arms” was also performed at Michael Hutchence’s funeral (after Cave requested the cameras be shut off, so don’t go looking for footage). It’s also the wedding song of my wife and I; it was originally going to be “Have I Told You Lately” before we remembered that latter-day Rod Stewart sucks.

That said, there are a couple of songs on The Boatman’s Call which can be considered more standard fare for Nick Cave. “People Ain’t No Good” walks that careful line between love and death that is familiar for Cave fans (and also found it’s way into Shrek 2 somehow); “Lime Tree Arbour” straddles that same line, although in that case it’s love protecting Cave from death rather than the other way around. “Idiot Prayer” is also about dying, although there’s a firm sense of fatality that accompanies the line “If you’re in Hell, then what can I say / You probably deserved it anyway / I guess I’m gonna find out any day / For we’ll meet again / And there’ll be Hell to pay.” The real summation of the album – and perhaps Cave’s career as a whole – comes on the final song, “I Got You Bad”. “Babe I got you bad / Dreaming blood-wet dreams / Only madmen have / Baby I got you bad.”

China: 20 Years of Either/Or

Elliott Smith – Either/Or

Released February 25th, 1997 on Kill Rock Stars Records

BestEverAlbums: #149

RYM: #106

Kurt Cobain may have been louder and flashier, but Elliott Smith really was the quintessential Nineties rock star. Haunted, brooding, and darkly melodic, he epitomized the “tortured artist” aesthetic that was popular during the first half of the decade. Raised in an abusive environment in Texas, he moved to Portland, Oregon and channeled his demons into drugs, alcohol, and music. His original band, Heatmiser, wasn’t anything particularly special but his solo releases – 1994’s Roman Candle and 1995’s self-titled LP – captured the imagination of listeners much more. Those solo releases had little to do with what Heatmiser was doing, and in the fall of 1996, shortly before their last album was released, they broke up (fun fact: bassist Sam Coomes would go on to be the frontman for Quasi). Smith’s next release would eclipse both his former band and everything he had recorded up until that point.

Either/Or was first an attempt by Smith to vary the moods on an album. Elliott Smith had been an album that was largely the same from beginning to end: acoustic confessionals about drugs and depression. Either/Or has some of those, of course: “Speed Trials”, “Between The Bars”, and “No Name No. 5” are evidence of that. Songs like “Alameda”, “Ballad Of Big Nothing”, and “Rose Parade”, though, are evidence of something bigger: songs by a guy who proved on this album that he could craft big hooks, emotionally impactful melodies, and arrangements that were built to last. That last item is especially important: Either/Or doesn’t sound like 1997 – there’s no pandering to teen pop, or ska, or post-grunge trends. It could have been released last year, or ten years ago, or today. It’s songs and it’s themes are artistically timeless, even more so now that the waves of the Great American Heroin Addiction have crashed over the shores of seemingly every state in the Union.

Everything that came after – Gus Van Sant’s love of the album, Good Will Hunting, “Miss Misery”, Smith’s two major label albums, and his mysterious death – would cement his legend. Either/Or is the moment that Emily St. John Mandel describes in Station Eleven: a moment that, ever after, would divide Smith’s life into “Before” and “After”. Before Either/Or, he was an up-and-coming songwriter with an acoustic guitar and a monkey on his back. After, he was a bona fide rock star with a following and highly-placed friends. Neither would prevent him from slipping a little further into addiction and depression – or from dying in Los Angeles with twin stab wounds to the chest, a death still shrouded to this day in suspicion and mystery.

China: 20 Years of Marcy Playground

Marcy Playground – Marcy Playground

Released February 25th, 1997 on Capitol Records

One of these days I plan on doing a listicle called “Ten Albums From The 90s That Aren’t As Bad As You Remember” and #1 on that list is Marcy Playground. Also, Bush’s Razorblade Suitcase and Live’s Throwing Copper, but that’s beside the point. Marcy Playground is one of the most criminally overlooked album of the Nineties, but at the same time it’s completely understandable as to why that occurred. The band’s first single, “Sex And Candy” was…well, you know it. Don’t pretend like you don’t. You’ve sung along to it, and I don’t particularly care how old “you” are. You like sex, and you like candy, and you like “Sex And Candy”. Unfortunately, it was 1997, and one hit wonders were par for the course for alternative rock by then. Remember Seven Mary Three? The Nixons? Chumbawumba? Semisonic? Marcy Playground is counted in those ranks, because “Sex And Candy” was huge, the other singles from the album didn’t make much of a dent in the radio, and the follow-up, 1999’s Shapeshifter, was listened to by approximately seven people worldwide.

So why are we marking the anniversary? It’s because Marcy Playground is something of a lost gem. It is a much better album than it has a right to be, and that all comes down to John Wozniak’s winsome songs that feature very dark shadows lurking in the corners. “Poppies” almost feels educational, with lyrics about the British opium trade with China, until you realize that the fate being sealed that he’s talking about is heroin. Heroin also features, implied or explicit, in “Ancient Walls Of Flowers”, “The Vampires Of New York”, and “Opium”. “Gone Crazy”, in context of the other songs, feels somewhat sinister, and “One More Suicide” is pretty much what it says on the tin. “Saint Joe On The School Bus” is about getting bullied mercilessly, and “The Shadow Of Seattle” posits a rainy war on art. The moments of levy stick out all the more for the darkness that shrouds the indie-pop arrangements: “Sherry Fraser” is about old love, “A Cloak Of Elvenkind” is a peaceful little song about Dungeons and Dragons and parental disapproval, and the ubiquitous “Sex And Candy” is a jumble of vaguely sexy non-sentences, capped with a hook that is an inside joke about Wozniak having sex with his girlfriend in her dorm room. The arrangements are tight, the guitars have just the right shade of grunge crunch without being histrionic and overbearing, and the hooks are goddamn barbed.

As I said before, the band would go on to do pretty much nothing in terms of mainstream exposure, although they keep releasing albums for a fanbase that must exist somewhere. Right? There are people out there that listen to Marcy Playground albums? Wozniak isn’t just releasing these albums into the void for no one to listen to, like I do? Who knows. Marcy Playground stands as their legacy, though, an album that will continue to be remembered even if it’s just because “Sex And Candy” is such an iconic Nineties song. There are worse positions for a band to be in.

China: 20 Years of City

Strapping Young Lad – City

Released February 11th, 1997 on Century Media

Devin Townsend is fully aware of how completely ridiculous many of the tropes in metal are. Think about it for a second. They are. There’s a reason that the genre is most popular among 14 year old boys – it’s because those are the people most willing to swallow absurdity in the face of pure, naked aggression (see also Trump supporters). Townsend knows how ridiculous the tropes are because he lived them; before forming Strapping Young Lad, the Vancouver musician was best known for providing the vocals to Steve Vai’s uneven 1993 album Sex And Religion. His experience with record labels and the music business led him to his awakening: metal is absurd, the business is absurd, so you may as well have some fun with it. A little burned out and feeling like a “musical whore” for working his muse at the command of other people, he recorded Heavy As A Heavy Thing, an album lost on it’s contemporary listeners, even in 1995. People sat up and took notice when City came out, however, and it marks the beginning of the metal community’s embrace of Strapping Young Lad and their balls-out, “twist-the-dial-back-and-forth-until-it-snaps” version of extreme metal.

City is a solid trash metal album buried carefully in a really stellar industrial noise album. For every moment of straight-ahead pummeling (like the beginning of “Home Nucleonics”, or the massive breakdown in “AAA”) there are layers of digital textures and those Townsend vocals that sound like they were lifted whole and breathing off of dank, bloody German industrial records. The influence isn’t particularly surprising – Vancouver is, after all, the home of Skinny Puppy, Frontline Assembly, and a bajillion other industrial acts – but Townsend’s mixing of it with his obvious mastery of metal forms is what puts City over the edge into being a bona-fide classic.