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Best albums of 1990: #5 Spirit of the West “Save this house”

Spirit of the West are one of my favourite ever bands.

And I know what you’re thinking: This guy’s probably got thousands of favourite bands. Which is probably true. However, SOTW have been with me for a very long time, almost 35 years. A Canadian band with a unique sound that I got into at a time when most Canadian bands were trying to sound American. For a while, they were the band I had seen the most times in concert. In fact, my wife and I officially ‘got together’ after seeing the band at our university pub. I could go on and on but I’ve already tread this ground on these pages a number of times, most notably when I counted down my top five favourite tunes by the group back in 2017.

Having said all this, “Save this house” isn’t my favourite Spirit of the West album. Yes, it’s got some of their classic tracks (see below) and it’s got a great and unique folk rock sound but they were still finding their true footing here, being one album removed from being a fully formed band. Multi-instrumentalist and backing vocalist Linda McRae had just joined the trio of Hugh McMillan, Geoffrey Kelly, and John Mann and their drummer Vince Ditrich had yet to join. The songwriting is very strong here for the most part but as a whole, the album is likely a couple tracks too long.

Still, as you can see, I’ve placed the group’s fourth album and first on major label, Warner Music Canada, in my top five for the year so you know I believe the album is worth your time. The songs are a bit of their time and place but can also be considered out of time. The band sings from a perspective with which I am very familiar and their instrumental prowess is understated but markedly better than some of their peers at the time, effortlessly sliding Celtic folk into an alt rock context. It’s an album, much like the rest of their catalogue, that deserves to be placed amongst the pantheon of great CanCon records but unfortunately, feels to me, largely forgotten.

So indulge me, if you will, and have a listen to “Save this house” in its entirety but if you are lacking the time, check out these three picks.

“Puttin’ up with the Joneses“: “Lock ’em up, and throw away the key, boys / The Joneses are not like you or me / Lock ’em up tight, ’cause if they had the chance they might / Show us that we’re wrong and that’s the one thing we can’t be.” My father got me a summer job working in the recycling plant division of the steel factory he worked at in the summer of 1995. For the first couple of weeks that I worked there, they didn’t know what to do with me and the other summer student that they had hired, so they had us scouring the barren fields on the property picking up scraps of metal that had floated down out of the air while they ran flattened cars through the ‘shredder’. I’ll always think of this song when I remember that summer because I sang the words to it to myself the whole time I was picking up these scraps. A song with a peppy rhythm put together with a non-stop acoustic strum, a popping bongo beat, and call and response vocals, words invoking everything I was feeling about the world in my youth. Questions of normalcy and what it all means, the relevance of life events, toeing the line or rebelling against it. A punk song that sounds more folk than The Pogues and that puts a smile on your face everytime.

“Save this house”: “The welcome mat’s worn out, the roof will never mend, the furniture’s on fire, this house is a disgrace. Someone change the locks before we trash this place.” The title track on the album is a three minute wonder that is very much relevant contextually to its era but is also quite prescient of the world events of the last few years. Starts off funky and haunting but at each chorus the guitars lose their effects and run at a straight ahead strum, racing at a pace that the bongos have a hard time keeping up with. The gang vocals add to the immediacy and invoke images of random and spontaneous jams at protest afterparties, a moment where everyone joins in, not just because they all know the words but more because there is a shared belief and conviction behind them. John Mann and company are bemoaning the state of the world, the politics and the environment, wondering aloud and not so conspicuously as to how we all got to this point and how we all let it happen. I’m still wondering the same.

“Home for a rest”: If, like me, you attended university in Canada in the 1990s (or in the years immediately following), you likely know this song or have drank and danced to it at some point whether you knew it or not. If you were not part of this cohort, you really don’t know what you’re missing. “By the light of the moon, she’d drift through the streets / A rare old perfume, so seductive and sweet / She’d tease us and flirt, as the pubs all closed down / Then walk us on home and deny us a round.” With universal, drinking song lyrics like this, “Home for a rest” has been considered by many an alternate Canadian national anthem, though it was never technically released as a single. I certainly love it and probably know the words just as well as I do “Oh Canada!”. I ranked it number two when I counted down my top five favourite by the band and placed it at number four in my Best tunes of 1990 list. I’ve danced to the wild music and have breathlessly sang along to all of these words so many times, in my room, at their shows, and on packed dance floors. And as I’ve written on these pages before, I was even coaxed up to a microphone by friends on a long ago green-beer-soaked Saint Patricks day at my old college pub, The Open End, to provide the slurring vocals when the entertainment for the evening couldn’t do it. This one has left an indelible mark on my life.

We’ll be back in a handful of days with album #4. In the meantime, here are the previous albums in this list:

10. The Northern Pikes “Snow in June”
9. Jane’s Addiction “Ritual de lo habitual”
8. Sinéad O’Connor “I do not want what I haven’t got”
7. The La’s “The La’s”
6. Concrete Blonde “Bloodletting”

You can also check out my Best Albums page here if you’re interested in my other favourite albums lists.

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Albums

Best albums of 1990: Albums #10 through #6

A couple of posts ago, I initiated a new mini-series focusing on my favourite albums of 1990. I shared some words on the concept, the fact that 1990 was the year with which I started out this blog, focusing then, on its best tunes, and finally, providing a handful of album honourable mentions. So I’ll not blather on too much today for preamble. If you’re interested where I was musically and in life in general that year, have a looky-loo here. Otherwise, I’ll dig right into albums 10 through 6 of my list of top albums for 1990*.

Enjoy!

#10 The Northern Pikes “Snow in June”

The Pikes’ third and best-selling record feels inextricably tied to my DNA sometimes. It’s not one I listen to often anymore but whenever I do, it instantly transports me back to my teenaged bedroom, where listened to this cassette tape on repeat, constantly flipping sides, while playing hours upon hours of ‘Pool of radiance’ on my C64. It’s way more than just the ubiquitous CanCon classic, “She ain’t pretty“. There’s thirteen solid rock tracks that are tempered by folk leanings and varied in sound according to which of the three vocalists wrote and led the singing on each. Perhaps the nostalgia is strong here but I stand by my love for this album. It’s unfortunate that the Saskatchewan-based quartet couldn’t keep the momentum up for their next album.

#9 Jane’s Addiction “Ritual de lo habitual”

Jane’s Addiction’s second proper studio album was handed to me on cassette tape by a friend and fellow new initiate to the alternative music scene, calling it industrial and comparing the group to Nine Inch Nails and Ministry, both bands I was just getting into. Of course, Jane’s weren’t really industrial but they had that similar rage and wild sound and perhaps even more so in a sense. There’s so many great tracks on ‘Ritual’ and I’ve always thought that what set them so apart was that the songs are all slightly unhinged, as if the whole ship could all fall apart at any moment. This orchestrated chaos was what made the American quartet led by Perry Farrell so great but it was also their undoing**. They broke up at the end of the tour for the album, the finale of which also saw the group headlining the very first Lollapalooza festival.

#8 Sinéad O’Connor “I do not want what I haven’t got”

I remember buying this album on cassette tape as part of Columbia House’s 9 albums for a penny, way back in the day, and for the longest time, only listening to “Nothing compares 2 u” because that was the song I knew from my weekly viewing of the Chum FM 30. Once I moved past that one tune, though, I grew to appreciate Sinéad’s other material. I later migrated away from listening to her, not because of her infamous photo burning appearance on SNL or her outspokenness on many topics, but because my tastes took me in a different direction. However, I’ve since returned to this album many times over the last couple of decades. Sinéad was a great songwriter. Not just a lyricist but also in the way she created a sound, sometimes infusing Celtic folk sounds with funky drum beats and sometimes leaving it all bare, singing a capella and including her inhalations of breathe as another tool in her tool belt. Such a legendary voice and polarizing persona.

#7 The La’s “The La’s”

You’ve heard about one hit wonders, right? Well, how about one album wonders? The La’s were a five-piece Liverpool-based rock act led by Lee Mavers that were active from 1983 to 1992. They released a handful of singles throughout that time, including one of my favourite one hit wonders, “There she goes”, but only ever managed the one studio album before disbanding***. But what a great album it was. The self-titled debut is filled with short and jangly rock gems that dig their way into your head and root themselves in there for good measure, much like another act from that same England town. It’s another one of those great rock ‘what if’ stories. Who knows what a second record would have meant to the band and perhaps rock music as a whole.

#6 Concrete Blonde “Bloodletting”

Concrete Blonde’s third album was oh-so-close to breaking into my top five for 1990. Previously, the sound of the Hollywood-based, indie rock trio led by Johnette Napolitano was mostly pedestrian rock and yet, their following was meagre, being picked up mostly by the college radio kids. With “Bloodletting”, they ventured into gothic rock territory and surprisingly, found commercial success for the first time. I remember listening to this album around my wife at one point early on in our relationship and she was surprised that I was listening to a band that she knew. But this album is so much more than “Joey“. Every track is dark and haunting and full of soul and drenched with meaning for me. I could listen to this album all night long.

*With each album in this post, I’ve tried to choose a representative track that was not featured on my Best tunes list for 1990, partly to show the breadth of each and partly to avoid being repetitive.

**I’ve often thought that it could have been Jane’s and not Nirvana that broke alternative to the mainstream, had they managed to survive the touring cycle for this album.

***There were a number of attempts at reforming over the years but none have really stuck up to now.

Stay tuned for album #5 on this list. In the meantime, you can check out my Best Albums page here if you’re interested in my other favourite albums lists.

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Albums

Best albums of 1990: Honourable mentions

It’s been nearly two months since I wrapped up my last mini series. So it’s about time to do another, right?

Right.

It actually occurred to me while drafting those comeback posts back in February and looking back over all the best albums series I’ve done over the years, that I hadn’t done a historical piece in a while. 1990 was the year that I opened up this blog with, starting a series on my top 30 tunes for that year so that seemed a good place to pick up, given I’m on a roll with this return to blogging. I’m actually reusing the above pic from the page that sums up that entire list, both for nostalgia’s sake and for taking the path of least resistance.

I won’t rehash all the words that I already spilled on said page but suffice to say, 1990 was an important year for music for me. It was just around that time that I was getting into alternative music and because it was pre-Internet, some of the albums on this list were discovered, and appreciation gained for them, in the handful of years following their initial release.

With this post, I am sharing a smattering of albums (in alphabetical order) that are great and mean a lot to me but landed just outside of my top ten favourites. I plan to post the rest of this series every week or so, intermingling them with our regularly scheduled programming. The next one in the series will feature albums ten through six and the posts that follow will each proclaim the greatness of my top five albums for the year. The series may take a month or two when all is said and done, but bear with me. It should be fun.

Cocteau Twins “Heaven or Las Vegas”: Not only my gateway* to the band but likely also for many others, given that the 6th full-length release by the legendary dream pop outfit was their most commercially successful – more intelligible lyrics from Elizabeth Fraser than usual and a very slight deeper leaning into pop from their typical experimentation were the likely culprits.
Check out: “Cherry-coloured funk”

Happy Mondays “Pills ‘n’ thrills and bellyaches”:  Eventually, I got over my prejudice against the mythical Madchester group for the part they played in bankrupting Factory Records** and moved past the couple of tracks with which I was already familiar, care of a mixed tape a friend made for me, and I fell hard for the ‘Mondays’ best selling record – yep, it’s druggy, danceable, and chaotic fun.
Check out: “Step on”

Inspiral Carpets “Life”:  The debut album by the Manchester quintet was chock full of dance floor ready boppers made distinctive by the singspeak vocals of Tom Hingley and the swirling organs of Clint Boon and it might even have cracked my top 10 had the wonderful standalone single, “Commercial rain”, actually been on this one.
Check out: “This is how it feels”

James “Gold mother”: Manchester stalwarts James first came to my attention with this, their third album, albeit a few years late***, but even still, I didn’t fully come to appreciate it until much later, after years of listening to later albums where the large group’s big sound became more fully developed. Nevertheless, a great introduction.
Check out: “Top of the world”

The Lightning Seeds “Cloudcuckooland”: Ian Broudie’s debut album as The Lightning Seeds was britpop before britpop was even a thing – and we know how much I love britpop****… so many great tracks that wouldn’t have sounded out of place at any point during the british alternative boom.
Check out: “Pure”

*This, after many years of trying and failing to find some common ground with the band and at least, a couple dozen spins of this particular album.

**It took a long time, though, because Northside, one of my favourite Manchester bands at the time, got caught up in said bankruptcy and never managed to release their sophomore album.

***After it was reissued for the US audience as the eponymously named album with the instantly recognizable flower on the cover and included a new version of the classic “Sit down“. A bunch of us were given copies of this CD at a high school CFNY video dance party and many never listened to it. Much like the Inspirals album here, “Gold mother” might’ve cracked the top ten if “Sit down” were on the original release.

****And as I’ve written about before on these pages, I came to The Lightning Seeds late – they somehow escaped my adoration for many years!

I’ll be back very soon with albums #10 through #6 for my Best albums of 1990 list. In the meantime, you can check out my Best Albums page here if you’re interested in my other favourite albums lists.