Dusted’s Opinionated, Non-Consensus Guide to the 1990s
The Fatima Mansions
The 1990s. Some of us lived through them. A few formed our musical selves during this pivotal decade. We watched hip hop emerge and swell to vast commercial proportions. We wondered what indie meant…and if it meant anything at all. We pondered whether lo-fi was charming, or just made it harder to hear the flaws. And mostly we listened to records that moved us, a few of which turn up on the decade-defining consensus lists, but most of which don’t. Here are a few albums that made us who we are. We chose one each and refused to put them in numerical order (they’re alphabetical by artist). Feel free to add your own in the comments. Everybody’s 1990s were different, after all.
Contributors include Tim Clarke, Jennifer Kelly, Andrew Forell, Bryon Hayes, Christian Carey, Bill Meyer, Jonathan Shaw, Ian Mathers and Justin Cober-Lake.
Bark Psychosis — Hex (Circa/Caroline)
Perhaps most famous for prompting music writer Simon Reynolds to coin the term “post rock,” Hex by Bark Psychosis still sounds oddly timeless — and certainly unlike many bands who would come to be described by the phrase. While legions of post-rock bands would emerge during the late 1990s and early 2000s with a lamentable dependence on dramatic shifts in dynamics, Bark Psychosis used rock instrumentation in more subtle and unique ways. Hex has more in common with bands such as Talk Talk and The Blue Nile, who prized atmosphere and texture over more direct songcraft. As a result, the album’s seven tracks take a long time to go nowhere, elegantly prowling around in the shadows like a stray cat. While Graham Sutton is far from a conventional singer, his disaffected vocals sound right at home in these ink-black, urban expanses. “Absent Friend” is perhaps the album’s most dub-influenced track, dappled with melodica and pinned to terra firma by a stubbornly simplistic bassline. “Fingerspit” is an eerie jazz nightmare, as if the players in some subterranean club have forgotten to play their instruments, so instead resort to hammering away at a single chord. The band’s commitment to maintaining a desolate tone makes the moments of levity all the more gorgeous, such as the woodwind textures on “A Street Scene” and “Eyes and Smiles.” The magnificent instrumental closer, “Pendulum Man,” eventually delivers some lasting reprieve from the gloom.
Tim Clarke
The Bevis Frond — Son of Walter (Flydaddy/Reissued on Light in the Attic)
Son Of Walter by Bevis Frond
Already a decade into his run as the Bevis Frond, Nick Salomon pulled back from the full-band, studio-produced aesthetic that culminated in New River Head. He recorded Son of Walter by himself, at home, but “bedroom pop” this is not. It sprawls. It rears. It rages. It surges in inexorable waves on the strength of spiralling guitar solos and delicate, folk-derived melodies. From the opening blare of fuzz in “Plastic Elvis,” through the wistful jangle of “Goodnight from the Band,” I love every song on this album. Sure there are highlights, the blistered, caterwauling romance of “Red Hair,” the Neil-Young-into-Jimi fireblast of “Barking or False Point Blues,” the lilting, surprisingly earwormy chorus of “Raining on TV,” but it’s really all good. As a young mom in the late 1990s, I found solace in spidery “Forgiven” about a love sanded down by life (“She’s always…exhausted”). The tune is worn down to a thread but still lovely, and it leads right into the black hole swirl of “All Hope Is Going Without You.” Spare beauty and psychedelic overload, cheek by jowl and wonderful.
Jennifer Kelly
The Fatima Mansions — Valhalla Avenue (Kitchenware)
On The Fatima Mansions’ 1992 album Valhalla Avenue, songwriter Cathal Coughlan (who passed this last May), sets his sights on corruption, religious extremism and human stupidity like Flann O’Brien’s furious younger brother. Moving between a Scott Walker croon and the coruscating intensity of a barroom preacher with Ministry on the jukebox, Coughlan and his bandmates create moments of poetic beauty (“North Atlantic Wind,” “Purple Window”) and maelstroms of indignant chaos (“1000%,” “Go Home Bible Mike). The fierce irreverence of their musical juxtapositions — lounge, industrial, sampling — and their no-fucks-given attitude remains singular today and Coughlin’s intense romanticism, mordant wit, political satire and apocalyptic imagery marks him as one of great lyricists of his time. Valhalla Avenue spent a week at the low end of British album charts, was not released in America and made nary a dent in Australia. Thanks to an Irish workmate in Germany who ceremoniously presented me a cassette of their early singles “Only Losers Take the Bus” and “Blues for Ceausescu”, Valhalla Avenue is still on regular rotation round here.
Andrew Forell
Flying Saucer Attack — Further (Domino / Drag City)
Flying Saucer Attack was the flagship band of that other 1990s Bristol scene, the one that didn’t revolve around trip hop. David Pearce and his friends favored a blend of coruscating noise, delicate drones, and airy folk over downtempo hip hop beats. With its DIY aesthetic, FSA championed home recording and a “less is more” attitude to music-making, paralleling that of contemporary acts such as Windy & Carl. Further was the band’s sophomore release and stripped away much of the razor wire-laced bombast of its debut. FSA, which at the time was a loose collective centered around Pearce and then-girlfriend Rachel Brook, began to incorporate more acoustic guitar into their songs, and took a measured approach to noise and feedback. Pearce allowed his deep and resonant voice to drift above the misty haze of the music; Brook uncharacteristically emits rays of vocal sunshine on “Still Point”. The resulting album is one of raw grace, a careful balancing act between tranquility and chaos. Further is as bleary and beautiful as its cover art, and it stood out elegantly amidst the various frayed threads of 1990s underground music.
Bryon Hayes
John Hiatt — Walk On (Capitol)
John Hiatt’s 1995 recording Walk On is an under sung masterpiece. Two collaborators that he would continue to keep in his band, until they were purloined for more lucrative gigs, multi-instrumentalist David Immerglück and bassist Davey Farragher, join drummer Michael Urbano and several backing vocalists, Bonnie Raitt noteworthy among them, to support Hiatt and supply versatile arrangements. “Cry Love,” “You Must Go,” and the title track provide a kick-off of catchy singles. Deeper in the release, Raitt and Hiatt duet on “I Can’t Wait,” a song that, if there were any justice, would have charted higher. Hiatt is prescient about the endless investigations and rise of militia groups during the second term of the Clinton administration in “Shredding the Document” “Native Son,” and “Wrote it Down and Burned It.” A hidden track hearkens back to the height of CD distribution.
Christian Carey
Peter Jefferies — The Last Great Challenge In A Dull World (Xpressway/Ajax/De Stijl)
In retrospect, the musicians who joined forces to form the Xpressway collective can be recognized as aesthetic game-changers. Not only did they unleash the forces of sonic resistance in their native New Zealand, raising clouds of gilded splinters as they pushed against the grain; they issued a permission-granting challenge to every subsequent wave of refuseniks determined to freely fuse noise, rock, and anything else at hand. But their success was by no means a given when Peter Jefferies made The Last Great Challenge In A Dull World on borrowed gear in a drafty old house on the edge of a container port at the end of the southern winter of 1989. At the time, the Xpressway crew were just the losers who were left behind when Flying Nun Records chased the brass ring north. Jefferies, like Alastair Galbraith, the Dead C, Peter Gutteridge, David Mitchell and the Terminals, had given Flying Nun some great music, and subsequently found himself ignored. A gifted multi-instrumentalist, singer, and sound recorder, he became the scene’s four-track documentarian, and he called on key associates to help make what he then felt might be his last testament. On Last Great Challenge he synthesized Cale-derived balladry, early Ubu rock, and post-This Heat sound manipulation into a singular statement of intent and reproach so acute that it, and everyone associated with it, could not be ignored. The album, which has been issued by three different labels, is currently out of print, but not that hard to find. It remains a stern condemnation of every lazy record out there that can’t be bothered to reach past the sky.
Bill Meyer
Nausea — Extinction (Profane Existence)
More and more, metal is moving out of its subgenre-specific silos and beyond its backward-gazing obsessions with hidebound traditions. But from its start, crust was a hybrid form, combining the politically motivated anti-aesthetic of anarcho-punk with metal’s swaggering muscle. It makes some sense, then, that this influential American crust record emerged from the Lower East Side, where hardcore punk was already cross-pollinating with metal; see Cause for Alarm (1986), the second LP by Agnostic Front, a band dominated by Roger Miret, then husband of Nausea’s singer Amy Miret, nee Keim. By the time Nausea made Extinction, its only LP, Al Long had joined the band, filling out the dual-vocal, female-male attack in a nod to Crass. And while “punk” usually follows the word crust in discussions of the style, Extinction is crucially informed by metal: “Butchers” owes much to Motörhead; “Clutches” rumbles like early Saint Vitus; the opening minutes of “Blackened Dove” could be from a Witchfinder General record. For this reviewer, “Inherit the Wasteland” is the key song, full of dystopian dread, replete with an enormous breakdown section and Vic Venom’s enthusiastic shredding. It’s an unhappy, unstoppable blast. Other metal and metal-adjacent sub-sub- and microgenres had formed by 1990: goregrind was already a thing, and the Slap a Ham crew was busily birthing powerviolence. Bandana thrash was just over the horizon. But few of those modish musical notions have had the substance (grimy, grotty and grave as it might be) and staying power of crust. Exhibit A: Extinction. It still stinks up the joint.
Jonathan Shaw
Readymade — The Dramatic Balanced By (No Records)
By 1997 shoegaze had ebbed back significantly from whatever high tide mark it had attained, and nobody was particularly looking towards Vancouver for it, if they were looking at all. And yet out of what sounds like a combo of ennui, political unrest, movies (particularly, from the cover on down, Mean Streets), “taking speed in Germany,” drum machines, insomnia, rain, power grids, airports, four-track recorders, windows, and urban sprawl, enigmatic trio Readymade created one of the great lost epics of the era and genre. They didn’t stop here, absorbing members of the sadly even more obscure Pipedream and producing two excellent, gleaming and ambiguous records in the next decade, but only on The Dramatic Balanced By was their rougher, fuzzier, more expansive side given free reign. The result, whether the craggier, more anthemic likes of “Bloomsbury Boxcutter” and “Dreamt I Fled,” the crepuscular trudge of “Following a Typewriter to Sleep,” or the mournfully lambent “Hamburg,” holds together as a great example of the kind of record that forms its own world, one you can get lost in. That record climaxes with “Head Falls to Shoulder,” one of the most overwhelming storms of sound and feeling anyone was making in 1997. The band may be long gone in 2022 (although blessedly for anyone wanting to check them out, all three LPs can be streamed), but their expansive opus of city-bound alienation endures.
Ian Mathers
Spaceheads — Spaceheads (Dark Beloved Cloud)
Spaceheads by Spaceheads
On first listen, Spaceheads' self-titled 1995 album can feel like a throwaway. The record contains a fair bit of silliness and didn't come about as a deeply theorized piece of art. Trumpeter Andy Diagram and percussionist Richard Harrison had been playing in various jazz bands together when they started recording some duo improvisations and playing with the tapes. Early release Ho! Fat Wallet sounds as indebted to 1980s hip hop as anything, and its mix of brass and beats would still make for great backing tracks. Spaceheads followed with a weird twist on, well, just about everything. It can sit not uncomfortably on an EDM shelf, but that term doesn't accurately capture what they were doing. Stretches of the album are funky without being funk or industrial without being industrial. Some moments are abstract enough to be almost incoherent while others could play in a Hollywood soundtrack; “Down in Outer Space” sequencing into “Joyriding” provides all of that in a short burst. Spaceheads sound like a group that could have been any number of things or that could have floundered with pointless fiddling and experimentation. Instead, they pursued the only thing they seem to have any interest in being: exactly themselves. In doing so, they created an album with quirks and surprises that continue to provide as much joy and listening pleasure as anything going on around them (whatever that field might be).
Justin Cober-Lake
