12. Possum Dixon, Star Maps This is one of the albums that drove home for me that commercial alternative radio was going to follow a different path than my old, preferred home of college radio. Possum Dixon’s second full-length, Star … Continue reading College Countdown: 90FM’s Top 90 of 1996, 12 and 11
The mad rush to the end of the year continues at Spectrum Culture. Everyone’s been doing their best to pull together various “best of” features while still making sure we still continue to crank out the regular new material. It’s fun (especially for a dork like me who enjoys wedging his media interests into list form, which the tags over there on the right certainly indicate), but a little exhausting, too. And it’s made even more busy when a feature we’ve been working on for ages comes to fruition at the exact same time. It took over a year for … Continue reading Spectrum Check
I’ve usually had fairly conventional picks for the best album of the year, to my dismay (I have a niggling desire to be more iconoclastic than I really am). There have been exceptions, though. One of those occurred in 1995, probably because I was enduring the overly conventional to a tedious degree thanks the playlists I was handed at the commercial radio station where I worked. While most of the cool kids’ lists were topped by the likes of Radiohead, the Smashing Pumpkins and Björk, I was ready to tell everyone who’d listen that the actual greatest achievement in recorded … Continue reading One for Friday: Mike Watt, “Heartbeat”
14. Golden Smog, Down by the Old Mainstream Golden Smog has a longer history than their best-known recorded history suggests. First formed in 1989 by a batch of Minneapolis musicians with pretty good day jobs (like the Replacements and Soul … Continue reading College Countdown: 90FM’s Top 90 of 1996, 14 and 13
We’re winding down to the end of the year at Spectrum Culture, so there’s a lot going into prep for that. I’m spending so much time trying trying to assemble my various lists–mostly extensive listening and re-listening to the most interesting music of the year–that keeping up with the new stuff week to week becomes kind of dizzying. For example, I have to keep reminding myself that I’ve got a late contender for the Best Albums list in the latest from White Denim. This also represents one of the few times (maybe the first time) that I’ve returned to a … Continue reading Spectrum Check
I guess we can’t have nice things. I remember the very moment I found out about Wild Flag. I was in my community’s finest record store, indulging in my usual practice of compulsively checking the Sleater-Kinney section, even though my collection was basically complete (I’m still lacking the self-titled debut in case anyone is looking for a holiday gift-giving idea). As I forlornly muttered about the demise of the band and my own inability to ever see them play live, the gentleman behind the counter gently directed me to a flyer on the front door of the shop. Sure enough, … Continue reading One for Friday: Wild Flag, “See No Evil”
16. Various Artists, William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet soundtrack Yet another soundtrack, but this time I get it. And not just because a copy of this one still sits on our household CD shelf. Like a lot of director Baz Luhrmann’s films, his kinetic adaptation of Romeo and Juliet is such a melange of music and imagery, essentially the culminating cinematic product of the heavy MTV influence from the prior decade, that getting the soundtrack comes across as almost a necessity, a way to openly acknowledge the fingerprints Luhrmann has left on the mind, for good or ill. Surely it … Continue reading College Countdown: 90FM’s Top 90 of 1996, 16 and 15
Considering it was a short week, I had a lot of material up at Spectrum Culture. The most challenging piece to write was my “Revisit” on Lawrence Kasdan’s The Big Chill, part of my ongoing attempt to exhaust all of my pop culture touchstones for the site. I suspect the result reads as a little more unkind towards the film than my actual, official stance on it, but I went where the writing took me. The other film I wrote on was a new documentary on Bettie Page. I picked it up because of the promise that the famously private … Continue reading Spectrum Check
For all the fondness and pride I have when I look back at my college radio years, I’m also amused by all the instances when my alma mater station proved to be far from prescient. Given the span of years when I happily toiled as an undergrad in the poster-laden studios, I’d love to be able to report that we were truly among the first to play the bands that would eventually become a sacred part of the indie firmament. But I don’t actually remember us giving a whole lot of airtime to, say, Bleach before Nevermind. For a college … Continue reading One for Friday: Dream Warriors, “Wash Your Face in My Sink”
18. Rusted Root, Remember Surely I’m not the only one who assumed that Rusted Root didn’t exist much past their fine breakthrough single, “Send Me On My Way,” right? Of course, there’s also no real reason I should have jumped … Continue reading College Countdown: 90FM’s Top 90 of 1996, 18 and 17
Coffee for Two 