No Doubt - Tragic Kingdom (1995) By Samantha Greenberg
The world is harsh when you're 15. You hate everyone and no one likes you. You're emotional and erratic. The pop-ska anthems of No Doubt's first album are certainly tailor-made for you. You listen to "Don't Speak" when you're crying and alone. You belt out "Just a Girl" and "Excuse Me Mr." in the car with your friends. You sang "Sixteen" and "Sunday Morning" in front of the mirror. Or at least I did.
True story, for about a year, my cell phone answering machine message was the chorus from "Spiderwebs":
"Sorry I'm not home right now I'm walking into spiderwebs So leave a message And I'll call you back." It was angsty but not depressed. Pop-y but not saccharine. Girly but not weak. I got the album when it came out and I was all of 6 years old. I don't know what my father, who introduced me to David Bowie and The Who, was thinking when he let me get that CD. He loves me that much, I guess. Tragic Kingdom was my music. It was my taste - not something that my dad taught me to like or my friends suggested. It's an album that, from start to finish, is completely unskippable. Not one song falls short. The sound may be repetitive but the energy (and horns) keep it from feeling stale. To this day, it remains highly played on my iTunes account. I may reach for it less and less but I'm always happy when a Tragic Kingdom song comes on shuffle. I know it's not the best musically or lyrically or conceptually. But our favorite albums aren't always based on logic - they come from memories and emotions and time. For what I wanted, for what it gave me, Tragic Kingdom is the best. Track list:
1. Spiderwebs 2. Excuse Me Mr. 3. Just A Girl 4. Happy Now? 5. Different People 6. Hey You 7. The Climb 8. Sixteen 9. Sunday Morning 10. Don't Speak 11. You Can Do It 12. World Go 'Round 13. End It On This 14. Tragic Kingdom
Wanna write about your own favourite record? Just holla, yo.
Weezer - Weezer (or, The Blue Album) (1994) By Nathan Crouch
You can’t write about Nirvana’s ‘Nevermind’ without talking about ‘grunge’. You can’t discuss King Crimson without saying ‘prog’. No overview of either Oasis or Blur could ever be complete without reference to the journalist-fuelled battle for ‘Britpop’ glory that dominated their early history, despite how different they were, and how little either cared for the crown. Some albums are so synonymous with a certain sound that it becomes impossible to write a retrospective review without taking this into account. This can prove frustrating for the artists themselves, as almost all of these musical buzzwords are the pigeon-holing brainchildren of journalists, and a lot of the time these buzzwords place far more focus on the look of a band than its sound. Unfortunately for Weezer, this proved to be the case, for when their debut album emerged in 1994, the pigeonhole parade took one look at the cover and cast them as ‘Nerd Rock’ until their dying days. Within their sound may be contained the gain-heavy power chord freak outs of Pixies, the sweetly acoustic serenading of Cat Stevens, and a fair few (simplified) solos stolen from the glory days of Glen Danzig, but despite all of this, they wore glasses. Not only in public, but on stage, and in music videos. In addition, not a single one of their songs was about drug addiction – no winking references to spoons, no reports on visits to Dr Greenthumb, not even a passing mention of anything ‘brown’. Indeed, it seems that when lead singer Rivers Cuomo chimes about how much he enjoys hanging out ‘In The Garage’, it’s less for its hot-boxing potential and more about an irony-free desire for Dungeons and Dragons and X-Men comics.
Wherein lies Weezer’s main appeal on their debut ten-track pop masterpiece: as with all great music, it’s incredibly honest. All the best musicians find the best ways to convey where they come from, be it Compton, Trench Town, Outer Space (google ‘Sun Ra’), or in this case, Suburban Nowheresville, Connecticut. No band who puts a couplet like ‘Come sit next to me, pour yourself some tea’ in the opening song of their first album could be aiming for street-cred, and it would almost be embarrassing to sing along to on the bus with your headphones were it not for the magic of Weezer: they sang infectiously catchy songs that make you not care about how lame you may look dancing to them, because you’re having too much fun. They would often recall the crooning pop numbers of Buddy Holly, with a modern post-Pixies adherence to loud-quiet-loud that gels perfectly - take the distortion out of ‘Holiday’ and you’ve got the sound of a hit 50’s 7 inch. From Holly to glam rock, at its best the Weezer sound is a compendium of every music that teenagers at various points enjoyed putting on in their bedrooms and turning up loud for the pure joy of rocking out, free of inhibition.
What differs ‘The Blue Album’ from the later, suckier work of Weezer on albums like ‘Make Believe’ is the subtle blend of angst and insecurity that infuses ostensibly happy numbers like ‘In The Garage’, and conversely the notes of hope and optimism that run through more miserable titles like ‘The World Has Turned and Left Me Here’. Latter-era Weezer are a little too content to wear their emotions on their sleeves, picking one feeling per song from the emotional spectrum and sticking to it, but the Weezer of yore had a wonderful way of making sad songs sound happy, and vice versa.
Thus, the success of ‘The Blue Album’ is a simple formula: ten perfectly crafted pop songs, from bouncy 3/4 opener ‘My Name Is Jonas ‘ to the dreamy walking bassline that fuels closing 8 minute wonder ‘Only In Dreams’, that encapsulate the main advantage of being a nerd: the ability to enjoy cheesy nerd things without giving a shit. And that’s pretty cool.
Interesting side-note: The influence of this album has stretched far and wide, to bands as bizarrely un-weezer-ish as Deftones and Biffy Clyro, who have both covered tracks from this album – it is certainly worth seeking out the latter’s rendition of ‘Buddy Holly’ as an example of artistic license gone magnificently insane. Remember that episode of ‘Family Guy’ where Peter turns a production of ‘The King and I’ into a war epic about robots from Space? This is the audio equivalent of that:
I bought this album after seeing At the Drive-In deliver a blistering version of One Armed Scissor on Jools Holland, then whizz a chair past Robbie Williams’ head when they finished. This performance summed up the feel of the album exactly, a startling combination of noise and energy leaning occasionally towards the unhinged/bat-shit mental.
Opener Arcarsenal slowly builds up before exploding into life, and is followed by one post-hardcore monster after another. Listening to songs like Cosmonaut and Sleepwalk Capsules feel like being driven the wrong way down a motorway, whilst Enfilade and Quarantined are brilliantly edgy slow-burners.
The energy of the songs is backed up by lyrics ranging from the baffling (“Lazarus threw the party, Lazarus threw the fight,” “this syringe will take a lifetime, it’s filled with bait and tackle”) to the powerful – particularly Invalid Litter Dept.’s account of the Ciudad Juarez drug murders. All of this is delivered in Cedric Bixler-Zavala’s inimitable yelp, although Iggy Pop gives a good attempt to mimic it when he turns up on Rolodex Propaganda.
When At the Drive-In broke up after this, their next bands they formed showed what each individual brought to the band, with Bixler-Zavala’s The Mars Volta producing staggeringly creative but frustratingly inconsistent music, whilst Jim Ward’s Sparta were solidly competent almost to the point of boring. However on Relationship of Command they each take their respective Lennon and McCartney roles, with Ward helping to shape Bixler-Zavala’s creativity into something resembling coherent song structures. What this leaves you with is one of the greatest punk records ever written.
