25 Albums to Celebrate 25 Years: 1999
The sky was all purple
Music writer Simon Reynolds was very critical about 1999, “1999 saw no new formations, paradigms, directions—not even a single genre or scene that offered a convincing frisson of novelty. At best, there was continuity from the previous couple of years (2-step/garage; post-Timbaland R&B; house). Mostly, there was just the further petering of sonic narratives into cul-de-sacs of their own construction: drum & bass, minimal techno, IDM, post-rock, ‘glitch.’” Reynolds goes on, longing for “a new explosion, that surge of cultural acceleration.”
The new explosion was in front of our faces the whole time, and even an eight-year old me recognized it. Despite not paying any attention to pop culture at the time, I was still aware of the ‘Britney Spears vs. Christina Aguilera’ and ‘NSYNC vs. Backstreet Boys’ debates, and three particular songs were constantly in my orbit: Britney Spears’ “…Baby One More Time” (technically released in 1998 but it ended up #5 of Billboard Year-End Hot 100 singles of 1999) and Backstreet Boys’ “I Want It That Way,” both courtesy of my older sister, and Celine Dion’s “That’s the Way It Is,” courtesy of living in Canada. All three of those songs have involvement by one Max Martin, who began his ascendency as pop’s mad doctor that year. Also worth pointing out is that Cher’s “Believe,” which, like that Spears song, technically was released in 1998 but didn’t peak on the Billboard Hot 100 until 1999 (where it ended up as #1), was the first song to use auto-tune as texture instead of mere tool, opening up new possibilities (and dumb-ass debates) for decades to come. Reynolds addresses all this in that essay with an easy dismissal, “As for pop.... It was a great year for teenage girls.” Yes, but it felt like a more potent year for teenage girls than normal.
But my response to Reynolds’ anti-1999 thesis is even simpler: was all that not the case of ‘97 or ‘98? Were we not all waiting for the countdown? At least we got lots of good music to tide us over. The sky was all purple… here’s my list:
#25. Keith Jarrett - The Melody at Night, With You
Primarily known for totally improvised piano solo concerts—particularly The Köln Concert—The Melody at Night, With You’s austerity is shocking by contrast. There’s no dazzle here, barely any extended runs or intricate harmonies. In 1996, after a concert in Italy, Jarrett retreated, cancelling the rest of his tour where he learned he was suffering from chronic fatigue syndrome that confined him to his rural New Jersey home. At the end of 1997, Jarrett started playing more and more, resulting in the recording of The Melody at Night, With You: ten mostly standards that have been totally stripped down. “It’s almost as though I was detoxing from standard chordal patterns. I didn’t want any jazz harmonies that came from the brain instead of the heart,” he explained in Time. The highlights for me are the standards I’ve known the longest, particularly opener “I Loves You, Porgy” (my favourite rendition in four decades?), “I Got It Bad And That Ain’t Good” (placed second on the album to prove his illness hasn’t completely sapped him of energy), and “Blame It On My Youth” (which Jarrett merges with the sole new composition on the album). In terms of solo piano from 1999, Gary Giddins crowned John Lewis’ Evolution as the best jazz album of that year, and Brad Mehldau put out his own solo song cycle in Elegiac Cycle, but this album stumbles upon a new way of approaching the solo piano for Jarrett, a night-ambient jazz album.
#24. Eminem - The Slim Shady LP
I don’t listen to Eminem at all anymore, having simply outgrown his shock value humour, and that his beats have not aged well. More than three Dr. Dre beats would’ve made this one more attractive, yes, so long as they don’t feel like leftovers from 2001 (an album with higher highs and lower lows); “My Name Is” is shockingly skeletal for Dre, riding that first hook (Dre scratching the beat, Eminem greeting us, and then Eminem imitating scratching), and then relying on Eminem to carry it through. Eminem’s prodigious level of wordplay and flow is worthy of our admiration so much so that we look the other way when he talks about raping a 15-year old girl by arguing that she already has pubic hair, or jokes about incest-rape on “My Fault,” or the 5-minute song about him and his infant daughter dumping his murdered ex into the river (a terribly boring song and awful hook but it’s that sample of a baby cooing in the background that makes it truly dark). What made this album special in the context of 1999—in the context of charts soon or already dominated by Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera, and Backstreet Boys—is that it sounded fresh and dangerous. What makes this album special in hindsight is that The Slim Shady LP is as honest a portrayal of Marshall Mathers that we will ever receive even though it is named after his alter ego. There are two key songs here, written at the lowest points of his life: “If I Had…,” written in response to the Barenaked Ladies’ “If I Had $1,000,000” after his car broke down, and “Rock Bottom,” written after he was fired before Christmas and was scrambling to get a gift for his daughter. The lines “I feel like I’m walking on a tightrope without a circus net / Popping Percocet, I’m a nervous wreck” clearly come from a real place, even before he revealed that he overdosed while recording the song in 1997. Put another way, after portraying himself here as a young and dumb teenager, when he was called out on his misogyny and homophobia, he did what any young and dumb teenager would do: he doubled down on those fronts to the point of a caricature on his next album.
#23. Handsome Boy Modeling School - So… How’s Your Girl?
A collaboration between hip-hop producers Prince Paul (De La Soul) and Dan the Automator (Dr. Octagonecologyst and Deltron 3030 around the corner), this feels like it should command more respect than it does. It does play like less of an album and more like a producer beat-tape, with a revolving door of different rappers that includes Del the Funky Homosapien, Dave (of De La Soul), Mike D (of Beastie Boys), Sadat X (of Brand Nubian), and El-P among others. I will say that a number of songs—“Magnetizing,” “Megaton B-Boy 2000,” and especially, “The Runway Song”—are close to 5 or even 6 minutes and don’t earn those lengths. And despite all the features the two have assembled, ultimately, only Del actually makes himself heard on these beats (it helps that he also is the only one who performs twice), and the two best songs on the album are ones with no rappers regardless: opener “Rock N’ Roll (Could Never Hip-Hop Like This),” and mid-album highlight “Holy Calamity (Bear Witness II).” The former should have been a rap mantra for the ages and ended up in semi-obscurity, while for the latter, Dan cashes in the favour that DJ Shadow owed him for Dan’s assist on Endtroducing… who goes nuts on the scratches. Both are the best rap bangers on this entire list despite this being one of the lowest-ranked rap albums. Elsewhere, “The Projects (PJays),” with its bluesy harmonica wail, ends up being the last great De La Soul song for quite some time, while the aforementioned “Megaton B-Boy 2000” brings out El-P’s bombed-out basement aesthetic as a surprise closer where it’s much less stifling as a one-off than part of a 70-minute package.
#22. Amadou & Mariam - Tje ni Mousso
Amadou Bagayoko and Mariam Doumbia, known as ‘the blind couple from Mali’ eventually became crossover darlings, contributing to the official 2006 FIFA World Cup anthem and then getting a Grammy nomination for Welcome to Mali, assisted by Damon Albarn (where he tests the waters for Gorillaz’s “Empire Ants”). They left Mali—and three children—early on, having devoted their lives to music but not believing in their chances in their home country. In the Ivory Coast, they released cassettes of their voices supported only by Amadou’s electric guitar, and when they went international in the late-90s, they bolstered their sound with piano, drums, horns, and altogether more colour. The liner notes mention that they “seem to hear their own music through the filter that made them marvel when they were adolescents: the pop of the Seventies, electric blues, reggae, Cuba.” It’s that diversity of sound, coupled with their linguistic mix of different African languages and French (and eventually English), which makes them appealing: it’s literally world music, not just by being music of the (non-Anglo) world, but by playing music of the world. Hence opener “Chantez-Chantez” with its kinda-corny French lyrics over a snaking bluesy electric guitar line from Amadou, or the horn-funk of “Djagnéba” and “Nangaraba.” My favourite songs here are the rhythmic songs like “Bali Maou” and “Si ni Kan” (back to back!) which sound like the Caribbeans by way of northeast Africa that have somehow made it to France and then to the rest of the world.
#21. The Roots - Things Fall Apart
The Roots should have played to their strengths as a band more, and their best albums are the ones where Questlove reminds us there’s a human behind these physical drum beats, particularly on the dark and political Rising Down. Because otherwise, I get the impression that they actually held Black Thought back: he’s one of the few rappers that has gotten better with age, proven by his performance on …And Then You Shoot Your Cousin and his famous freestyle on Hot 97, especially when he stopped with the battle emcee shtick that he was stuck in during the Roots’ early years. Things Fall Apart isn’t even close to the Roots’ best album—I rank it fourth—but it’s often ranked high because of the provocative cover and crossover hit “You Got Me” (far more preferable than their next crossover hit with its awful hook of “I push my seed in her bush for life”). But there’s a real beauty to some of these beats, particularly the shimmer of the cymbals on the first half of “Table of Contents” (just the first half), the tangle of voices on “The Next Movement” and “Act Too (Love of my Life),” the marimbas behind “Double Trouble” (shame that Mos Def wastes so much time ad-libbing at the end), and especially, Erykah Badu’s effortless singing on “You Got Me” which is my favourite performance from her, ever. There’s a Radiohead call-out for the rock fans too, who’d they actually just go ahead and sample to better effect on Game Theory.
#20. Mos Def - Black on Both Sides
I was just a teenager when I heard the words “I M.C., which means I Must Cultivate the Earth,” and I swear, it was that line—establishing, no, redefining what it means to be a rapper—that helped me fall in love with the genre. It’s a shame that Yasiin Bey, the rapper formerly known as Mos Def, barely raps anymore because his voice is always a treat—he’s the one that goes “Kids see ghosts sometimes…spirit” on the Kanye-Cudi album—and back when he was getting started, his command of flow put him ahead of contemporary conscious rappers Common and Guru; there’s a lot of wisdom keeping within the numbers theme on “Mathematics.” Assuredly, the album does not deserve its 71-minute runtime, and there are blunders of well-intentioned, badly-argued politics and Red Hot Chili Peppers interpolations (do you prefer Mos Def singing RHCP or Q-Tip featuring Korn?). But some of these songs are the best rap music had to offer that year, including the live street feel of “Fear Not of Man” (Mos Def’s best song is a spoken word one); the pre-good Aretha Franklin sample of “Ms. Fat Booty” (it’s insane to me that J.I.D. used the exact same sample for a worse song and… no one cared?); the mischievous vibraphone line on mid-album highlight “New World Water”; DJ Premier’s joyously bounding bass-line on “Mathematics.” “Hip-hop won’t get better until the people get better / Then how do people get better? / Well, from my understanding, people get better when they start to understand that they are valuable” remains to this day the best lesson in rap music.
#19. Césaria Évora - Café Atlantico
I adore the first 20 seconds of this album. Portentous strings turn melancholic, and a Latin acoustic guitar line comes in, moving that melancholy onto the dancefloor and framing the entire album that follows: this is joy and heartbreak coexisting, balancing, mingling, dancing together. Cesária Évora, from the west-most African island country of Cape Verde, is known for popularizing morna/coladeira outside her country, music that mixes influences from pop songs from Portugal (the Portuguese Empire colonized Cape Verde until 1975) and Britain with west African instrumentation. That’s a lot of words for what is the best album of pop songs out of Africa that I’ve heard from 1999. Évora’s voice has a natural grace to it—she sings better than did Mariam mentioned earlier on this list—navigating the melody of “Vaquinha Mansa” with ease, or slow-dancing with the eerie-sad string line on the Spanish standard “Maria Elena.” Aside from strings and guitar, there’s thankfully lots of other instrumental colour to help distinguish Café Atlantico’s 14 songs: horns and Brazilian hand drums on “Carnaval de São Vicente” (the party depicted on the cover), kora on “Desilusão Dum Amdjer” (albeit unfortunately underutilized), and accordion on closer “Terezinha” that ensures the album ends on an upbeat note.
#18. Dettinger - Intershop
When Pitchfork put out its list of the top 50 IDM albums of all time, I pondered what my own personal list would look like and stumbled on The Stranger’s alternate list in response released later that week where I discovered this album. Olaf Dettinger’s debut album was among German electronic label Kompakt’s first-ever releases. Following label co-founder Wolfgang Voigt’s music as GAS, there are no song names, asking listeners to just focus purely on the sounds, which is minimal-ambient techno taken to the extreme. (PSA: this is not an IDM album, though The Stranger writers Dave Segal and Nick Zurbo mention the problem of that genre’s “broad aesthetic parameters.”) There are ambient techno synths, but they’re slowed down such that would-be melodies are dissolved down to textures, and they’re underneath strangely active glitch drum programming that was popular in Germany at the time (Oval and Jan Jelinek as Gramm). The loops are attractive enough on their own—with headphones on, you can live in the world created out of just two drum tones on the second track—but Dettinger adds some additional surprises, like the warm vinyl crackle on the third track, or the blissful synth bleeping itself into existence and fading away like a distant star on the sixth song. Of these seven tracks, only the closer doesn’t work, and perhaps to no surprise: it’s the only one without beats.
#17. DJ Rolando - The Aztec Mystic Mix
Arguably cheating because this isn’t an album but a DJ mix, but it’s better than any techno album from 1999 that I’ve heard, including Underground’s Beaucoup Fish or Orbital’s The Middle of Nowhere. (I also considered Round One to Round Five’s compilation 1993-1999 for inclusion on this list but ultimately didn’t.) Underground Resistance (UR) was a musical collective of many of greatest second-wave Detroit techno artists following the Belleville Three’s first wave, whose members included Jeff Mills, Robert Hood, and ‘Mad Mike’ Banks, and whose version of techno leaned more into the mechanical nature of drum machines, creating a far more industrial sound to represent their city. Here, DJ Rolando—a.k.a. The Aztec Mystic—curates a 23-track, 72-minute experience from UR’s catalog, which includes two tracks from underwater sci-fi duo Drexciya; their short “Dr. Blowfins Experiment” is a drum-based pile-driver that stands out far easier than the short, usually-melody-based tracks that peppered their own album that year. Elsewhere, DJ Rolando uses the Martian’s “Firekeeper” as a centerpiece, removing the introduction from its original release so that the first sound we hear is that addicting metal squeal. But the best song is the one immediately after the intro, the Aztec Mystic’s “Knights of the Jaguar” that surely ranks among Detroit techno’s finest, all insistent rhythms and romantically-orchestrated synthesized strings.
#16. American Football - American Football
I think this album needs to be knocked down a peg: its long-standing status as one of the greatest emo records ever in some circles is because (1) it removes a lot of the core elements of emo in the first place (there’s not an iota of punk or hardcore here), and (2) that striking cover that, in Kinsella’s words, “represented living in a kind of insular college town” with so little: just the last light in the strange suburbs before it flicks off and everything starts over again. It is not the best emo album of its year, and like the Microphones’ The Glow Pt. 2, the rest of the album just hits the vibe of the first three songs. But it’s hard to argue with “Never Meant,” which takes the interlocking drums and guitar of Joan of Arc’s “Gin & Platonic” and somehow ends up hookier than pop punk Promise Ring’s “Is This Thing On?” I love when Kinsella sings “Not to be overly dramatic” the histrionic way he does, especially when the word ‘overly’ is overdubbed and repeated like an echo, and then the whole album that follows is the most overly (overly) dramatic thing in the world. Essentially, American Football took emo’s big feelings and mixed it with Steve Reich and Miles Davis, lofty ideas for a small three-piece rock band, and came out sounding like post-rock by way of math rock (the first song is in 6/4, the second song is in 7/4, and so on). The trumpet, courtesy of drummer Steve Lamos, doesn’t sound like Miles Davis at all, but it is a striking foil to Kinsella whose vocal melodies tend to drift in the air. The first song reasons that “you can’t miss what you forget,” and Kinsella claims he can’t remember his “teen dreams / All my teenage feelings and the meanings” in the third song, but the entire album is land-locked in memory, specifically that moment at summer’s end when two lovers break it off. A tender peck on the cheek that doesn’t qualify as a kiss. Anyone who’s ever had their heart severed will know the one.
#15. John Prine - In Spite of Ourselves
After John Prine passed away from COVID-related complications, I wrote about the opener of this album and what the country duet means to me for Tone Glow; basically, that I feel deeply nostalgic for the format because the song that soundtracked my youth was Conway Twitty’s “Don’t Cry, Joni.” John Prine’s In Spite of Ourselves—Prine’s first album after his first bout with cancer—is an album full of country duets, including with Emmylou Harris and Lucinda Williams, practically a new voice on every other song, singing standards by Hank Williams and Don Everly. Someone plays three notes on the piano to imitate the titular wedding bells on Prine and Lucinda Williams’ take on Hank Williams’ “Wedding Bells,” and then they splice in a cover of a late-period Hank Williams b-side “Let’s Turn Back the Years” whose melody is handled wonderfully by Lucinda, lovely stuff. But it’s Iris DeMent that steals the show, who gets the most microphone time (at four songs) after John Prine. “(We’re Not) The Jet Set” with DeMent is far better than the original country hit sung by George Jones and Tammy Wynette by ditching the doofy bass and having you focus on the cute rhymes of “jet set” with “Chevro-let set.” DeMent also sings on the only song here penned by John Prine, the title track, a love story chock-full of witty lines describing two flawed people (“Drinks his beer like oxygen”; “Convict movies make her horny”), sung so wonderfully that you can’t help but root for them.
#14. Everything But the Girl - Temperamental
Everything But the Girl—Tracey Thorn and Ben Watt—were never a hugely popular group, having scored only one top 10 UK hit in a Danny Whitten cover (popularized by Rod Steward), until Todd Terry remixed “Missing” and it became their biggest hit on both sides of the Atlantic. EBTG’s sound before that point was curious, but with the success of “Missing,” they dove head-first into electronic, with Tracey Thorn featuring on Massive Attack’s Protection, and Watt getting more into house and drum and bass. Temperamental, their last album for almost 25 years until Fuse released in 2023, is a continuation of Walking Wounded, except with Thorn becoming a mother to twin daughters in 1998, and some of the lyrics on the album feel like she’s looking out a window into a life that’s temporarily no longer available as she embraces motherhood. “Did I grow up just to stay home?” she ponders on opener “Five Fathoms” that otherwise romanticizes London nights and its inhabitants (“The people fill the city because the city fills the people”) while the following “Low Tide of the Night”—which starts with a sophisti-pop take on Dr. Dre’s g-funk—has a chorus that goes “When you’re down and troubled / You don’t tell your friends / You don’t tell your family.” Though Thorn has commented later that she felt like a guest on her own album, besides her absence on “Compression,” that’s never the case. Meanwhile, Ben Watt’s house music has gotten extremely sophisticated, leading to the rousing scenery-chewing beats (plural) at the end of “The Future of the Future.” Imagine Herbert’s deep house domesticity and Massive Attack’s late-night wandering and you’d arrive at this album.
#13. Gustavo Cerati - Bocanada
“Tabu” opens this album with a thick, Latin percussion groove with lots of cow-bell, but it’s the stutter at the 0:06 mark that sticks out to me. “Se puede esperar cualquier cosa”—“you can expect anything”—Cerati said about the opener in an interview with Argentina newspaper Página/12 ahead of the album’s release. Gustavo Cerati was the frontman of Argentina’s most popular band, Soda Stereo; despite 1992’s Dynamo being their lowest-selling album, it has found a foothold outside Argentina as one of the best non-British shoegaze albums, but it’s important for another reason: it’s where Cerati became curious with sampling, which would inform his first album after Soda Stereo’s break-up, Bocanada. Inspired now by British electronic music, specifically trip-hop—he name-drops Massive Attack, Portishead, and DJ Shadow in that same interview—Bocanada is yet another reinvention for Cerati. Human drum parts are sometimes replaced by drum machines playing boom bap rhythms (“Perdonar es divino”) while a handful of songs like “Y Si El Humo Esta En Foco…,” the second part of “Aqui & Ahora,” and “Balsa” are synthetic and mostly if not completely without vocals, a dramatic change for someone known for his guitar and vocal talents, the alternative rock of Soda Stereo mostly left behind (Cerati does rock out on “Paseo Inmoral”). It’s extremely front-loaded—or else I would have ranked this much higher—with the album’s opening salvo impressing the most; with “Tabu,” there’s the feedback-and-release around the bucolic loop of “Engaña”; the sample of Focus’ “Eruption” paired with the trip-hop drums of the title track, and then the lead single “Puente” that sounds like Radiohead’s The Bends with a psychedelic edge to it.
#12. Tom Waits - Mule Variation
Tom Waits’ six-year hiatus since The Black Rider yields his strongest album in over a decade (Xgau says since Swordfishtrombones but I wouldn’t go that far); that, and in increased role in collaborator-wife Kathleen Brennan who co-writes all but four songs here. I will say that 70 minutes is a little too long: drummer Andrew Borger takes it too easy on closer “Come On Up to the House” while “Filipino Box Spring Hog” feels like an attempt to re-make “Big in Japan” but not as good. Thanks to “What’s He Building?” placed firmly in the middle of the record, I get to comfortably say that there are brawlers (“Big in Japan”), bawlers (“Take It With Me”) and bastards (“What’s He Building?”) here (which isn’t true of all his albums). “What’s He Building?” is a paranoid story about a neighbor potentially up to no good that Waits tried to sing but ended up speaking it through instead to better effect; “Big in Japan” outdoes Bone Machine’s weird rock but being weirder and rocking harder while “Hold On” is the best song Bruce Springsteen never wrote about two lovers holding on (“We wrote that together, Kathleen and I, and that felt good. Two people who are in love writing a song like that about being in love. That was good”). Meanwhile, Waits’ love of the blues—demented and Delta—are on display here on “Lowside of the Road” and “Chocolate Jesus” respectively; the former is performed by Smokey Hormel on the chumbus and dousengoni, and the occasional low trumpet notes feel like roadside images that pass by before you consciously register what they are. His best album of that decade, and better than every other Tom Waits album that came after.
#11. Le Tigre - Le Tigre
“We want to write political pop songs and be the dance party after the protest,” Kathleen Hanna said about Le Tigre’s purpose. The second half of the statement is the important part. Before Le Tigre, Hanna was the frontwoman and bassist of Bikini Kill, part of the feminist punk movement known as riot grrrl of the early 90s, and eventually the narrative spun out of control. “‘Baby barrettes and sexy young girls. Their feminism is ridiculous. They've all been sexually abused and hate men.’ That was the media narrative,” Hanna recalled in an interview two decades after Bikini Kill hung up the cape. Le Tigre is political—“Hot Topic” is LCD Soundsystem’s “Losing My Edge” but all of the name-drops here are of women, while “My My Metrocard” makes space to condemn then-New York mayor Rudy Giuliani while riding around the New York subway—but their music is also deeply fun, in that bubblegummy way of early punk. It helps that like the first wave of punk albums, it’s short: 12 songs in 34 minutes, and all the filler is shoved into the last three songs at the end. (Hanna’s band-mates are zine producer Johanna Fateman and media artist Sadie Benning, notably not musicians first and foremost, and with that context in mind, “Slideshow At Free University” and “Dude Yr So Crazy!!” make sorta sense even if they’re still not interesting.) And like early punk albums, the best song is placed right at the start, “Decaptacon,” with its incessant bass thump and incredible vocals from Hanna. Best lines: “Your lyrics are dumb like a linoleum floor / I’ll walk on it, I’ll walk all over you.”
#10. Orchid - Chaos Is Me
Imagine the passion of screamo mixed with the brevity of early hardcore, and you’d get this record. It’s ugly, chaotic, and short; squirming, seething, and screaming for 18 minutes, and then, just like that, Orchid’s debut album is over. Opener “Le Descordre, C’est Moi” opens with a high-pitched string-scream—Krzysztof Penderecki’s Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima re-imagined by an emoviolence group—and wood blocks that give way to the band’s sound, which is basically a swarm already at the city gates. Moments of respite are few and far in between, usually rendered to the introductions of the longer songs like “New Jersey vs. Valhalla” and “Epilogue of a Car Crash,” and I’m actually glad there’s not more: they don’t need to prove that they’re eclectic or that they have songwriting chops, they just need to play fast and hard. With all the vocals a gutteral noise, I needed to reference the lyrics online, and I’m glad I did because they revealed stuff worth screaming about: “I'm here because I was ready to leave / This should mean more but it can’t,” Green screams on “Aesthetic Dialectic,” while “In G and E”—one of four songs here that don’t even breach the 1-minute mark—sounds like it’s going to be a joke about the number of chords used, but ends up being a love song where singer Jayson Green repeats that he wishes he could provide a safer life than this one.
#9. Koopsta Knicca - Da Devil’s Playground: Underground Solo
OutKast didn’t put the south on the map, they put Atlanta there. Meanwhile, Memphis thrived, developing its own local sound of droning, lo-fi, horror-ambient texture. Some of these songs are not actually songs but pure woozy, murky atmosphere courtesy of DJ Paul’s production. Notably, there’s not a single verse on “Smoking on a J” or “Purple Thang”—the latter is 7 minutes—and so both are pure beat, while other songs feature choruses that take up a lot of their songs’ real estate which would be death in any other context but end up hypnotic inside this funk. It’s that atmosphere that distinguishes Da Devil’s Playground from other memphis rap albums that year like Project Pat’s Ghetty Green or Tear da Club Up Thugs of Three 6 Mafia’s CrazyNDaLazDayz, longer albums with Bangers™ that are ultimately not as special. Most of these songs originally were released on Koopsta Knicca’s debut solo tape in 1994, but re-recorded here with some new ones, including “Now I’m Hi” featuring Gangsta Boo, queen of Memphis; the three song stretch from “Crucifix” to “Robbers” distills the two hours between 2 a.m. - 4 a.m. in less that 15 minutes (the beat of “Robbers” is just a bunch of disembodied voices gasping their last breaths, and then maniacal laughter). Favourite moment: 1:30 - 1:34 on “Judgement Nite” where Koopsta Knicca shoves in 23—I counted—syllables into two bars rendered into barely-comprehensible clicking of his tongue to imitate the twelve gauge (the only truly audible words) that he finishes the line with.
#8. Taj Mahal & Toumani Diabaté - Kulanjan
Another entry from Mali! Toumani Diabaté is the son of Sidiki Diabaté, known as the king of the kora, a West African string instrument that sounds like a harp, a legacy carried forward by his son Toumani. (Sidiki is credited as being the one to prove that the kora could be played solo instead of merely as accompaniment.) Toumani Diabaté released two albums, both collaborations, in 1999. In June came New Ancient Strings, a purely instrumental album of two koras with fellow Malian musician Ballaké Sissoko (who also contributes to half of these songs too). Kulanjan arrived just a few months later in August, working alongside American blues player Taj Mahal. I prefer this one to New Ancient Strings, not just because the occasional English vocals and American blues makes it ‘easier to digest’ for a foreigner like me, but because there’s just more here. More instrumental colour (via Fodé Lassana Diabaté’s balafon), more voices (not just from Taj Mahal, but also via female vocalist Ramata Diakité), more talent (via ngoni player Bassekou Kouyaté who would kick off his own incredible solo career a decade later), more compositional rigour, and not that it matters, more songs too. There are songs where Toumani Diabaté completely sits out, or when Taj Mahal doesn’t bother singing, so that the 12 songs here feel like a revolving door of different sounds. “Fanta” would be a nothing-special piano blues some bar-player thought of on the spot, but it’s turned into something beautiful thanks to the interplay between Taj Mahal and the balafon (like a xylophone), while “Catfish Blues” imagines if Mali were part of the Mississippi Delta region.
#7. The Pillows - Runners High
Japanese rock group the Pillows released two albums in 1999, and I give the edge to Runners High over the more popular Happy Bivouac—more popular now it seems, but Happy Bivouac was their weakest-charting album on Oricon since they started getting big—because the songs are more spirited. You won’t get 2-minute punk blast “White Ash” on Happy Bivouac for starters (only “Advice” comes close, which fulfills a similar role as Sonic Youth’s “Eliminator Jr.” for that album). Compared to their prior albums, Runners High also feels more textured even though they’re the same four-piece thanks to high-precision production: the drums on “White Ash” feel like metal garbage can lids, and Yoshiaki Manabe’s guitar jangles or buzzes, ripping all the same. Power pop reminds me of early adolescence in general, but Runners High has a teenager’s sarcasm—an edge—to it, evidenced by frontman Yamanaka Sawao’s tongue-wagging “wahhhhhh” that leads “Juliet” out of its choruses that makes me think of the cover every time I hear it, while opener “Sad Sad Kiddie” plays and reads (“nananana”) like a playground taunt. The latter is actually completely sung in English even though it took me a few listens to pick up on that, whereas most of these other songs are in Japanese with a few stray English lines-as-hooks: “Juliet, don’t cry”; “No self control”; “Oh yeah!”; “Wake up, frenzy!” “Paper Triangle” is one of alternative rock’s most endearing instrumentals—silver to “Return to Hot Chicken” as the decade’s best instrumental by an alt rock group—which nicely splits the album in half, although they frustratingly slow down in final stretch when they should have kept up the sugar rush.
#6. The Dismemberment Plan - Emergency & I
The acclaim for this band has cooled, which the band predicted here, “Don’t be surprised / When they don't remember you or simply don’t want to,” and their comeback album of 2013 was unfairly dumped on. I liken this album to The Catcher in the Rye, where it feels like you have to be a certain age—and gender—to really appreciate it; “Girl O’Clock” is literally a 2-minute burst of teenage satyriasis (“these urges, all these urges, all these urges, all these urges”). The Plan’s sound, of mathy rhythms, post-hardcore intensity, and emo earnestness, is bound to annoy anyone who doesn’t like any of those factors; frontman Travis Morrison tightropes his way through “Gyroscope” (spinning) and “Girl O’Clock” (stuttering) in such a way that I can’t imagine anyone else performing them. Opener “A Life of Possibilities” is oddly structured—not a chorus in sight—and so Morrison makes every line count, an airy hook building up to the song’s release, quoted up top and delivered in perfect iambic pentameter; “The City” is a Ritalin-amped up take on the Replacements’ “Here Comes a Regular.” For the record, I also found it admirable when they tried to mature their songwriting while still spazzing out on follow-up Changes. What pushes this album over the edge is the outro of “Gyroscope,” how Morrison changes the subject of the song from she, to he, to finally, you, “If you spin fast enough then maybe the broken pieces of your heart will stay together.” And then the coup de grâce, “But somethings I’ve seen lately makes me doubt it.” And the song just slams to an end, foreshadowed by the line “ain’t no gyroscope can spin forever.”
#5. The Flaming Lips - The Soft Bulletin
The Soft Bulletin is a reinvention for the Flaming Lips: Ronald Jones, the extraordinary guitarist doing magical things on Clouds Taste Metallic left the band, and they get decidedly less rocky, turning to psychedelic pop instead, but grand, orchestral psychedelic pop!
It is flawed. Even putting aside the remixes on the original version (the definitive version is the 2006 5.1 reissue which removes those remixes and consolidates the UK and US versions, which contain “Slow Motion” and “The Spiderbite Song” respectively, exclusively), there’s the issues of songwriting (many of these songs play their hands really early), melody-making (from here on out, Coyne only sticks to the high register and tunes start becoming interchangeable) and production (scrubbed clean, which was not the case on their previous two albums). None of these issues alone are a deal-breaker, but put together results in an album that I never want to listen to as just that: an album. Plus, the track sequencing keeps twisting and turning (as opposed to ‘ebbing and flowing’). Here’s a question for ya: if you were to re-arrange this album’s songs, what would you pick to close it? Because I see multiple contenders: “Buggin,’” “Sleeping on the Roof,” “Waitin’ for a Superman,” and “Feeling Yourself Disintegrate.” It keeps sounding like the album’s about to close only to start up again.
And yet, most of these songs offer pleasures: the countdown before the riff of “Race For the Prize” over Steven Drozd’s garbage can lid drums, a riff that actually puts movement into your feet; the slow build in the intro of “What Is The Light?” that culminates in Wayne Coyne singing the title’s lyrics that’s answered by a tiny little computer beep; the huge bass volume on “Buzzin’” that always sends me right to summer, the rare sort of song that doesn’t view bugs as disgusting because they’re not; the effective use of panning in “Feeling Yourself Disintegrate,” a human voice that genuinely feels like it’s disintegrating; the sheer ridiculous of the big “WHOOSH” sound followed by the backwards drum loop of “The Spiderbite Song” that has lyrics like “To lose your arm would surely upset your brain.” You’ll notice most of these moments come within the first 10 seconds of the songs… yeah. In some cases, it’s because of Steven Drozd’s one-note drumming, like he’s auditioning to play on the Cure’s Pornography, and while most of these songs do morph subtly, the ‘morphing’ never adds enough. Take “A Spoonful Weighs a Ton” for example; as soon as the explosion in the middle hits, that’s it, the song has nowhere left to go.
Those highlights aside, two of my favorite cuts are “Sleeping on the Roof” and “Waitin’ for a Superman.” I’d be hard-pressed to tell anyone that they need “Sleeping on the Roof” since, like many things, it’s just a Brian Eno pastiche, but the combination of piano chords with the calming buzz of insects makes me feel like I lost out because I never slept on my roof as a kid (seems kinda dangerous?). Meanwhile, “Waitin’ for a Superman” is one of the few songs about the superhero that is mellowed out and downright sad, about a time when not even Superman could save the day.
The Flaming Lips’ best work was done between 1993 and 1999, when they were quirky but never obnoxiously so, and there was an earnestness to Coyne’s Peter Pan syndrome before it got out of hand. Having mined psychedelic pop all they could on the overproduced At War With the Mystics, they got heavier and weirder in 2009, and dropped the pretense of writing songs by writing space rock/krautrock grooves instead and they haven’t written a single song since, even though there’s been plenty—to many—of actual albums.
#4. Prince Paul - A Prince Among Thieves
The dream of a movie adaptation seems to be moving further and further away in the rearview mirror with every passing second, but it’s still nice to dream. Prince Paul, who invented the hip-hop skit on De La Soul’s 3 Feet High and Rising, would turn out to be the first one to think about using a mixture of skits and proper tracks to create a cohesive story. This is one of the few, few concept albums—hip-hop or otherwise—where you don't need a Wikipedia summary to understand because the skits lay it out for you, starting with the deaths of two men and then reversing to the start of the day that got them there (obviously the inspiration for the Roots’ undun and Vince Staples’ Prima Donna).
I have my problems with the main voice too, courtesy of Breeze from the Juggaknots, who simply isn’t as good a rapper as this story or this album deserved. Originally, Prince Paul’s Psychoanalysis was going to be his piece de resistance, but it got enough attention that Tommy Boy reached out to him to reissue that album and convinced him for one more, but they forced him to make the album on a shoestring budget. Prince Paul originally had his mind set on Notorious B.I.G. playing the secondary character here, and one is only left drooling at how that might’ve turned out. Breeze raps hard on “What U Got” which makes sense since in the context of the story—he’s working on finishing a demo for a meeting with the RZA—but his flow is basically non-existent, and he’s not letting some of the words hit as hard as they should.
Regardless, this is the culmination of Prince Paul’s career. Having made a name for himself for his eclectic samples—digging up bass-lines in Tom Waits and Serge Gainsbourg records in the pre-Internet era—and organizing them in psychedelic-colourful ways, he gets even more eclectic on A Prince Among Thieves: the ‘pain, pain’ sample on the first proper song feels like a clip of a sports announcer but in this context only adds more weight to the already sobering strings, while “War Party” has a trick that’s from RZA’s playbook with an ambiguous ‘Hmm’ sound that could be a woman humming or a string line. Meanwhile, after he stopped working with De La Soul, he didn’t get satirical as they did; instead, he went full parody in some of the funniest rap albums of the 1990s: first on 6 Feet Under as part of supergroup Gravediggaz (less a supergroup and more four friends blazed out and cracking jokes) and then proper debut album Psychoanalysis.
A Prince Among Thieves’ parodies are subtler, mostly in the inspired casting. Prince Paul brings in his old friends De La Soul as crack addicts, casts Big Daddy Kane as the pimp, and Kool Keith as the weapon master. “Weapon World” is a mid-album highlight because the context gives Kool Keith room for his considerable vocabulary to play. He’s not even trying to make sense, he’s just streaming together arcane multisyllabic rhymes with a flow that makes me think Del the Funky Homo Sapien was taking notes. (Minor quibble: “Garment and bags from hefty, I’m a lefty” wasn’t a good enough way to end the first verse, and how the beat stops temporarily at the end just highlights how much of a throwaway rhyme Kool Keith threw on at the end.) Elsewhere, Everlast (House of Pain) helps make “The Men in Blue” an easy late-album highlight by playing up a racist cop over the thick fuzz of the beat, starting the track off with a twisted version of the Miranda warning that’s humourous before his words quickly get unsettling: “It’s the bad lieutenant, running up in your tenement / Planting evidence on any black resident.” And of course, any music fan will recognize Posdnuos going “And I need to book a flight tonight / I—” as the Avalanches will loop it into a joyful hook one year later.
A Prince Among Thieves was released on February 23, 1999, which also gave us Eminem’s The Slim Shady LP and Roots’ Things Fall Apart. Blink that one day out of existence and 1999 might have been the single weakest year for hip-hop. With the deaths of Biggie and 2Pac still looming large, Dr. Dre and Jay-Z made plays for the king of their respective coasts with 70-minute albums, and the failures from EPMD, Goodie Mob, GZA/Genius, Method Man (without Redman), Mobb Deep, Nas (twice), Raekwon, and Slick Rick makes the year analogous for hip-hop as 1986 was to rock legends.
#3. Sigur Rós - Ágætis byrjun
People still poke fun of the line “I had never seen a shooting star before” in a music review, but I never laughed because I understood where it came from. I want images in my music; I want worlds to be created. Ágætis byrjun gives me that: it makes me think of the few times I glimpsed a hazy Orion’s belt in downtown Toronto on winter nights—and early mornings.
What separates Sigur Rós from any other post-rock band is Jónsi’s alien falsetto who can’t help but shape these words into clear melodies, which makes Sigur Rós feel like a post-rock band that wrote pop songs where most post-rock bands were focused on ambient soundscapes or drawn-out crescendos, while at the same time, giving us plenty of textures and crescendos anyway. “It’s you…” Yes, it’s you, it’s you, it’s always been you. It doesn’t matter that that’s not what he’s actually singing on the title track, the effect is the same: space reframed as actually a friendly ocean, all embracing pressure. A point here that I never cared enough to look up exactly what Jónsi was saying because the beauty was in the sounds, but the press release claiming that they made up their own language (“Hopelandic”) for ( )—an album with no title, no song names, and no liner notes—is flat-out false advertising: Jónsi made up one phrase of five different syllables (“You sigh lo, no fi lo”).
Ágætis byrjun represents the balance of the two modes that Sigur Rós would operate in, which are the more ambient-focused ( ) and Valtari, and the more pop-oriented Takk… and Með suð í eyrum við spilum endalaust, albums that are simply not as good because they pull too much in those directions. (The first song on Með suð í eyrum við spilum endalaust sets you up to expect a 2004-era Animal Collective album that the rest of the album fails to capitalize on.) “Starálfur” is as close to pop as this band would get with the exception of “Hoppípolla,” clear-cut string melodies harmonizing with Jónsi in a beautiful slow-dance, except there are unexpected textures like the opera sample(?) that wafts in like a radio transmission at the 2:10 mark or the song’s shift to the acoustic guitar section, which is the weirdest thing to happen on this album now that I think about it, precisely because you don’t expect an acoustic guitar on an album like this, with its alien fetus album cover and all.
Because the climaxes—the concussive, icy blasts of Ágúst Ævar Gunnarsson’s drums on “Ný batterí” and the life-affirming second half of “Olsen Olsen”—are servicing what are essentially pop songs, it makes them feel earned, especially compared to a lot of the ghastly-named ‘crescendo-core’-strain of post-rock that I’ve heard. The best moments on this album—although short, instrumental closer “Avalon” is pretty unremarkable (is it a coincidence that it’s the only song here with an English name besides the intro?)—remind me of Orion. Just impossible little darlings that don’t feel man-made.
#2. Jim O’Rourke - Eureka
If anyone could be considered the new Brian Eno, then it has to be Jim O’Rourke, who similarly had his own too-brief art-pop period and was able to impart a personal touch into his production work for others, like a washed-out beach-at-dusk warmth for Sonic Youth and Wilco that you simply could not confused for anyone else. Ignoring his work for others (which, in the year of 1999, included Smog’s Knock Knock and half of Stereolab’s Cobra and Phases Group Play Voltage in the Milky Night), O’Rourke put out around 200 albums if you include his collaborations, live albums, and albums as part of different groups, and his beloved Steamroom series. (I wrote a guide for Bandcamp on him.) Most of his masterpieces came at the turn of the millennium in the form of a trilogy of albums named after Nicholas Roeg films released on Drag City, each one stylistically different from the other. Being super reductive about them, they are Bad Timing (a folk album), Eureka (a pop album), and then Insignificance (a rock album), and a darling little EP named Halfway to a Threeway that essentially mixes Bad Timing and Eureka.
Vocally, O’Rourke has a very nice voice if a little too diffident, but it’s not a big deal since he’s giving you so much instrumental colour to the point that one of the highlights on Eureka is an instrumental, “Please Patronize Our Sponsors,” whose opening minute builds to the entrance of Ray Mazurek’s cornet that sounds almost like a woman singing to herself in the shower, and then later proceeds to take an unexpected turn as strings lead the song out, courtesy of Julie Pomerleau. Other instrumental “Through the Night Softly” could’ve dropped some of its long fade out but that saxophone climax is awesome in its late-night television swoop.
O’Rourke’s interests in American minimalism does come out to play on the 9-minute cover of Scottish poet-musician Ivor Cutler wherein O’Rourke repeats the same line throughout, “Women of the world, take over / Because if you don’t, the world will end / It won’t take long.” There’s an ironic distance to O’Rourke’s music—hence the grotesque album covers of Eureka and Insignificance or subject matter of “Halfway to a Threeway”—so you might think he’s being witty here, but he sings it with grace all the same such that when he eventually layers in high harmonies, I don’t think he’s being ironic on this one. The title track on the other side of the album is longer, a mostly instrumental, mostly ambient piece backdropped by electronics with some horns at the end that feels like he’s testing the waters for 2001’s electronic album I'm Happy, and I'm Singing, and a 1, 2, 3, 4. (Some part of me thinks he only covered “Something Big” so he could tease audiences using the line “Something big is what I’m after now” so he could dump a really long song after it.)
“Ghost Ship in a Storm” is what I mean by his ironic distance, whose misandrist opening lyrics make me roll my eyes, but the song itself takes the sentiment of being like a ghost ship seriously: the pedal steel guitar bending around those piano chords is fleetingly gorgeous. And closer “Happy Holiday” reminds me of the tiny miniatures on Neil Young’s After the Gold Rush, which is to say, ultimately indispensible. All told, a great album that makes me wish he went for broke and made a pure pop album—more songs with vocals, basically—as long as he met pop on his own terms. And so, Eureka, I adore you but I still rank you second in terms of Jim O’Rourke releases in 1999, after Halfway to a Threeway.
#1. The Magnetic Fields - 69 Love Songs
A lot of twee bands suck shit at playing their instruments, which was part of the point: it was cuter (twee-r) that they couldn’t and it made them more relatable. That’s not the case here: there’s a lot of instrumental eclecticism, and the playing is tight even when the arrangements are spare, or even simple. While Merritt (deservedly) gets all the credit, the album wouldn’t be as special without the occasional voices of Claudia Gonson and Dudley Klute. Claudia Gonson-led “Reno Dakota” is stacked full of clever rhymes (“There’s not an iota… I’m reaching my quota… I’m not Nino Rota, I don’t know the score”) while Dudley Klute gives an unbelievable vocal performance at the end of “The Luckiest Guy on the Lower East Side” with splish-splash cheap-o percussion that sounds like a boy on a faulty bicycle in rain making his way to you so he can profess his love. Meanwhile, Merritt can also sing well: he’s an expressive baritone that can actually move his voice around, for instance, the big interval jump of “I Think I Need a New Heart”—“Somewhere Over the Rainbow” for introverts—and he’s able to plumb deep within himself for the sadder songs like “The Book of Love.”
It’s the ‘white album’ syndrome: package 69 Love Songs with less and it wouldn’t be nearly as special. A single disc? Well, the Magnetic Fields put out plenty of those and none of them are nearly as good. A double album? Too many of those floating around; too many eager critics with scissors. But three discs’ worth of short songs? And what better a number than 69 of them, the number of love in the first place?
There is filler. Obviously. Who cares? But the way I see it, if you remove the 20-or-so songs here that are underwhelming, you’re left with 49 songs that aren’t, which is about 4 albums’ worth of pretty good tuneage, which is something most bands can’t muster up, let alone dump it all in one year. And the brief detours into different genres are usually among the album’s flat-out worst songs: “Punk Love,” “Love is Like Jazz” and “Experimental Music Love” (one per disc) are all pretty dumb. (Celtic jig “Wi’ Nae Wee Bairn Ye'll Me Beget” is not.)
69 Love Songs plays to Stephen Merritt’s advantage on two fronts: (1) Merritt is better at—or at least would rather—write a short ditty that’s around 2 minutes in length than a ‘proper song’ around 3:30 in length, so it’s better to receive a lot of short ditties from him than a slight album with only a few of them, and (2) Merritt can do whatever he wants under the loose guidelines of writing ‘love songs’ instead of the increasingly-dumb concept albums he began to make after this. (To wit, he initially intended for there to be a second concept here by alphabetizing the song titles, which is why the first and last few songs are sequenced that way, which also makes the album end on a sour note as “Xylophone” and “Zebra” are nothing special.)
Although these are not really love songs, which Merritt makes plain: “69 Love Songs is not remotely an album about love […] It's an album about love songs, which are very far away from anything to do with love.” Hence the many, many sad and absurd lyrics that populate its songs, suicide threatening on “Absolutely Cuckoo” (a lyrically vile song that’s also sung adorably) or the sobering thought that “You know, every minute someone dies” in the middle of a dance that he ponders on “Papa Was a Rodeo.”
The third disc is the weakest one, but even that one has “The Death of Ferdinand de Saussure,” possibly one of the five best songs on the entire album, wherein Merritt rhymers the titular Saussure with: “so sure,” “closure,” “bulldozer,” “composer,” “composure,” “kosher,” and, finally, “Holland-Dozier.” But what makes it special for me is after the line, “I’m just a great composer,” Merritt inserts three claps—clap-clap-clap, like an audience answering in the affirmative—a sonic detail that happens nowhere else in the song, and ends up being one of my favourite musical moments of 1999.