'Cocaine Nights'

Part detective novel and part dystopian 1984, you keep waiting for Cocaine Nights to turn the corner. With all the secrets and all the mystery, the wizard is behind the curtain pulling all the levers. Then you get to the final 10 pages and realize there is no wizard, no curtain and no levers. There’s no resolution. There’s no real end. Characters and plots are interchangeable and the book could go on forever, but why tell the same story over again? It all sort of makes you depressed.

'A Northern Soul'

A story of a band that breaks up all the time.

Basically, Richard Ashcroft is kind of a hard guy to get along with for one reason or another. I’m sure it’s not all his fault, but when you consider its him getting punched in the face by his guitar player and him having to reconcile with the drummer, bassist and same guitar player during a second break-up, you can see that there’s a central figure in all of this.

The band first broke up after the success of their break-out album A Northern Soul. Chiding their psychedelic first album, the band loosed the chains on Ashcroft’s lilting vocals and wrote basic rock songs.

Right before the release of their third single, Ashcroft broke the band up.

Although noting no regret, he got the band back together with a new guitar player about a year later. Next thing they know they are mega worldwide superstars thanks to the hit single “Bitter Sweet Symphony.”

Then they broke up again.

Six years later they reunited. Then they broke up again. This time for good, or so everyone thinks. 

'Yank Crime' & 'Scream, Dracula, Scream!'

This might be a first (and only) for the 1,001 Records You Should Listen To Before You Die.

Plenty of artists are involved in multiple records on the list. For example, The Beatles or Elvis Costello. But very few are involved with two different albums from two different bands within a year of each other.

This is the case with John Reis and his two bands, Drive Like Jehu and Rocket from the Crypt.

Reis was in the band Pitchfork (had the website Pitchfork been around in the late 1980s, I’m sure they would’ve given the band a poor review) with Rick Froberg. Pitchfork died and Reis’ attentions went two different directions. He formed the post-punk/hardcore outfit Drive Like Jehu with Froberg and Rocket from the Crypt, a punk band, basically.

“Different” doesn’t do the two bands justice. Rocket is a collection of two-minute, three-chord punk songs. Drive Like Jehu are orchestrated eight-minute multi-sectioned compositions with heavy guitars interconnecting into crescendo and release.

The two bands released eponymous debuts in 1991. Drive Like Jehu released its only other record, Yank Crime, in 1994 (which seems like a lifetime after Nevermind) and Rocket released Scream, Dracula, Scream! a year later. Drive Like Jehu promptly broke up even though they were the superior band, but there’s no accounting for taste, I guess.  

Ever friends, Reis and Froberg formed another band, Hot Snakes, together several years later. 

'Queens Of The Stone Age'

I like a band with an identity, with a home. Upon releasing their eponymous album lead singer and guitarist Josh Homme said, "I just wanted to start a band that within three seconds of listening, people knew what band it was.”

No one is like Queens of the Stone Age. I can pick out one of their songs within probably 10-15 seconds of the song starting. Furthermore, they’re probably one of the more unforgiving bands to have a hit on rock radio the last 25 years. “No One Knows” from Songs For the Deaf is as scorching of a song as the Queens have released and it’s still really great.

The Queens’ roots go down to the stoner rock group Kyuss. After they broke up, Homme toured with the Screaming Trees and eventually decided to start a new band. After several line-ups, it settled on Alfredo Hernandez on drums and (after completion of the album) Nick Oliveri on bass (Homme played bass on this album). Of course, Homme, Hernandez and Oliveri were essentially Kyuss.

Queens also has its roots in the deserts of southern California and you hear it in the music. There’s a dry irritation and heat that comes off the songs. It’s stark and scary. It runs hot and yet you can’t get away from the cold nights. It’s rock music for coyotes. 

'Shadowlands' & 'Ingénue'

Not to take away from the massive steps forward the United States has made in accepting of the homosexual community, but k.d. lang came out of the closet in 1992, during the very heart of her massively successful career. And no one seemed to care.

lang is sorta weird for several reasons, none of which include her sexual preference.

For one, she sings and plays pretty weird music. At the time, however, it was popular to like country-ish pop, easy-listenin’ rock. It’s why Bonnie Raitt sold about 10 billion albums and why Dwight Yoakum wound up so popular that he became a part-time actor.

k.d. lang got popular by playing this moody country adult contemporary that nobody that liked country listened to but everyone that was pretty lame loved. There is no way this should have been popular. The only explanation was that it happened in the 1990s and a lot of weird things happened in music during the 1990s.

What also is weird is that the United States fully embraced an openly gay celebrity. The same year she “came out of the closet,” lang’s album, Ingénue, went double platinum. Double platinum. It was mega-popular. Every one over the age of 30 bought this album. These are the same people that 20 years later are thumping their Bibles and bemoaning the rhetoric of same-sex marriage, basically condemning the country as a modern Sodom. In fact, they did more for normalizing homosexuality than anyone.

Plus, lang is Canadian.

k.d. lang is extremely popular and there’s no viable reason why she should be outside of the fact that Americans love lesbian Canada pseudo-country contemporary adult pop music. Go figure. 

'Ring'

A horror film about a ghoul that scares people to death. The victims aren't eaten or beaten. They see what they see and their heart stops with fear.

Now that's a horror film.

'Faith' & 'Listen Without Prejudice, Vol. 1'

I've never understood why George Michael was such a polarizing guy. I guess in conservative America in the 1980s a blatantly homosexual singer could turn heads. Then again, he sold a gajillion records, so most people had little problem with his sexuality at this point.

But my memory of the late 1980s might not be as accurate as I perceive. I don't remember a time when George Michael was never a heterosexual. And I'm starting to question that memory only because I recollect a time when I thought Michael was pretty cool with that quaffed hair, the stubble, earrings, leather jackets and sunglasses perpetually perched on his nose.

Michael admits to bisexuality and (despite Wham! being incredibly gay) basically going through women like air during his heyday of the 1980s.

Reading more about the guy, the more I sorta respect him. If you take his quotes as gospel about how he really feels, sexuality had less to do with how they were attracted to a male or female form. It had to do with love. He thought he was a heterosexual in the 1980s because he was in love with a woman. It had less to do with who he wanted to have sex with (I only assume he had sex with whoever he was in love with). Then, he fell in love with some guys and he's not so much heterosexual anymore.

I also get the feeling that George Michael is in love with falling in love.

Later, when Michael's sexuality was pretty well known and he started to get into legal trouble he suddenly became an uninteresting lightning rod that occasionally released pop records.

He's just a man who loves his anonymous sex in roadside bathrooms. It was one time!

OK, it was two times. And he likes weed. No big deal.

The guy's been around for 30+ years now and if enjoying things enjoyed also by heterosexuals (weed, sex with strangers) is the guy's biggest pockmark, then I think that's OK.

'Viva Hate' & 'Your Arsenal' & 'Vauxhall and I' & 'You Are The Quarry'

Should someone that records so prolificly as Morrissey be such a person in demand?

I remember when You Are The Quarry was released and it was a major deal. I assumed that The Smiths quit playing together and the get went into hiding (granted, it was his first album in seven years). But I feel like he's done enough to be a pretty accessible artist. I mean, you can have all the Morrissey you really want.

I don't much care for his music and I'm not a huge Smiths fan in the least. Morrissey is actually kinda of a boring subject although almost everyone I know either loves him or hates him.

I don't know if any recording artist of Morrissey's stature to maybe be known for being a vegetarian as much as he is known for being the lead singer of one of the best bands of a particular decade. It's like equating Paul McCartney with being left handed rather than one of The Beatles.

Morrissey is almost equally as known for his questionable sexuality and being an odd sex symbal not necessarily for his looks (he's not terrible looking) but for being a songwriter that wrote about being awkward, out of sorts and depressed. People latched onto that and made them kindred spirits to the point of being boyfriend and girlfriend.

Most like, he is bisexual although publicly he likes playing word games (once calling himself "humasexual" for being attracted to humans) and avoiding any one stereotype because he knows that girls and boys love him just the same. Gotta keep selling those records.

'Phaedra' & 'Leftism'

I was set to present these two albums (neither are which are bad, by any means) only because they reminded me of each other only because they're both electronic music with sparse lyrics.

The two are actually very, very different (although I bet Leftfield played the hell out of Phaedra when they were growing up).

Phaedra from Tangerine Dream is a sequencer-driven prog album from the 1970s and, most notably, from Germany. I mean, who was doing weirder shit than the art-school Germans in the 1970s? No one, that's who.

Imagine Pink Floyd if they dumped all of the guitars, drums and bass ... and songs lasted 10 minutes a piece.

Leftism is 1990s British trip-hop. And it's very good. If you're the type to throw a party you probably would not go wrong with this album.

Two different albums, but both are brilliant examples of two important sub-genres of recorded music.

'Music For A Jilted Generation' & ' The Fat Of The Land'

Prodigy is known for one thing, really, and that’s their single from Fat of the Land, “Smack My Bitch Up.” The amount of press that they got for the lyric in addition to the video can’t possibly be placed in some monetary perspective. Although, it’s safe to say that they probably couldn’t have bought that much attention.

The irony is that it’s a sampled lyric.

'Connected'

Robert Christgau, famed music critic, said that this album is "so multifaceted that its functionality is fungible and forgettable."

See, even Christgau didn’t have anything to say about it.

'Screamadelica' & 'Vanishing Point'

Another installment of “1990s rock bands that I should’ve been listening to in the 1990s.” Two tremendous albums from a band that started in the heart of New Wave. 

Both their acid house and straight rock efforts are tremendous. Even the heavier sound of (due in part to hiring Gary Mounfield from the broken up Stone Roses) is only so low as the highs felt in the bubbly and danceable Screamadelica.

Vanishing Point

As a side note, the band was – like any group of artists from Scotland in the 1990s – heavy drug users and by the mid-1990s they were all heavy heroin addicts. 

In his feature on the band, James Brown reported that the band were arguing between Vietnamese, Chinese or Indian. When someone interjected with the idea of a hamburger, it was found out that the subject was not food, but heroin. 

Two must haves or any fan of 1990s rock music. The albums, not drugs.

'Henry's Dream' & 'Murder Ballads' & 'The Boatman's Call' & 'Abattoir Blues/The Lyre of Orpheus'

It seemed a daunting task diving into four albums of Nick Cave’s five-minute dirges. I tackled it head on: Just queued all four up in a row and spent three hours mowing through them.

I’m no Nick Cave fan, but I’m not one to hate him either. I will probably not listen to these albums again but I can appreciate a guy that’s made a pretty nice career for himself doing semi-melodic spoken-word albums steeped in story telling straight from the hard edge of the Australian bush. Truly, if Cave has any cohort in this world, it’s Johnny Cash. He’s not the best singer, his music isn’t the most pleasant to listen to, but he’s ghoulish from the subject matter, to wardrobe and overall presentation.

I must say this: It sorta floors me that Cave somehow got four albums onto the 1,001 list. Good, but not four-album good.