Tag: 1990s

Categories
Tunes

Best tunes of 1993: #3 Cracker “Euro-trash girl”

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Digital music has certainly changed the way we consume our favourite songs and albums*. First, with the mp3 and illegal downloading in the late 90s and early 2000s and then, with music streaming services in the late 2000s to present. I know a great many people who have stopped buying physical music altogether and some who have been offloading their collections in order to make room for other… stuff. Indeed, I am thinking that there may be some in the younger generations who have never owned a record, a cassette tape, or a compact disc. It’s these folks that I worry may never know the joys of physical music: album artwork, liner notes, gatefold and other foldout sleeves, and of course, the hidden track.

Yes… the hidden track.

For those who may not know of what I speak, hidden tracks are songs that were typically tacked on at the end of the official track listing on records, tapes, and CDs, the song titles weren’t listed on the sleeves and sometimes on CDs, would be “hidden” on tracks far later on in the disc. I personally have enjoyed a great many of these over the years** but I do believe my all-time favourite example would be Cracker’s “Euro-trash girl”. It appeared at track 69 of 99 on the CD version of the band’s sophomore album, “Kerosene hat”, and was apparently put on there by the band unbeknownst to the record company, who wanted them to keep it for a future release.

I had gotten into Cracker with their self-titled debut album and the hilarious debut single, “Teen angst (What the world needs now)” and when I started hearing new singles “Low” and “Get off this” on alternative radio, I recognized their country-twanged alt rock right away. But when I started hearing “Euro-trash girl” on the radio, I knew had to get the new album. Of course, when I first picked up the CD in the stores and didn’t see the song listed, I was quite disappointed but I picked it up anyway. And yet the story had a happy ending, unlike our protagonist in the song.

“Yeah, I’ll search the world over
For my angel in black
Yeah, I’ll search the world over
For a Euro-trash girl”

“Euro-trash girl” is a fan favourite at live shows that was as such before it was ever put to tape, which is reportedly why it ended up as a hidden track. It starts with a gentle strum and a forlorn electric guitar and it doesn’t really kick in to a higher gear than that, even when the drums join the fray and things get louder. It’s a lackadaisical eight minutes of meandering and reminiscing, David Lowery weaving a tale, true or no, of a backpacking trip through Europe, a search for European love and the misadventures that are found instead. It plays on all of our collective schadenfreude, amusing us to the point that we don’t want it to end, singing along with our narrator as he gets robbed, arrested, shaken down by border cops, is forced to sell his ‘plasma’ after his parents refuse to wire him money. And at the end, he is still searching for his “angel in black”.

*In fact, I’ve seen more than few writers posit whether the ‘album’ has seen its day.

**“Train in vain” by The Clash, “Blue flashing light” by Travis, and “All by myself” by Green Day are just a few fine examples.

For the rest of the Best tunes of 1993 list, click here.

Categories
Vinyl

Vinyl love: Neutral Milk Hotel “In the aeroplane over the sea”

(Vinyl Love is a series of posts that quite simply lists, describes, and displays the pieces in my growing vinyl collection. You can bet that each record was given a spin during the drafting of each corresponding post.)

Artist: Neutral Milk Hotel
Album Title: In the aeroplane over the sea
Year released: 1998
Year reissued: 2018
Details: gatefold sleeve, 180 gram

The skinny: I’ve not just been away from blogging over the past week or so but also from work and home and have been out living the dream. I returned just a few days ago and almost immediately reacquainted myself with my vinyl shelves, one of the very few things I miss while being away from home. So it made most sense to me to share one of these ‘vinyl love’ posts as my first upon returning from this brief hiatus and I chose Neutral Milk Hotel’s classic sophomore album, “In the aeroplane over the sea” because I just happened to be reading about it of late in the 33 1/3 books treatment of the band and album. I personally came to the album years after its 1998 release but it quickly became one of my all-time faves, landing at number three on my best albums list of that year. And the book is giving me so much more context to chew on that I felt giving it a fresh listen was overdue. The reissue in my collection was repressed to 180 gram vinyl by Merge Records twenty years after its initial release and came in a gatefold sleeve. I’m fairly certain it was one of the last records I ever purchased from Amazon, an add-on to another purchase to bring me over the free shipping threshold, but I’m even more certain that it gets more spins on my turntable than that other record*.

Standout track: “In the aeroplane over the sea”

*Indeed, I don’t even remember with which record I purchased it.

Categories
Tunes

Best tunes of 1993: #4 The Boo Radleys “Lazarus”

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Here’s a song with which I will always and forever connect with The Dance Cave.

Some of you who live, have lived in, or frequently visit Tarannah will likely have heard of or know of Lee’s Palace. It’s a long-standing concert venue in the Annex neighbourhood that has seen a great many alternative and rock acts grace its stage since opening in the mid 80s. If you’ve never been there, you likely remember its garish paint job that looked like a Ralph Bakshi cartoon exploded all over the face of the building, long since pared down to a mere memory of itself after years of weather did its worst. Upstairs from said venue, they had a big open space that served more as a rough and tumble looking club that often played alternative and indie rock, served $1.50 glasses of mystery draft, and was packed most days of the week throughout the 90s. This was The Dance Cave.

It was the first club I went to with any regularity because it played “my music”. Music I loved and music that I was destined to love. “Lazarus” by The Boo Radleys is one of these latter tunes that was played there pretty much any night that I attended and that I danced to every time, countless times before I even knew the name of the song or its performing artist.

The Boo Radleys formed in 1988 and broke up just over a decade later having released six full length albums. They started off firmly planted in the shoegaze realm for the first half of their career before embracing the inescapable wave of britpop for their last three albums and actually saw a modicum of commercial success during this latter period. And though I loved “Lazarus” through and through during the late 90s, I never really explored their catalogue into well after their break up. My first stop was, of course, 1993’s “Giant steps” and that album took me a long time to digest and fathom because it was so expansive and diverse in sound and scope. Some would call it an unheralded masterpiece of shoegaze and I couldn’t disagree.

In amongst the noise, “Lazarus” is lucky 13 of 17 tracks. It starts off with alien waves of guitars, strings fed through pedals charged with laser beams. This just sets the stage, allows you time to put down your beverage and rush out into the crush of sweaty bodies on the heaving dance floor and at the same time, plays the decoy for the incredible explosions yet to come. Then, everything vaults skyward and the dancing begins in earnest. And just when you think you might have to take a break, the vocals start in to calm the mood some, soothing the energy, allowing the spray of perspiration to settle, just before kicking it all up again. It’s the classic loud-quiet-loud, disruptive energy, a blurry anthem and cause for happiness and bliss for its entirety.

For the rest of the Best tunes of 1993 list, click here.