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Best tunes of 1993: #13 The Smashing Pumpkins “Disarm”

<< #14    |    #12 >>

For a while in the 1990s, I went off of American music, and to a lesser extent, Canadian music. For a newly minted music geek that felt he had just begun to experience the best that the alternate music world had to offer, Nirvana’s ascent on the scene and the life altering effect that had was like a death knell. And I don’t mean to get down on the Seattle-based trio here because it really was the fault of big music. The dollar signs shone bright green in their eyes and they followed their noses to the west coast, snapping up all the acts there, and when that was done, started sniffing out similar sounding acts the rest of the continent over and in some cases, tipping some more established acts into more consumer friendly territory.

Smashing Pumpkins predated the Seattle renaissance by a few months and their debut album, 1991’s “Gish”, already had prognosticators comparing them favourably to be the next Jane’s Addiction, who at that point were already on their way to implosion. The expectations were high with Virgin executives when the band went back to the studio with the now mystical producer Butch Vig to record their sophomore album. By all accounts, the sessions were fraught with difficulties – drugs and heartbreak and depression – but as we know, from adversity springs beauty and “Siamese dream” is widely considered one of the classic albums of the early 1990s.

I remember hearing them a lot on the radio and despite being initially turned off, given that they were being lumped in with the Seattle grunge heads, still found something palatable in their songs. Yeah, I knew they were from Chicago and wasn’t fooled by the hype machine, but I could also hear something different, an element in their sound that made me not want to turn off the radio. There was something theatrical there, owing more to the goths and noiserockers from the 80s. I went out and got a copy of “Siamese dream” on CD on the strength of these radio singles and quietly became a fan.

And now that I am spilling the beans here, I might as well admit that “Disarm” is the rod that reeled this music fan in. I mean, really… chugging acoustic strumming… haunting chimes… and dramatic intensity heightened by violin and cello strings. It is operatic in scope but not in sound. Billy Corgan spouts dangerous and strong words that got the song banned in some countries but in truth, this is just him dealing with the trauma and pain inflicted upon him by his parents during his youth.

“Disarm you with a smile
And cut you like you want me to
Cut that little child
Inside of me and such a part of you
Ooh, the years burn”

It’s a song that begs to be turned up loud and played on repeat and that I did, on both counts back in the day, often the volume knob easing slightly more clockwise with each listen. Great tune.

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

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Best tunes of 1993: #14 Björk “Human behaviour”

<< #15    |    #13 >>

Has there ever been a performance by an artist, be it of just the one song or their whole set, that completely changed your perception of them? For me, there have been several of these, some of them introductions and some reintroductions. Björk’s performance of “Human behaviour” was one such personal and almost spiritual experience and it wasn’t even a set that I witnessed live, that’s how transformative it was. I can only imagine how it must been for those who witnessed it in the flesh.

I distinctly remember hearing Björk on alternative radio and a big deal being made of her solo debut album, cheekily titled “Debut”. I knew from hearsay that she had been in a band called The Sugarcubes but I wouldn’t properly discover and explore that band’s catalogue and understand what it all meant until many years later. Many of my friends and passing acquaintances throughout the 90s were huge Björk fans, bordering on obsessive and on my side, I also liked pretty much everything I heard, which was quite a lot given how popular she was becoming in the alternative rock realm. I also remember being super impressed by her acting turn in the Lars Von Trier feel-bad movie, 2000’s “Dancer in the dark”. In fact, the music for that film was also so great that the soundtrack by Björk (“Selmasongs”) would be the first album of hers that I would own on CD. After that, though, her art explorations tended to diverge with my own musical tastes and we grew apart.

At some point in the late 2000s, I picked up the Julien Temple directed documentary on “Glastonbury” at the Ottawa Public Library and brought it home with me to watch. I’d always heard that the British music festival was the holy grail of music festivals and based on the lineups that have graced its stages over the years, I’d had held a reverence for it, always dreaming of attending. I was held rapt for the film’s two plus hours and found myself watching a ton of the bonus features, including uncut sets of the some of the iconic performances there over the years. One of these was Björk’s 1994 appearance there, specifically her performance of “Human behaviour”. It was the embodiment of childlike exuberance and animalistic intensity, exuding both sensuality and innocence. She was pixie-like in a slinky pink slip of a dress, racing and marching and flitting about the stage when she wasn’t blowing the speakers wide open with that unique and powerful voice of hers. It further fuelled my desire to go to Glastonbury (which I have yet to do) and forced on me a Björk rethink. I started collecting her early albums on CD and even managed to see her perform live in 2013.

“If you ever get close to a human
And human behaviour
Be ready, be ready to get confused
There’s definitely, definitely, definitely no logic”

Though it is not the only great tune on the aforementioned debut, “Human behaviour” now has its hold on me as my bar none favourite from album. It was track one and released as the first single and incidentally, was written a good five years before its release, back when Björk was still leading The Sugarcubes. It is synth, sample, and percussion heavy, rhythm as a melody, industrial dance, playing second fiddle to Björk, the voice, the magician and artist and shaman. A song that could grace and cross dancefloors of many ilks, high culture, pop culture, low culture, and everything in between.

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

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Best tunes of 1993: #15 Depeche Mode “I feel you”

<< #16    |    #14 >>

Ok. I know I’ve told this story before, at least a part of it, but I’m going to tell it again.

After I graduated high school, I took a year off, partly because I couldn’t afford the steep tuition fees for university and partly because I wasn’t ready. My parents knew it and deep down, I knew it too. It all worked out in the end but at the time, I was pretty sore about it.

The idea was that I would find work and save up. But there was a big flaw in the plan: finding a job in my small hometown was near impossible. I had found a job at a Becker’s Milk in October 1992 but that only lasted six weeks or so, through no fault of mine, and I was back pounding the pavement. I found a bit more luck the following spring when my high school drama teacher’s name on my reference list caught the eye of the owner of one of our town’s more reputable bar and grills. The King Street Bar & Grill, to be exact.

My first scheduled shift was a Thursday night, aka, Wing night, and after about an hour and a half of washing dishes, they finally got me doing some food prep. I was shown the correct way to locate the joints on a chicken wing, handed a big knife and cutting board, and was set to the task of separating the drumette from the wingette and disposing of the tip for three cases of wings. It was mindless and mundane work and if I didn’t love them so much, it might’ve put me off of wings for life.

Luckily for me, I had the radio nearby and the head cook for the night (whose name is forever lost to me) didn’t care if I changed the station, as long as I kept the wings coming. I quickly moved the dial from the country station to which it had been set and found Toronto’s alternative station, still called CFNY at that time. Now I may be remembering this part wrong* but I feel like they used to have a half hour new music show, on which they would test out new songs on the listening audience to see if they would fly in the regular music rotation. And I feel like one of the songs featured that evening was the latest, long awaited single by synth pop icons, Depeche Mode.

This was the age before the internet and I had yet to come across articles featuring the band in the music magazines** and David Gahan’s radically different, long-haired and bearded look. So I had no idea what I was in for when “I feel you” first came on and I was confronted with that screaming intro, followed by the bluesy guitar lick and drum line. The vocals were so obviously Gahan, though, and I fell for the tune from the beginning. I went out and bought the CD, “Songs of faith and devotion”, as soon as I was able, and welcomed the group’s new direction.

To this day, “I feel you” is still one of my favourite Mode tunes, and it came in at number three when I counted down my top five favourites of their 90s tracks. It is an explosion of sex and religion. It is an iconoclastic synth pop band paying tribute to rock without giving in to mass culture. It is a band thirteen years into their career, surviving crises and at the same time, finding a new path. It is heaven and hell at the same time. Hallelujah.

*Whether I am remembering this part right or not, what is indisputable, at least to myself, is that on this night, I heard this song for the very first time.

**This would come in the weeks that followed. First pay check in hand, I went out and purchased a copy of the latest Creem that featured them on the cover and voraciously read the article.

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