Youth, like cultural history, rarely signals when it is about to disappear. For a series of reasons that would have been hard to discern at the time, 1997 stands as both Peak Indie and the beginning of the end for the style’s heyday.

The best work of that indie heyday — and 1997 alone offered Elliott Smith’s Either/Or, Stereolab’s Dots and Loops… and Teenage Fanclub’s Songs From Northern Britain — compares well to any year. And while every band was different, the world that had been opened up by Nirvana, Sonic Youth, and the Smiths meant an ocean of succinct, structured songs complicated by feedback, overdrive, odd guitar tunings, feminism, Gen X irony, and intense emotion that would never have suited the macho “classic rock” paradigm of Album Oriented Radio.

But something else was happening in 1997: Most of these bands’ recordings were not selling all that well. Albums in the broad “alternative rock” category moved okay in the aggregate, but besides Nirvana and a few others like Pearl Jam and Alanis Morissette, record sales did not compare to mainstream pop, bedroom R&B, hip-hop, or big-hat country.

But you had to look further down the charts to find what would eventually deal Peak Indie a coup de grace. In 1997, a Mississippi teenager and Mickey Mouse Club veteran named Britney Spears signed to Jive Records — known to indie types as the home of hip-hop hipsters A Tribe Called Quest — and the world would never be the same. vox

Spiritualized – Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space  Bolder than the term Britpop might suggest, more focused than the term psychedelic might imply, Ladies and Gentlemen is one of the great triumphs of the 70-plus-minute CD era. Alternately chaotic and meticulous, thundering and quivering, Ladies and Gentlemen finds power in conflict– between restraint and excess, addiction and isolation, and ultimately, love and hate. pitchfork

Radiohead – Let Down Since its release, it has been held up as a game-changing state-of-the-world address, a critique of globalisation and consumerism. An album created in a world where the internet had yet to take off, it eerily prefigured the themes of alienation and information overload that everyone would start discussing the minute it did. But its origins are substantially more prosaic: OK Computer feels like a reaction to the band’s experience of promoting its predecessor, 1995’s The Bends. Indeed, it may be history’s most brilliantly disguised example of an old musical tradition: the successful rock band moaning about the day-to-day business of being in a successful rock band. For all the camouflage – the lyrics are elliptical enough to make scrolling through the various interpretations online a matter of days rather than hours – its roots keep showing through. The opening of Let Down reads suspiciously like a retelling of the Morissette support-slot imbroglio theguardian

Pavement – Shady Lane/J Vs S Malkmus’ vocals really captured, with equal parts bemusement and grudging tenderness, was how alienation in its most ordinary, everyday forms feels like… “Shady Lane” reflected on how life imitates art imitating life, its scenes from unasked-for adulthood surreal precisely in how mundane they are. The blind dates and the break-ups inevitably end up in a suburban cul-de-sac, as Malkmus tells it, and how that happens can sometimes seem like a screenplay we’re watching of our own lives. popmatters

Sleater-Kinney – One More Hour Corin Tucker and Carrie Brownstein hang it all out to dry: the ups and downs of their relationship, the jealousy, the attraction, the breakdown. As Brownstein would later emphasize in her memoir Hunger Makes Me A Modern Girl, Tucker wrote the lyrics as a catalog of their couple-hood and the feelings surrounding it. Looking back, they “both laughed,” Brownstein wrote. But there’s no laughing in the song—just angst, and maybe a little release. But even if removed from the discourse and the drama, this song is an emotional masterpiece. It’s springy and tart, but might still leave you with an overall melancholy aftertaste. Letting go is never easy, after all pastemagazine

Yo La Tengo – Stockholm Syndrome a warm and tightly written look at romantic confusion, sung with McNew’s Neil Young-ish high-pitched sigh of a voice. It’s one of those pop songs that sounds effortless. Sadly One Direction’s song of the same name isn’t a cover. pastemagazine

Ben Folds Five – Brick In a chapter ironically titled Cheap Lessons, he writes about his best-known song, Brick: taking his first girlfriend to a clinic for a pregnancy termination. He fills in the stuff that isn’t in the song – the two jobs he worked to pay it off, the final year of high school both he and his then-partner both mostly missed, their sympathetic parents, the emotional aftershocks. theguardian

Blur – Song 2 shot from their self-titled fifth album at 300mph and hasn’t stopped, careening into indie discos and karaoke machines with enough turbulent velocity to obliterate, for two glorious minutes, your crushing awareness that the ‘90s ended, youth fades and you’ll never be a rock star. nme

The Verve – The Drugs Don’t Work topped a list of songs that make people feel sad, a scientist has found in research conducted on behalf of phone company Nokia…

Dr Witchel commenting on the results said, “Music is undeniably powerful at triggering different emotional states. Changes in tempo and frequencies induce profoundly different emotional states. A slow tempo song like the Verve’s The Drugs Don’t Work slows down the heart compared to most of the other songs and compared to white noise – in other words, it works like the emotional state of sadness.” uncut

Echo & The Bunnymen – Nothing Lasts Forever with Liam Gallagher on uncredited, Beatles-esque backing vocals – it chimed perfectly with the post-Britpop era and the sense of another musical and social sea change. theguardian

The Sundays – Summertime The subject of “Summertime” isn’t such a new concept–the idea of summer doesn’t live up to the steaming-concrete reality, imagine!–but the execution is perfect: someone drawn to the idea of idyllic summer love, but cerebral enough to prod at the idea the whole time, and to know that the prodding’s ruining it. It’s good prodding, too spin

The Beta Band – Dry The Rain Deceptively quaint in the beginning, the track drops these little climactic bombs, each one completely defying your expectations for what a band should sound like. The initial hook, with its slide-guitar groove, could have been enough by itself. But right when you think that’s all there is, a drum and bass groove shows up two minutes in, gradually morphing it into an entirely different song. The most famous part is when the band coasts on that coda, which in actuality only lasts a minute or two, but feels like it could loop for an eternity. stereogum

Oasis – Stay Young Originally intended for the Be Here Now album but cut late on, Stay Young has been put down by Noel since as being no good. He’s wrong.  manchestereveningnews

Cornelius – Count Five or Six Cornelius’s Fantasma was a high point of the mid-’90s Shibuya-kei scene, an eclectic crate-diggers’ subgenre that celebrated old sounds. pitchfork

Broadcast – Lights Out ‘Work And Non Work’ proved you could mine the past and still sound like the future…twenty years on its idiosyncratic interpretation of 60s nostalgia still feels far more nuanced and textured, and therefore more nourishing, than many of its contemporaries. loudandquiet

Stereolab – Brakhage It’s an album that divides fans with some finding it has too much surface sheen, too much stylisation. You can kind of see their point, but I’d prefer to read this as Stereolab finding a new degree of poise and confidence.  factmag

Primal Scream – Star

Elliott Smith – Say Yes one of Smith’s more simple and romantic lines. Speaking of the song he said, “It was written about someone particular and I almost never do that.” Unlike some of the more tragic lyrics which would come later in his career, it’s a moment born out of positivity. nme

Guided By Voices – Sad If I Lost It one of Guided By Voices’ most important albums, proving that Pollard’s songs didn’t need to rely on lo-fi charm to be appreciated stereogum

Sleeper – She’s a Good Girl She maybe a top babe in Chris Evans’s eyes, but Sleeper vocalist Louise “I invented the Spice Girls!” Wener has a voice as emotive as cold running water. independent

Travis – U16 Girls there’s a tendency to trudge rather than swagger in the manner the songs deserve, and some tracks could do with a little more trip to their gait independent

Green Day – Good Riddance (Time of Your Life) once you get past the nostalgic phlegm, you’re still left with one of the cleanest examples of good songwriting: a universal sentiment expressed with palpable simplicity spin

Modest Mouse – Heart Cooks Brain is about yearning, absence, and the dullness of depression, and the band’s right to play it close to the chest. popmatters

The Make-Up – Pow! To The People The mainstreaming of punk rock in the 1990s was disheartening to artists and fans committed to punk’s radical political ethos. This paper examines the rhetorical response to punk’s popularization in this era, focusing on how the DC‐area band, the Make‐Up, reorganized the common sense of punk by articulating it to the musical and social elements of gospel and funk.  Theodore Matula, Pow! to the People: The Make-Up’s Reorganization of Punk Rhetoric, Journal of Popular Music and Society, Volume 30, 2007, Issue 1

Clinic – IPC Sub-Editors Dictate Our Youth ironically enough, was named a Single of the Week by NME – Clinic’s signature sound arrived fully formed: dramatic drums courtesy of Phil Spector, taut, chugging guitars and creepy, creaky organ allmusicguide

Kenickie – Punka Since Kenickie first snared me in the mid-90s, they’ve popped up on every mixtape I’ve ever made, had their B-sides smuggled into nearly every DJ set I’ve played. And when I think about the T-shirt I left at the house of a boy I had a horribly unrequited crush on, a little tight knot of loss still grips my guts, and definitely not for the boy. Most summaries of 90s music tend to focus on Britpop, making those years seem much more limited, male and white than it did if you grew up through it. Though they are seen now as something of a novelty footnote, Kenickie were, for many young, glitter-smeared fans, a necessary band of the era, one who lived out all its promise and its problems. In a cultural housefire, I would let everything Oasis, Blur, Elastica and Suede ever did burn to save Kenickie’s debut album. Emily MacKay, theguardian

Dinosaur Jr – Take A Run At The Sun wrote and performed for the Brian Wilson segment of Allison Anders’ film Grace of My Heart. Complex yet graceful, it seemed to suggest that there was more to the Dinosaur Jr mainman than sheets of cloudy-grey guitar and a hoarse, sub-Neil Young croak. independent

The Wannadies – Hit even the most sugary pop songs here barely mask undercurrents of anger, spite, resignation, and obsession allmusicguide

Smog – Ex-Con as near to the indie-rock standard as Smog had hitherto strayed, but once again deceptively complex, this time imagining a man imagining that he’s a newly released felon who’s obsessively imagining planning a child abduction or a house robbery. That it does Inception levels of meta-characterisation while also prodding at the more universal discomfort of being a social misfit (“Out on the streets / I feel like a robot by the river / Looking for a drink”) and presenting an instant earworm is perhaps the best evidence here of Callahan’s ambitions. loudandquiet

Belle & Sebastian – Photo Jenny

Belle & Sebastian – Century of Fakers

The 1997 EPs kicked off with Dog on Wheels, which featured three 1996 demos plus “String Bean Jean”. In all, the tracks romanticized childhood, wrung happy memories out of post-university poverty, and lamented the fleeting nature of happiness. 3…6…9 and Lazy Line Painter Jane increasingly took advantage of the collective swelling in ranks, adding lush strings and increasingly highlghting Mick Cooke’s trumpet playing. On the whole, the three carried echoes of the whitewashed soul and puritanism of Orange Juice and Scot indiekid fave Vic Godard is evident in the band’s quaint, fey, self-deprecating lyrics.

Collected as a whole, these dozen tracks are probably the quintessential Belle and Sebastian album, and “The State That I’m In” (included here is a demo version) and “A Century of Fakers” are still arguably their best songs. On the surface the EPs created an idealized world of childhood memories, books, crushes, bicycle rides, and faded photos. But no mere shrinking violet, Stuart Murdoch traded in “la-la-la”‘s and also spent time threatening that “if you ever go lardy or go lame, I will drop you straightaway“, and wondering how to “tell [one’s] folks about a dose of thrush.” pitchfork

Helen Love – Does Your Heart Go BOOOOOOOOOOMM! where the sublime and ridiculous intersect in cartoonishly tuneful lo-fidelity. If they don’t make your heart go boom, frankly, you don’t have one nme

Morrissey – Maladjusted How near-identical personnel to Southpaw… created this wretched artifact is hard to fathom… maybe put it down to the pandemic of awfulness in UK music at the time, Britpop’s very own swine flu. drownedinsound

Gene – Fighting Fit Gene at their most anthemic and inspiring, conjuring up a real feeling of seizing the moment godisinthetvzine

Teenage Fanclub – Ain’t That Enough found the songwriting trio of Norman Blake, Gerard Love and Raymond McGinley at the height of their powers and stacking their harmonised vocals behind a wall of Blake and McGinley’s guitars and backed up by the complimentary drumming of Paul Quinn… This was the album where the band reflected on all the lessons that they had learned to date and gave it their best shot to put out an album of absolute brilliance that would capture the hearts and minds of a music fans that had been listening to lesser acts for far too long. backseatmafia

Lambchop – Your Fucking Sunny Day a little self-deprecating humor from a group that produced two earlier albums with few sales to show for it. On the off chance this song might have received some airplay, there was a clean version called “Your Sucking Funny Day,” lineartrackinglives

Stereophonics – Local Boy In The Photograph If the band had never made another record this would have been their perfect epitaph. A record Stereophonics have never bettered in two decades of trying, and one they’re unlikely to in however many years it takes more. drownedinsound

Geneva – Tranquilizer This is more of the usual piss-elegant, polite guitar pop complete with a single bloke singing in a high-pitched voice. melodymaker

The Chemical Brothers (feat. Beth Orton) – Where Do I Begin consists of exactly one verse—“Sunday morning I’m waking up/Can’t even focus on a coffee cup/Don’t even know whose bed I’m in/Where do I start/Where do I begin?”—repeated over and over as a reverse guitar loop morphs into itself, Beth Orton’s vocal crisscrosses and overlaps, and the whole thing builds to a clattering racket of crashing drums and chainsaw synths as disorienting, numbing, and rousing as waking up to a bucket of ice-cold water to the face. slantmagazine

Embrace – Fireworks an absolute gem of a song, real heart on the sleeve stuff and the EP contained enough over 4-songs to ensure I knew this was a band with a little something about them. This was mixed with excellent interviews in the music weeklies, here was a band led by two brothers speaking from the heart at a time where another band of brothers had disappeared up their own backsides. everythingflowsblogspot

The Ropers – These Days the band disbanded shortly after this Teenbeat release cloudberryrecords

Eggstone – April and May Listening to the whole LP is like listening to a cool, swayable, tuneful, retro sounding pure pop, you might even think they were made during the 70’s outgrowingmorrissey

Velocette – Get Yourself Together When you spin this song , the dance floor will change very at instance. Their charm of British melody and taste taken up by Camera Obscure,The Pipettes and Amanda Applewood. Why don’t you spinning this twee song ,wearing cute dress? tweegrrrlsclub

Supergrass – Richard III The sparse lyrics seem to address the futility of escape from the humdrum of daily life, but really, the music is what matters, and opening with the dissonant chord combination and punk sensibility of “Richard III” certainly dispelled any notion that the boys wanted to hang out in adolescence beyond their years. 50thirdand3rd

Half Man Half Biscuit – Paintball’s Coming Home Released at a time when a ubiquitous and needlessly self-congratulatory music scene was just about to consume itself, Voyage to the Bottom of the Road is an album for those of us smart enough not to look for messages of wide-eyed hope, optimism and unrealistic expectations of what life was going to hand to us if we were bullish and over-confident enough. This was music for those of us who felt disenfranchised by such needless displays of self-confidence, backing up a world view of those grounded in the nitty gritty of real life, yet still able to laugh at how stupid that life can be sometimes, and reminding you that you’re not the only person in this universe who feels like you do backseatmafia

Aden – Cause of Your Tears

Shoestrings – Whipped One perfect album on Le Grand Magistery and one perfect single on Sunday Records was what Shoestrings left behind cloudberryrecords

The Lucksmiths – Under the Rotunda One thing I struggle to understand whenever I meet an Australian is how they never seem to have heard of The Lucksmiths. Lunacy.

This is where it really started.  From the opening line of “It’s already Friday and soon it’ll be Friday night” I was hooked. Most people who know me have this song on a mix tape/minidisc/cd somewhere.  It is breathtaking, weekend-is-upon-us delight in song.  I still get a lump in the throat when I hear Tali sing “somewhere, over the railway line” with the production letting his burgeoning voice vibrate into the shadows of the growing evening, leaving you lonely and melancholy as the light turns from soft orange to blue, before picking you back up with “there’s a light on in your lounge room”.  And to top it all, a delightful horn part. backseatmafia

Stereo Total – Supergirl The album is so wild, so romantic, so much fun, that you wind up wishing that Stereo Total would let loose just one more time, like they did on this terrific album popmatters

Super Furry Animals – She’s Got Spies What to pick from an album teeming with highlights? Maybe the West Coast harmony saturated post-punk power balladry of ‘She’s Got Spies’ (‘but it’s not quite like the KGB, you see’)? A song which effortlessly manages to be both profoundly moving and profoundly exciting all at the same time. walesartsreview

Dawn of the Replicants – Radars Theirs is an exhilarating amalgam of the surreal, the psychedelic and the scatter¬brained where nothing is quite what it seems or how it sounds. heraldscotland

Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds – Into My Arms The song at its heart is about loss and the sorrow that flows from it, whether it’s the end of a relationship or the death of a friend or family member – Cave sang the ballad at the funeral of Michael Hutchence. Evocative, emotional and stirring, Into My Arms reminds us that even at the darkest times we’re not alone, truly conjuring of the elusive spirit of duende. theguardian

Six by Seven – 88 – 92 – 96  best displays the Pink Floyd influence. The song is a mini-epic of pessimistic vocals and sonic textures allmusic

Cornershop – Brimful of Asha a work of exuberant cultural hybridity that emerged amid a blindingly white latter-day Britpop scene. An homage to Indian cinema and its behind-the-scenes queen, the playback singer Asha Bhosle, the track meanders into a loose bridge (conspicuously absent from the Cook remix) that finds Singh shouting out global pop institutions from T. Rex to Trojan Records. “Everybody needs a bosom for a pillow” notwithstanding, this is a love song to the record player. spin

The Flaming Lips – Riding To Work in the Year 2025 Consisting of four different CDs that have to be played simultaneously on four different CD players to make up one musical whole, the Flaming Lips’ 1997 album is, depending on whom you ask, either the most groundbreaking experimental masterpiece released on a major label since Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music or the biggest troll job released on a major label since Metal Machine Music. Either way, when it first came out 20 years ago tomorrow, it had to come with a warning label to keep the squares away:

WARNING: This is a unique recording. These eight compositions are to be played using as many as four compact disc players, and have synchronized start times. This recording also contains frequencies not normally heard on commercial recordings and on rare occasion has caused the listener to become disoriented.

In 1996, coming off of the relative commercial failure of Clouds Taste Metallic, the Flaming Lips were disoriented. They had ridden the unexpected success of “She Don’t Use Jelly” straight to alt-rock semi-stardom and a baffling appearance on 90210, but despite its considerable artistic merit and the equally considerable momentum behind them, Clouds Taste Metallic failed to connect with a buying audience. Then guitarist Ronald Jones left the group, depriving the band of the primary weapon in their psych-rock arsenal. They were forced to regroup. And for Wayne Coyne and company, “regrouping” meant diving headlong into madness.

The first bout of insanity came to be known as the Parking Lot Experiments. In the summer of 1996, Coyne and Steven Drozd, fascinated by the alien, brutalist space of parking garages, dreamed up a grand symphony of parked cars. They distributed 40 cassette tapes, comprising one sprawling original composition, to 40 volunteers, who synchronized their car stereos on command. The second bout of insanity was turning the concept behind that wild performance art spectacle into an actual album. After their manager convinced the label that it would make a good PR stunt and would soon be followed by another, more traditional album, Warner Bros., then beset by companywide turmoil in the wake of a series of firings, agreed to give the band $200,000 for their next two albums and leave them alone. And with that $200,000, the band made both Zaireeka, the album born of the Parking Lot Experiments, and their true masterpiece, 1999’s The Soft Bulletin.

Unlike The Soft Bulletin, which is welcoming in its sheer, shining melodicism, Zaireeka is a willfully difficult album. When most people hear the phrase “difficult album,” they think dissonance, noise, and atonality, and Zaireeka has all that, sure. But Zaireeka is difficult in another way, too: logistically. Not only do you have to have four CD players to listen to it, but you have to have four hands to start them at the same time. And because every CD player runs at a slightly different speed, the music becomes progressively more out of sync over the course of one playthrough. Back when Pitchfork still gave albums a 0.0, they gave Zaireeka a 0.0. Here’s a sample line from their infamous review: “Do I wanna buy three more CD players with which to enjoy Zaireeka or, say, eat?”

The Lips saw these seemingly insurmountable issues as features, not bugs. The album’s supposed to be difficult. It’s supposed to not quite sync up. It’s supposed to sound different every time. And, perhaps most importantly, it’s not supposed to be one guy with four CD players. The listening experience, as Coyne envisioned it, was communal, social, collective. It was friends getting together, hauling their stereos around, and sitting breathlessly in a room, letting the music wash over them in an overwhelming wave. It was the Zaireeka party. It was an event.

Because of the Flaming Lips’ reputation as gimmick artists, I think Zaireeka is often seen as either a total lark or an exercise in unnecessary pretentiousness. And it is those things, kind of. But the fact is, Wayne Coyne was dealing with some genuine art-school shit. Playing one piece of audio on several different devices and hearing it get progressively more and more out of sync is straight out of Steve Reich’s playbook. Exploring the relationship between space, sound, and the acoustic properties of a room is very Alvin Lucier. If you squint, a Zaireeka party might look a little like a Fluxus happening. But Coyne approached all of it with the same sense of childlike wonder that marks all of the Flaming Lips’ output, more dorm room philosophy than grad school dissertation. Somehow, despite all of its inaccessibility, it felt accessible. It was the magic of the Flaming Lips.

The bigger shame is that the perception of Zaireeka as a conceptual art stunt overshadows its status as a piece of actual recorded music. Granted, the concept was a big part of the appeal, and because the music itself was so hard to actually listen to, the concept was all that many people experienced. But speaking solely in terms of genuine musical merit, Zaireeka is a good album. It was the Lips’ first album after the departure of Jones, and in some sense, it was the end of their time as a rock band and the beginning of their time as a space-traveling psychedelic pop orchestra. It was, in other words, the beginning of the band that made The Soft Bulletin.

Twenty years on, Zaireeka’s legacy is a little hard to parse. It can’t really be called influential, because there hasn’t been anything like it since. And besides actual bootlegs and unreleased material, it’s hard to think of any other relatively well-known album by a relatively well-known band that so few people have actually heard. For a band so concerned with populist spectacle — see any Flaming Lips concert from the last two decades, rococo affairs full of glitter and confetti and giant hamster balls — there’s something almost perverse about obscuring songs this good behind the off-putting and difficult presentation. But at the same time, the songs can’t be separated from their context. That difficulty is Zaireeka.

Whatever else it did, Zaireeka raised questions about why we consume music, when we consume music, how we consume music, and what we expect from our music. In the age of the iPod, which ushered in a new era of personal, private, portable listening not too long after Zaireeka came out, Zaireeka felt intentionally archaic. Now, it’s downright obsolete. No one plays CDs anymore. No one has CD players anymore. New laptops don’t even come with disc drives. The album has since come out on vinyl, and you can find fan-edited one-disc mixdowns online. Even in these secondary formats, it’s still very much worth hearing. But that warning label — “These eight compositions are to be played using as many as four compact disc players” — is for a world that doesn’t exist anymore. stereogum

The Divine Comedy – In Pursuit of Happiness Released at a time where the fashion was to fill the whole run time of a CD with as much material as possible regardless of quality, all in the name of offering the listener more ‘value for money’, The Divine Comedy’s A Short Album About Love, as its name suggests, pulled in the opposite direction.

In releasing a brief punchy album, hot on the heels of the wonderful Casanova, Neil Hannon was skilfully managing to keep a firm grip on quality control, while making the most of the escalating interest in The Divine Comedy. It would have been so easy to double the length of this album by padding it out with sub-standard material, however by exercising restraint, Hannon ensured that his band’s legacy was not watered down by weaker material that should not have passed muster. As a result of this, A Short Album About Love remains as vibrant and vital as it did when it was released two decades ago, studded as it is with career high-points like “Everybody Knows (Except You)” and the wonderful “In Pursuit of Happiness”.

It retains your interest throughout with a bunch of great songs, without putting any unnecessary demands on your time. Could it have been longer? Sure it could. Should it have been longer? No, it’s great as it is. That’s the secret to love. Don’t over do it. backseatmafia

Comet Gain – These Are The Dreams Of The Working Girl  by the time the album was released, the band had quit en masse, leaving Feck as the sole remaining member correctivelenses

Grandaddy – A.M. 180 a melancholy album that doesn’t mope; it’s rooted in the kind of gradual losses that fade into the fabric of a life. Lytle’s reassuring melodies take influence from Jeff Lynne and Neil Young, for a style that still feels wiser than most indie-rock debuts. And the contradictions at this band’s heart—nature vs. technology, electronic vs. organic—have hardly become obsolete over the last 20 years, even if it has arguably become harder to make a career singing about them. On “A.M. 180,” Lytle sums up the large and the small of it all: “We’ll defuse bombs, walk marathons, and take on whatever together.” When those last couple words—“whatever, together”—are repeated over an explosion of guitars and keys near the track’s end, they ring out like an understated mantra. pitchfork

The Butterflies of Love – Wild flits along on a budget of hormones and ”la, la, la’s” nme

Mansun – An Open Letter to the Lyrical Trainspotter Do you remember the heady days of the hidden track at the end of a CD? You do? Well Grey Lantern had a great one with “An Open Letter To The Lyrical Trainspotter” which is included here and for me has a little touch of XTC to it threesongsandout

Beulah – The Rise and Fall or Our Hero’s Reward This isn’t a spectacular album, but one that was able to acquire Beulah a large indie-pop audience. At the time of this album Beulah was more of a collaboration of friends and family that wanted to put out some songs they created. With the mild success of the HWS in the United States and Europe, the boys of Beulah were able to cut down to a 6-piece with rotating musicians. This was the record that got them there tinymixtapes

Ash – A Life Less Ordinary burst out of its skin after second guitarist Charlotte Hatherley arrived with yet more elbow grease and cooed backing vocals classicpopmag

Candyskins – Circles  the record is filled with alternately crunching and ringing guitar hooks and pretty melodies, but it is hampered by undistinguished and uneven songwriting, as well as predictable melodies allmusic

The Crabs – Love & Hate begins with the pretty whimper that characterized its successors, but actually finds some Some Velvet Sidealk-style full-band territories that have the rough and chirpy rock appeal K releases tend toward allmusic

Beck – Jack-Ass The plinking guitar that runs through the first half is a sample from “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue,” but not Bob Dylan’s original—it’s a cover by the band Them. Beck, of course, began as an outsider folk artist, and on “Jack-Ass,” he nods to one of the greats as he shapes his own fried-out, hip-hop-inspired style. When the sample drops out “Jack-Ass” briefly goes singer-songwriter, but then it detours again, back to where it all began: Beck on guitar and harmonica at once, over a barnyard menagerie of snorts and growls. “I remember the way that you smiled / When the gravity shackles were wild” might be as poetic and enigmatic as a Dylan line, but mostly, it’s just very Beck. spin