She’s the voice you hear on the Smiths’ “Ask” and Morrissey’s “Interesting Drug.” She’s the salty dame calling Shane McGowan a “cheap lousy faggot” on the Pogues’ “Fairtytale Of New York.” And she’s one of the most underrated songwriters of the ’90s and one of our biggest losses.
I will go to my grave never understanding why Kirsty MacColl never became a multi-platinum superstar. Everyone I’ve ever played her records to has instantly fallen in love with her voice, a smoky mixture of romance, defeat and irony, with a dollop of sugary sweet syrup on top. Her songs were incredibly catchy, the type you hear the first thirty seconds or so and you can already sing along. And her lyrics…ah, the lyrics. World-weary, tired, yet optimistic, witty and uniformly brilliant. Take, for example, “autumngirlsoup”, where Kirsty equates sex with, well, cooking:
Get me on the boil and reduce me
To a simmering wreck with a slow kiss
To the back of my neck
Carve up my heart on a very low flame
Separate my feelings then pour them down the drain
Close my eyes and sweeten me with lies
Pierce my skin with a few well chosen words
Now you can stuff me with whatever you’ve got handy
And on a cold grey day a cold grey man will do…
When people ask me, “Where have I heard her before?”, all I have to mention is that immortal Pogues’ Christmas song and eyes light up. She also wrote and sang background on “They Don’t Know,” a Top Ten hit for Tracey Ullman back in 1984. That’s also Kirsty in the Talking Heads’ “Nothing But Flowers” and Wonder Stuff’s “Welcome to the Cheap Seats” videos. She got around a bit.
As the ’90s rolled around, Kirsty released her third solo album, Electric Landlady. A more varied affair than her previous album, Kite, Landlady featured salsa, waltzes, quiet folk ballads and its lead single, the hip-hop and baggy influenced “Walking Down Madison (7″ Mix),” (download) which became MacColl’s highest charting single in the U.S. Featuring Jimmy Chambers and George Chandler from Londonbeat (”I’ve Been Thinking About You”) on backing vocals, “Madison” was an attempt to bring Kirsty into the clubs, complete with various remixes. It’s no surprise the song was co-written with Johnny Marr, then in the midst of his own club mindset as half of Electronic. (more…)
Record deals were being handed out like Halloween candy to anything remotely resembling “alternative” in the post-Nirvana ’90s. It’s nearly impossible to imagine a band like art/math rockers Shudder to Think being signed to a conglomerate like Sony, but heck, they put out two albums on Epic Records.
Sometimes I can forgive a band for anything if I love them enough. Even being featured in a Pringles ad or an Adam Sandler film.
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Morrissey was one of the earliest fans and champions of Britpop glumlords Suede, and it’s not too tough to figure out why. Besides owing quite a musical debt to Morrissey fave Bowie and even the Smiths themselves, Suede followed Moz’s tradition of tossing aside their most stellar compositions to inhabit B-sides and filler space on EPs.
I’ve had it up to here listening to a small segment of people trying to put down America. America’s the greatest land on Earth and we oughta be proud of what we have! I’m proud of America. I’m proud of our people, and I’m gonna prove it! We’re American and damn proud of it! Frankly, I’m getting a little ticked off. Go to Hell!
Is there such a thing as a casual Trash Can (or Trashcan, if you prefer) Sinatras fan?
Scottish trio One Dove found themselves branded with the trip-hop label after releasing their debut Morning Dove White in 1993. It wasn’t a label undeserved, really, since the group’s expansive, five-minute plus opuses tended to obscure the catchy hooks underneath layers and layers of shuffled beats, foggy synths, and in the case of the original “Guitar Paradise Mix” of the album’s lead single, “White Love,” squealing electric guitar.
Board games, candy, AWFUL boys, Nancy Drew books and girls who sing – these are a TON of my favorite things!
Combining shoegaze and dreampop with straight-ahead power pop, Washington D.C. indie-rock darlings Unrest were the brainchild of Mark Robinson, founder of the TeenBeat label. After a few post-punk experimental years, Unrest tamed their sound a bit (with plenty of more unorthodox tracks here and there) and snagged a distribution deal with famed 4AD Records, which was itself distributed in the U.S. by Warner Brothers. This is a roundabout way of basically saying their 1993 album, Perfect Teeth, was the first to get a major label push which resulted in the band getting some MTV play on “120 Minutes.”
Anyone who’s ever worked at a record store that buys and sells used CDs can tell you what titles they see over and over again. Jagged Little Pill, Cracked Rear View, the entire Cranberries catalog … these are discs that clog the bins coast to coast, as music buyers buy, absorb, and ultimately get sick of these huge mega-hits. The second type of disc you see a lot is the one-hit wonder album – Vanilla Ice’s To The Extreme or today’s featured artist’s album, Chumbawamba’s Tubthumper.