Here’s my own personal They Don’t Make ‘Em Like They Used To gripe. I’m at the point of my life where I mourn the passing of 120 Minutes‘ ’90s heyday, when they showed videos by weirdo bands that had managed to snare major-label contracts.
Arguably, there is no weirder album from this era than Shudder To Think‘s Pony Express Record (Epic), which mixes glam, prog, hardcore, pop, beat poetry, and rock ‘n’ roll, probably in that order. It has a twisted sensibility which gloriously sets it apart from a lot of the painfully earnest rock of that era. Also, this is an album that you have to hear a couple of times to understand. (I actually picked it up in a used bin about 2 years ago.) The album doesn’t present itself as a mass-pleasing easy-to-love hook-fest. You have to meet it on its terms, and I’d argue it’s a rewarding experience.
I bet the above video will piss off a number of you for any number of reasons. (These comments from lead singer Craig Wedren make for a good read.) So tell me about your favorite Way Weird Albums From Major Labels, all the better if, like Pony Express Record, they were perhaps-inevitable commercial failures. Also, am I wrong in thinking these kinds of albums don’t come out anymore?
A few other notes:
1) Shudder To Think reunited a year ago, and have just released a live album, which you can stream for now here.
2) If you can track down their rendition of “The Ballad of Maxwell Demon” from Velvet Goldmine, you can hear the best fake Bowie song ever. Sadly, the version on YouTube is from the film, featuring the band’s backing track, but with that unfortunate lead actor singing lead instead of Wedren.
fellow Dischord to Atlantic Records defectors, Jawbox. Savory, the single from For Your Own Special Sweetheart, was a weird but welcome change to MTV’s early 90s programming. I could list a dozen bands that all got major label deals around that time.
The fact that Sonic Youth, Beck, and The Roots have all been putting out records for David Geffen for almost 20 years continues to flip my lid.
This implies that Canada has a definition for “necessary” cannibalism and necrophilia.
I saw Shudder To Think play a long time ago and I hated them so much that I’ve forgotten who the other band on the bill was in effort to forget them. I guess it worked until now. Parts of this sounds like a cat composed it by walking on a piano. But there’s a good chance the cat would sound more natural when it was in heat than this guy. Probably, they were trying to annoy people like me. I hope that only works once.
I’m pretty sure the only band I hated more live in the last 20 years was Guster.
I liked their version of Animal Wild on the Victoria Williams health care album, but they used the exact same bag of production tricks for this arrangement and this song kind of bites it.
The Flaming Lips album Zaireeka was released by Warner Bros.
Bjork put out some albums in the ’90s that were “out there” for major-label releases. I recall one that had “big band” arrangements, or was that just used on the single from that album?
Is this where we discuss “Song Cycle?”
The ’60s and ’70s were loaded with such albums. In more recent decades, some of Sam Phillips’ less-than-accessible releases have been on majors, right?
There was a guy at Atlantic named Yves Beauvais (and there must be something in the water there, since Hal Wilner is another person who comes to mind) who seemed to delight in signing offbeat stuff like Moondog, Daniel Johnston and Lullaby Baxter Trio. Great suff!
stuff, i meant.
Sonic Youth left Geffin last year, I believe. They are now on Matador.
As for Shudder To Think, yes “LIVE” they were truely weird. Wedren has this goatish vibrato that really comes out in the acoustics of a large hall, and the lead guitarist posed like he been studying Malmsteen instructional videos. On every song they did this! But in the studio the vibrato was really toned down, and you didn’t have the accopanying image of the RAWK GAWD guitar player. Yes, they engaged in some peculiar time changes, but they never really struck me as weird.
When I think of weird, I think of the Residents or Negativland or Tori Amos.
Is Shudder To Think a weirder band than, say, Mars Volta? I have a particular attachment to the album 50000 BC, though I’d venture that most of their fans would choose Pony Express Record.
Oh and Yoko Ono, of course. Let’s give the lady some context:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h9kgu71d81U