You can hang me high for this one if you must, but I’ve never been a huge fan of Gram Parsons’ musical output.  Not quite sure if it’s his voice, the songs themselves or the way they are played, but I just have never been able to get into it that much.  What I am a huge fan of is the influence he brought to bear on rock music in the late 60s and onwards to this day.  Maybe some shun the term “country rock” and there have been some musical train wrecks as a result of that - on both sides of the aisle if you will. 

As a fan of the Olivia Tremor Control, most fit under two modes of thought: those who believe that Dusk At Cubist Castle is their best work; and those who believe Black Foliage: Animation Music is their best work. Neither side is wrong; both works are perfect for very different reasons. The Olivia Tremor Control existed only for a moment it seems – eight short years that only saw two proper albums released, but a slew of EPs, singles, and compilations. It’s a shame because their two proper albums are bold game changers for indie rock in the 90s.

As I sat down to try and write something enlightening about a 48 year old album generally regarded as one of the best ever, I had to wonder, how many people reading this review actually lived through Beatlemania? I firmly believe that if you didn’t, you can listen to all the music, read all the books, and watch all the old Youtube videos, but you will never fully appreciate or understand the phenomenon that it was.

Unrepentant Bowie geek here. So, if this is a bit long, I make no apology. Safe to say, Bowie is my favorite recording artist of all time. I say “is”, because he’s not dead to me. His legacy is far too alive for any of that death nonsense. In terms of his classic 70’s albums, I don’t play favorites. I adore them all. I keep coming back to them and each time I do, I discover something new. 1977’s ‘Heroes’ is no exception.  

When The Cardigans’ infectious brand of indie-fied lounge-pop caught commercial fire in the Fall of 1996 via the irresistibly infectious hit “Lovefool”, fans who flocked to stores to purchase the band’s third album First Band On The Moon (as opposed to the soundtrack for Baz Luhrmann's DiCaprio-led Romeo & Juliet) quickly discovered that the album's genius first single was merely the tip of a much larger iceberg.

There are few debuts as fully realized as that of Portishead’s 1994 release, Dummy. With an unflinching adherence to a jarring, introspective aesthetic, the potency of the album is no less muted by the passage of time, as Dummy remains as indefinable now as it did then. It’s not necessarily a ‘90’s’ album, but it is clearly one of that decade’s most important releases.

A coworker of mine once approached my cubicle – this was a while back – and held up a copy of the Nine Inch Nail’s Pretty Hate Machine and uttered the line “Sometimes it’s just a Pretty Hate Machine day.” We shared a laugh, and it became apparent that her day was filled with frustration, and the only aphrodisiac was Trent Reznor’s most volatile work. This stuck with me for quite some time, and for her anniversary a few years later I presented her with the only album that I went to when I was feeling frustrated – Microcastle which to this day is still packaged with its companion piece Weird Era Cont.

Some albums, great and forgotten, are cut from the blood of hardships, some from the sweat of non-stop touring, some from the tears of break-ups and disappointments; and then there are those cut straight from the bands own pure talents, refined, polished and left to shine in refracted light off their glorious surfaces. Miners dig for stones to uncover and cutters in workshops sculpt to shape rocks into shining jewels. Occasionally works of pure art are born.

It’s been 40 years since ‘The World Turned Day-Glo’ and Poly Styrene & Co. sliced through the ‘Art-I-Ficial’ world of consumerism. Germfree Adolescents is a brutally honest broadside against ‘Genetic Engineering’, poseurs, ‘Warriors in Woolworths’, bandwagon-jumpers searching for their ‘Identity’ in the weeklies and fashion magazines, frustrated about living on the dole because ‘I Can’t Do Anything’.

Like the other Native Tongues acts, A Tribe Called Quest made a name for themselves by blurring genre lines and even artistic media in order to create a diverse, flourishing ecosystem of aesthetic variance. They began to gain a devoted following with their moderately successful debut, 1990’s People's Instinctive Travels and the Paths of Rhythm, which found the group preaching the gospel of positivity through Afrocentric lyrics and spitting witty verses over a minimalist jazz groove. Their signature sound was built around an efficient production that worked as a cultural bridge between generations.