The best easy listening/big beat/exotica/pedal steel-record of the year. It’s a mood bath. There’s hardly anything there, but I do so enjoy to hear BJ’s pedal steel snaking through Vibert’s expansive soundscapes, whether they consist of standard big beats and sampled rappers, reductionist Hawaiian or Chinese music, or attempts at a free form narcotic haze. At its best it’s like pasting a photoshopped picture of a Pacific island beach on the windows of your mind, sitting back and enjoying it.
At its best: Swing lite-alright, Start the panic, Nice cave, Fly Hawaii
149. Outkast: Stankonia
The sound of the future. It’s undeniably good. Why not top 100? It’s close, but for some reason I’ve never totally clicked with the record. It’s kind of a hard, sterile, alien record, little room for reflection or nuance – the only track that makes room ‘Toilet tisha’ is a wordplay on toilet tissue, sorry, that won’t do. And, of all the hip hop records of 2000, there’s some lyrical content here (about women) that sorrows me, which is surprising as they’re supposed to be the ‘progressive’ rappers. Still, the hoes and sex stuff here offends me far more than the freak caricature of Eminem or the gangster movie posing of the Wu-Tang. This stuff seems real.
At its best: Ms Jackson, I’ll call before I come, X-Plosion, Stankonia
148. Clinic: Internal wrangler
Clinic couldn’t miss becoming a cult band in 2000. If it wasn’t the anonymity and the surgeon’s uniforms, then it was the amazing songtitles (‘Voodoo wop’, ‘The return of Evil Bill’, ‘Hippy death suite’, ‘DJ Shangri-La’). And if it wasn’t that, it was the –can’t miss- combination of influences and sounds: trippy melodica, cavernous organ notes, found sounds, jerky post-punk rhythms, high pitched singing like disembodied spirits. I swear I heard the 13th Floor Elevators’ lost jug in there somewhere. It was just pitch perfect for journalist cultdom.
At this remove, it’s still tremendous fun (I didn’t hear it at the time, so it’s new to me) and it’s out the door before you’re fully aware the songs are somewhat lacking. I wouldn’t miss, and when they hit, they hit. I mean, ‘Distortions’ would do the Velvet Underground proud. For real. They’ve got some growing to do, but that’s ok.
At its best: The second line, Distortions, Goodnight Georgie
147. Cat power: Covers record
I can never decide if this is some fragile beauty or blank-faced ineptitude. Probably a bit of both, but I swear when the lights hit it just right it resembles something very close to real emotion.
At it best: Satisfaction, Kingsport town, I found a reason, Wild is the wind
146. Chieftains: Water from the well
This record reminds me of the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band’s ‘Will the circle be unbroken’. A modern roots band taking up the challenge of surveying the entire landscape of their musical tradition, covering all the bases (songs, lots of instrumentals, dance music, sad music, a cappella singing, more instrumental music), and generally using the record as a set-up to meet and play with the great traditional artists of the past, on their own classics. Just that in this case it’s not country and western but Irish folk. And of course the Chieftains have been an ongoing concern since before the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band had even met.
I know next to nothing about the Chieftains, they like to have guest stars on their albums or be guest stars on other people’s records. But this is the first album by them I heard, and probably the first Irish folk album I’ve heard. It takes a couple of listens to sink in, but I’m well on the way. There’s something about those flutes, and the harp, it’s a bit magical. There’s not much I can say yet, though, it’s all still mysterious. It shouldn’t work, or at least all the components together should definitely make up something dusty and mouldy. It’s almost wrong that instead it feels full of life, and I can recognize those feelings.
At its best: Lots of drops of brandy, Jack of all trades, Planxty George brabazon, An buinnean bui, Casadh an tsugain, An goath aneas
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