Tag Archives: 90s

Album of the Month: Girlfriend – Redux

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Girlfriend
Girlfriend

“Nothing Lasts”
by Matthew Sweet
from the album Girlfriend
1991
Buy the album on Amazon

When Lance wrote up this album last week, it was pretty spot on. I completely agree with him that it’s one of the rare albums with nary a skippable song. I associate this album most strongly with my high school friend Joel Robinson (not of MST3K fame), as we had a shared love of it from the time it first came out. It is indeed a perfect album. I don’t want to rehash what Lance went into, but just to expand on a couple of points (and I’m going to ramble here entirely too long to just add it as an article comment)…

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October Soundtracks: Romeo + Juliet

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Romeo + JulietRomeo + Juliet
1996
Buy the album on Amazon

I was a big fan of this movie when it came out and (though I still for some reason haven’t seen Strictly Ballroom) it made me an ongoing big fan of Baz Luhrman. It was the coolness and fun and frenetic energy of it, it was Leonardo DiCaprio, fresh from The Basketball Diaries, and the totally cute MSCL-era Claire Danes, and a great cast all around, like Harold Perrineau in drag and John Leguizamo being bad-ass, and it was the music (2 new Radiohead songs!), etc. On a personal level, I also really enjoyed it because in my sophomore year of high school, our theater department put on this play, and I was the Friar, and quite frankly, I didn’t really understand everything that I was saying. Seeing the masterful Pete Postlethwaite at work, it all became totally clear to me.

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Orphan Songs: “The Ballad of Winnie”

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Pearls Before Swine
Pearls Before Swine

“The Ballad of Winnie”
by Tribe after Tribe
from the album Pearls Before Swine
1997
Buy the album on Amazon

Scattered throughout my digital library are lonely orphan songs which contain the only appearance from that particular artist in my collection.  Most of these come from a time when file-sharing was new and exciting.  You’d search for a bunch of random stuff you had heard about but had never seen in a store, or maybe had a jonzing for that catchy track you heard on the radio.  Every search was an attempt to fill up the empty hours at night and the megabytes on your hard drive.  Most of these songs have been lost to time,  played once and forgotten.  Most are missing key pieces of metadata.  But every now and then one of those songs will stick out.  It’ll make the move from computer to computer.  You might even end up buying a higher bit rate version later on iTunes or Amazon.  And if when it comes on shuffle, which is rare in a sea of complete discographies and ever-increasing collections, you’ll listen to it and remember. Continue reading Orphan Songs: “The Ballad of Winnie” →

Album of the Month: Girlfriend by Matthew Sweet

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Girlfriend

Girlfriend
by Matthew Sweet
1991
Buy the Legacy Edition on Amazon

Chris and I have been talking about doing full album reviews ever since we started MNP a few months ago.  We recently set a goal of one album per month from each of us, which seemed manageable at the time, particularly since we had no other rules regarding what to pick or how to go about covering it.  You’d think it would be awesome having the ability to choose any album ever made, throughout all time and space but fuck if it’s not totally stressful – particularly on the first go-around.  You want to pick something great to initiate your catalog but at the same time you don’t to completely blow your load and have nowhere to go.  While my wheels were turning I became aware of the dates quickly advancing towards the end of the month, I have to get the entry done by the 31st.  The 31st, that date means a lot to me, which I’ll get into later… but it did make this album pop into mind and when I started doing a bit of research, I came across another interesting fact:

Twenty-three years ago today, Matthew Sweet released his masterpiece of an album, Girlfriend.

That sealed the deal.  My first album of the month will be Girlfriend. Continue reading Album of the Month: Girlfriend by Matthew Sweet →

Belly: “Feed the Tree”

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Star“Feed the Tree”
by Belly
from the album Star
1993
Buy the album on Amazon

I didn’t know much about Tanya Donnelly when this song came out. Throwing Muses had been in one Venn circles of the type of music I was mainly into, but I had never been that exposed or into them. I knew her more from being part of the Breeders’ first couple of albums. When this song came out, though, I got hooked, and got really into Belly and a lot of her later solo work (some day I’ll do a proper full album post of Star, which is a great album).

I even tried this once at karaoke because, well, yes I love it, but also because admittedly I really liked our friend Matt’s karaoke version of Lisa Loeb’s Stay, and was wondering if this song could match it. The song might, but my version was fairly horrible. I’m certainly not opposed to singing female songs, but wasn’t a match for this one.

October Soundtracks: Trainspotting

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Trainspotting
Trainspotting

Trainspotting: Music from the Motion Picture
1996
Buy the album on Amazon

I’m not a junkie or even a dabbler, but most of my favorite films are wrapped in heavy layer of drug use and overdose references: Dazed and Confused, SLC Punk!, Requiem for a Dream and Trainspotting.  It’s probably some weird escapism thing – watching a life I’ve never lived, the same way we’re fascinated by alien invasions in science fiction.  Big characters in outrageous situations.  Seeing the best and worst of people.  Depression.  Darkness.  Great soundtracks.  Trainspotting pretty captures all of those things.

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October Soundtracks: The Doom Generation

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The Doom GenerationThe Doom Generation
1995
Buy the album on Amazon

There are entirely too many great soundtracks I’d like to post for this month’s theme. So either I have to start posting with a much higher frequency, or we’re going to need to have this theme another time in the future. Since I can barely handle once a week, I guess it will have to be the latter. Anyhoo, on to this week’s post.

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Orbital: “The Box”

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In Sides“The Box”
by Orbital
from the album In Sides
1996
Buy the album on Amazon

Short and sweet today, but time to share what’s probably my favorite music video ever (though that’s a short list – I can’t remember many off the top of my head). I used to live with a friend who was big into MTV’s Amp, which got me a little bit into it (the MTV’s Amp compilation album is a pretty good mix), and I’m pretty sure that’s when I first saw this. It’s just delightfully weird and Tilda Swinton is awesomely quirky and odd as ever. This also came out when i was an animation student, so seeing a cool live action iteration of techniques probably made this stick with me as well.

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October Soundtracks: Twin Peaks and Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me

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Twin Peaks“Twin Peaks”
by Angelo Badalamenti
from the album Music from Twin Peaks
1990
Buy the album on Amazon

“Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me”
by Angelo Badalamenti
from the album Music from Twin Peaks
1992
Buy the album on Amazon

Lance mentioned that Monday was craptastic in his last post, and I would upgrade that to the entire week shaping up to being pretty crapperific, However, the best thing I’ve heard all week was the reboot of Twin Peaks. Hell. Yes. That made me so happy. So then made me realize these two albums would make great entries for this month’s theme. Not entirely in the MNP vein (not that that’s ever stopped me) but they came out in the exact same formative time as most the other things we post here.

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October Soundtracks: Pump Up the Volume

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Pump Up The Volume
Pump Up The Volume

Pump Up the Volume
1990
Buy the album on Amazon

Since the theme choice is mine, it means I get to swoop in and do this entry before Lance does, since I know it would be at or near the top of his list as well (which is not to say he might not write his own entry about it). Maybe not the soundtrack to end all soundtracks (though it may just be), but certainly the movie of movies to me, and it’s tough for me to express just how important this movie and soundtrack were to me in my impressionable youth. I’m going to try hard not to write too much about the movie, because some day I’ll write a proper entry about it in the Movies category, but this came out right around the beginning of my freshman year of high school,  when I was just starting to become the MNP person I am today.

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