The Dandy Warhols - Dandys Rule OK
Alt rock
Debut album

I think this is probably shitty stoner music for shitty stoner people, but maybe I shouldn't be that dismissive, because it's actually not that bad of an album. It just kinda gives off that vibe, and there's really not that much else to say about it. It's very listless, and self-aware in a way that lacks self-awareness, if that makes any sense at all. You just have to look at the song titles, which consist of things like:

- The Dandy Warhols' T.V. Theme Song
- (Tony, This Song is Called) Lou Weed
- Nothing (Lifestyle of a Tortured Artist for Sale)

If I don't think about whatever these chuckleheads are trying to say or do, and just focus on the music itself, I tend to roll my eyes a lot less, because there's some genuinely cool moments to be found on tracks like "The Coffee and Tea Wrecks," "Genius," and "Dick," which all play to the band's strengths, I think, in establishing moody tones.

But at the same time, there's some really self-indulgent crap in there, as well, such as the 20-minute three-part romp, "It's a Fast Driving Rave-Up with the Dandy Warhols," which has three whole tracks dedicated to it. It's essentially just one relatively uninteresting guitar riff played on a loop for that length of time, and it probably shouldn't have been on the album, because it's such a huge waste of time.

This album feels like a homework assignment submitted by the class flunkie who's actually really intelligent, or very talented in some respects, but simply doesn't apply themselves.

6/10

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Oval - 94diskont.
Glitch
3rd album

This is the most disappointing album I've heard so far—maybe ever. Time for a bit of a rant.

If you're unfamiliar with my process when it comes to listening to new music, I don't normally just listen to a new album by an artist I've never listened to before without checking out their back catalog first. That means, because I've never actually listened to a Green Day album before (all the way through, at least), I'm not going to start with their most popular album, or their latest album—I'm going to start with 39/Smooth, and work my way up chronologically.

That said, I had expectations for this one. Oval is just one guy now—Markus Popp—but in the '90s, it was this pioneering trio of electronic musicians in Germany who helped to develop the glitch genre, and I find their methods very interesting. They'd basically just take a bunch of CDs and physically fuck around with them, typically by writing or scratching them, play it back, and make music out of the resulting ruination. Here's one of my favorite examples from one of their previous records:


I thought this was cool as shit, so naturally, I was looking forward to their 1995 output—however, that excitement was clearly misplaced, because I feel like this album was created with intentions far outside what I was listening to it for.

The opening track of this 40-minute record is 24 minutes long. Prior to listening to it, I was thinking to myself, "Okay, so this track must have at least five or six movements across the entire song, or something, right?" Which is precisely what the track doesn't have. There are zero movements. All 24 minutes of this song are made up of just one short electronic loop—and it's not an interesting loop, either.


Now, I get it. This is an ambient piece, and I realize that it's not unusual for ambient artists to stretch out their tracks to unreasonable lengths for whatever reason.

Further, it doesn't even sound bad—it's curious and aquatic, and were it at least 20 minutes shorter, I could see myself vibing to it. But no, it's 24 whole minutes of the same goddamn loop. Sometimes the percussion drops out for a bit, and then it comes back. At the 12 minute mark, the music kind of just stops to take a breather before starting right back up again where it left off—still no change-ups or anything interesting going on whatsoever. But I get it; this is part and parcel for the genre. I just don't personally appreciate it.

Repetition is fine—Swans is one of my favorite bands, and they're infamous for having these soul-crushingly lengthy songs where they'll play the same riff over and over and over and over again, but there's a point to it. The song is going somewhere. There's a tension being built up, and often, there's a rewarding explosion at the end. That's not the case with this Oval record. It's just wasting my time.

You might be noticing a theme—I complained about the same thing on that Dandy Warhols album. You could say that absurdly long tracks that go absolutely nowhere are one of my least favorite things to deal with in music. I mean seriously, though—there's no reason why this track needs to be 24 minutes. If it's trying to put me to sleep, or relax me, I can certainly find better music for that.

Maybe you're not supposed to listen to all 24 minutes—maybe you're only intended to listen to however many of those minutes you need. No one ever said I had to listen to the entire track, after all, and after a certain point, it should've become clear to me that the song was never going to change, right? So it's my fault that the song sucks.

As far as I'm concerned, an artist with foresight would release a track like this as a single, but mix it in such a way that the end of the song loops seamlessly into the beginning, so that when you have it on repeat, it'll be a perfect loop, and you can listen to it for as long as you want. Why not just do that?

Anyway, after that track is done, you've essentially heard over half of the entire record, even though there's still a handful of tracks left. They're all okay—just okay—which isn't enough to forgive the onslaught of bullshit that I was served on the first cut. Had these tracks been just a little bit better, though, I almost could have.

But then the funniest fucking thing ever happens. The last song on the album is 5 minutes long and shares the same title as the opening track—I'm thinking to myself, "There's no fucking way they just did this."

Way. WAY.

They really did just slap a fucking coda to the first track on the end—effectively adding 5 extra minutes of that same loop, so that 30 out of the album's 40-minute running time is all the one same boring loop. How the fuck is this even an album? I genuinely don't understand how they got away with this.

This was well-received, too. Allmusic gave it five stars, and Pitchfork put it among their top 50 albums of the '90s—later, they said it was the seventh best ambient album of all time. Ooooookay then, guys. I, for one, wasn't impressed.

4/10

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Vertical Horizon - Running on Ice
Acoustic rock
2nd album

These guys are like a less interesting Dave Matthews Band, I guess. Nothing wrong with that, but they're a little too soft for my tastes, and their sound doesn't really lend itself to detailed description. Here's "Answer Me," one of the better tracks, so you can hear for yourself. It's all right.

6/10

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Wet Wet Wet - Picture This
Soft rock
4th album

Crap.

5/10

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White Zombie - Astro-Creep: 2000 – Songs of Love, Destruction and Other Synthetic Delusions of the Electric Head
Groove metal
Final album

Now we're talking. I fucking love Rob Zombie—and while I'm fully able to acknowledge just how objectively corny a lot of his music is, I honestly could not give a fuck less, because it's a major part of his appeal for me. He's cheesy, but in a way that I find kind of awesome. I mean, just read that long-ass album title.


If you don't have a taste for this kind of stuff already, you'll probably never acquire it. It's very id-level stuff—it appeals to something deep and carnal within me that I can't really explain to you. It's kind of like watching a really shitty horror movie from the '60s, except you're having a blast—but not a ton of people are into that kind of stuff, so it's really hard to explain that kind of experience. It just has this intentionally gaudy "fuck you" aesthetic that resonates with my loins. Every song is badass and catchy as fuck—heavy, but not too heavy—and each one possesses a really tight groove that carries a palpable momentum across the entire tracklist, so there isn't a lull to be found.

This is probably my favorite April '95 album at the moment, and probably the one I was most familiar with prior to starting this journey, but I'm not going to rank it as highly as The Great Annihilator by Swans, or Delete Yourself! by Atari Teenage Riot. Those are legitimately great albums, whereas Astro-Creep 2000 is really just more of a "fun" album, albeit a particularly awesome one. It's just not going to satisfy you in the same way that a truly great album would.

7/10

Hum - You'd Prefer an Astronaut
Alt rock
Third album

Well, I certainly wasn't expecting this of all albums to be as good as it was.

Easily one of my top albums of the time man
call me basic but Stars is my goddamn jam

Little Feat - Ain't Had Enough Fun
Swamp rock
Eleventh album

I gotta hand it to these guys. Despite being considered one of the great American rock bands (by those who know their history, at least), and having records dating back to the early '70s, they don't have a single household hit to their name—hell, even my dad never listened to them—but they still kept doing their thing anyway, and have earned themselves a legacy of one of the most commercially underachieving yet unerringly persistent rock bands in history. There's definitely something to appreciate about that.

That said—if you've ever wanted to listen to 70 straight minutes of the most meat-and-potatoes rock and roll music you've ever heard in your life, then boy, do I have the album for you!

Yeah, this was quite the slog for me. These guys deserve nothing but respect, but I cannot for the life of me feel any degree of entertainment or inspiration from rock music this boilerplate. It's just too plain. I can't do anything with it. They did get Shaun Murphy to sing on this one, though, and her impressive pipes are probably the one highlight in my opinion—but I will not be revisiting this one any time soon.

If you wanna get into Little Feat, I suggest listening to Dixie Chicken first. That's probably their best effort, and was made during the absolute high of their career in the mid '70s, so that's where the best stuff is.

5/10

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Maná - Cuando los Ángeles Lloran
Latin rock
Fourth album

Pretty decent and inoffensive rock album with a few catchy songs on it. Not much else to say. Even though it's entirely in Spanish, it doesn't take a genius to figure out what the dude is singing about, accounting for the music's overall romantic sound—especially with how liberally the word "corazón" is used.

6/10

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Flotsam and Jetsam - Drift
Heavy metal
Fifth album

Just another decent-ass metal album that fails to bring anything unique to the table. I guess if there's one thing that sets F&J apart, it would be their attitude? Eric A.K.'s vocals do have this charismatic in-your-face bravado to them, but this one element isn't really strong enough to carry the rest of the album into the "recommended" zone.

6/10

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Mobb Deep - The Infamous
Hip hop
Sophomore album

I've been waiting anxiously for another great rap album after all this middling metal music—and I'm happy to report that my patience paid off this time around. The Infamous is easily one of the better records I've heard on the hip hop end of things, which is saying something, because I've given high praise to almost everything I've covered in the genre so far. At this point, I'm comfortable attesting to the notion that East Coast hip hop was setting some serious flames in the mid '90s.

Our two main MCs, Havoc and Prodigy (RIP), are accompanied by an impressive bevy of featured artists, including Nas, Raekwon, Ghostface Killah, Big Noyd, and Q-Tip—the last of whom also lent a hand in the album's gritty and nocturnal production. Crystal Johnson also shows up to do some crooning on "Temperature's Rising," which may not be my favorite single, but it's certainly a highlight nonetheless.

Consciousness in subject matter is something that I value a lot in rap lyricism, and again, being that this is an East Coast group, a great deal of care was taken to make each and every bar hard-hitting and meaningful. Combine that with the ominously off-kilter beats that keeping you on your toes on a track for track basis, and you get one hell of a riveting experience.

I still need a few more listens (and a couple visits to genius.com) to fully appreciate the poetry behind each track, but there'll be plenty of time for that in the future. For the time being, from a purely emotional standpoint, I can already tell why this is regarded as a classic. If you're into some old-school hip hop, but not too old school, you have to listen to this. This is the kind of music that oldheads will point to and say, "Why can't they make rap like this anymore?"

7/10

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King Crimson - THRAK
Progressive rock
Eleventh album

When I noticed King Crimson on my big list of '95 albums to listen to, I was like, "Ah, fuck. I'm not gonna be able to listen to this one," because Robert Fripp is notorious for his curmudgeonly boomer-ish views on the way music is distributed in the modern age, and for the longest time, pretty much none of King Crimson's albums were available to stream (legally) online. Apparently, though, he changed his mind about this—and just last year, too, because now those records are available to stream now, which is fantastic.

I've heard almost all of them at this point—everything leading up to their '95 release, of course—and as a result, although I wouldn't necessarily call myself a King Crimson fan, I've definitely seen the light when it comes to this band. These guys are kinda fucking awesome, and consistently so, with not a dud across their entire oeuvre—although, admittedly, I still haven't heard a record in their discography that I would rank above In the Court of the Crimson King. I think knowing just how fucking old that record is—1969—really adds a lot to it for me, because they were so sonically ahead of the curve. It's actually unbelievable.

In the specific case of their 1995 album THRAK, however, I was told on Wikipedia that this record is intended to be a companion piece to an EP that was put out in 1994 called Vrooom. For the purposes of this challenge, just to make my life a little bit easier, I typically choose to ignore anything that's not a full-length studio album—that means no EPs. However, in the case of an album being a direct followup to a pre-existing EP, that makes me feel somewhat compelled to listen to it.

Aaaaand it's not available. Anywhere. Not for free, at least. I ended up paying $7 for the thing, because I'm a chump, and because I'm ultimately okay with monetarily supporting a band this cool. But that's the first and last time I ever pay for anything with regards to this project.

That $7 was well-spent, I would say. Vrooom is a pretty great EP. Not only is it lengthy enough to be its own album, it's another testament to the band's consistency in quality and experimentation. It's loud, stentorian, and bursting at the seams with flavor and pizzazz. There's even some industrial influence, which is pretty cool, albeit risky—but it worked out just fine in their favor, I think. All in all, it's just yet another artistically satisfying and evocative prog rock effort.

However, a number of songs from this EP would end up being rerecorded for THRAK, and I guess that's what makes these two records companions—although, honestly, there are points where I just feel like the latter is just an extended version of Vrooom.

That doesn't mean it's better, though. In fact, I enjoyed THRAK significantly less than I enjoyed Vrooom, and for a number of reasons—which is very unfortunate, because while I do still think it's a good LP, there's just something intrinsically less exciting about a King Crimson album where you've already heard half the tracklist. The new mixes aren't really different enough to make them feel distinct, and paradoxically, the two songs that were not taken from the EP would've drastically improved it. Further, out of the album's material that's actually new, most of it's actually quite boring to listen to. it all just kinda sounds like uninspired filler to me.

As a result of these issues, THRAK has actually turned out to be my least favorite King Crimson album. Again—it's not that it's bad, but most its best material had already been readily available in 1994, so...

6/10

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Fair Warning - Rainmaker
Hard rock
Sophomore album

Sleep-incuding garbage. When the rock music is this generic, this trite, and this fucking dimestore, you would never in a million years guess that this band hails from Germany of all places. Who in Germany was asking for music like this in 1995? And why?

5/10

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So ends the April segment. Overall, that was a pretty shitty month. Probably the weakest one so far. There was a handful of good stuff, of course, but there was so much mediocre bullshit, too, and I never gave anything higher than a 7/10, which is a huge bummer. I can think of three candidates that might deserve an 8/10, and might get one from me down the line, but I don't really think that's in the cards as of right now.

I don't know when I'll move onto May just yet, but it probably won't be until July, since I'm a little burnt out.

Anyway, here's the all-important chart:



Snobbier music nerds than myself would probably recoil at the thought of placing White Zombie over Aphex Twin, but I don't care.

I actually have some adjustments to make on previous charts, because Wikipedia is imperfect, and their list is constantly in the flux of maintaining date-accuracy. For example, when I covered that Porcupine Tree album, I was under the impression that it was a February release, but it is now being considered a January album—so I'll have to adjust for those shifts, I guess. This is what I get for relying on an unreliable resource.

I also have a few score adjustments to make, as well, but most of them are relatively minor, so I probably won't bother posting any of those.

Right now, I recently came up with another stupid (albeit quarantine-induced) idea: try to watch every music video from the '90s. I'll start and finish with the year 1995, in which about ~700 videos were made, according to this database that I found, so if I get tired of the mission by the end, I'll at least have completed one year's worth of videos. I've already seen over 90, and if I keep it up, I'll be able to finish up a ranked list in a matter of two weeks. Should be fun.

This whole thing has been very impressive, Verb.

I've been meaning to get round to checking out King Crimson. I see it discussed a lot in the same general space as a lot of the other stuff I listen to.

It's good stuff.