µ-Ziq – Royal Astronomy [Astralwerks] – 27 July 1999
Given how prominent techno and electronic music in general were in 1999, it’s still not surprising that Mike Paradinas remains an obscure figure, although it is a shame. His early brutalist albums have held up surprisingly well (particularly 1997’s Lunatic Harness, which ought to be mentioned in any conversation about Aphex Twin’s peers).
Still, the one that my friends and I stumbled upon in high school was his even more gonzo (and thus far, totally singular) Royal Astronomy album. In addition to encompassing a myriad of sounds and styles and having an individualistic, definitely cracked sense of sound design, Royal Astronomy stands as one of the very few proper LPs of what used to be called IDM that actually provides an enjoyable, intelligible listening experience today.
Paradinas and Aphex Twin’s Richard D. James collaborated in the 1990s, but nothing the latter did was weird in quite the same way that “Royal Astronomy” is. Paradinas toured with Björk and was sufficiently influenced by her live string section to start working with both real and fake strings. Even though he initially started in a relatively poppier direction, he also incorporated hip-hop vocal samples. Sound like an unholy mess yet?
The range of Royal Astronomy is best summed up by its first two tracks. “Scaling” starts the record with strings and bells and odd little synthesizer fillips, and for four minutes it sounds unconcerned with any of the practical considerations that touch music made by humans. A timpani thuds away softly, the strings soar, the same little melodic figure calmly repeats — the result is sublime.
Then “The Hwicci Song” dopplers into view with rapidly sawing strings and a more determined melody, only to be interrupted by turntable scratching (which does kind of sound like ‘hwicci’) and a sampled MC repeating “You want a fresh style / Let me show you” until it frays. There’s a beat poking under it rather than just some percussion, and it’s a fantastically busy one. Paradinas, like a lot of his peers, often suspended free-floating melodies above knotty, driving drum patterns, but does it so well that he makes it fresh again.
Best of all is “Carpet Muncher”, a beautiful little production that, in three minutes, showcases little bits of all the facets Paradinas was working on, and is as close as this music can get to killer pop. Elsewhere, Paradinas throws nearly everything at the wall — the horror movie soundtrack of “Gruber’s Mandolin”, the terse spitting and crazed synth buzz of “The Motorbike Track”, the queasy synths of “World of Leather”, the reflective choirs of “56”, “Mentim”‘s far-off explosions, the peaceful-village-on-acid video game “Slice”, Japanese fan Kazumi’s expressive and amateurish singing on “The Fear” — and it all sticks.
Part of this is clever sequencing: opening with a string of immediate and ingratiating tracks, doling out the more complex and longer tracks throughout the album to add balance and heft to the proceedings, and throwing in just enough curves to keep you interested. But the songs on Royal Astronomy are varied and fresh enough to this day that they keep you coming back for more. Now if only anyone had heard of the damn record. – Ian Mathers
Destiny’s Child – The Writing’s on the Wall [Columbia] – 27 July 1999
Destiny’s Child might be remembered today for launching the pop juggernaut best known as Beyoncé. That’s fair. While the group’s lineup was constantly in flux, Beyoncé was its irreplaceable core. The Writing’s on the Wall was the group’s breakthrough album and their biggest hit, going multi-platinum and cementing the quartet (soon to be a trio) as one of the sharpest, smartest girl groups around.
That’s not to say it’s spontaneous; Destiny’s Child was, after all, carefully assembled by producer (and padre) Mathew Knowles. However, so were the Sex Pistols. So were the Monkees. So were Girls Aloud (that might be a bad example). The point is that great pop music (because Destiny’s Child were, at heart, a brilliant pop group from the start) doesn’t have to share the indie obsession with authenticity. After all, Rihanna doesn’t write her own songs, but after “Disturbia”, do you really care? The Writing’s on the Wall never pretends to be homemade. It’s almost deliberately slick, as processed as its cover image. But it just sounds so good.
The standout track “Say My Name” goes beyond being a “guilty pleasure”. Propelled by Beyoncé’s commanding vocals and a hook that digs in so deep it might never come out, “Say My Name” became the group’s signature track for a reason. “Bug a Boo” is a sleek message of empowerment hidden beneath a glossy riff. It’s a rare thing: An album comprised almost entirely of singles. Even rarer, while slightly dated, The Writing’s on the Wall comes off just as funny, sharp, and well-crafted as when it was created.
Personal confession: The Writing’s on the Wall was the first album I ever purchased, at the tender age of 12. While my indie pedigree might’ve progressed since then (goodbye Britney, hello Band of Horses), the message of The Writing’s on the Wall still remains. No, not that a guy ought to pay your bills, bills, bills, or that even if you’ve got a man, the club is still jumpin’, jumpin’. No, the real message behind this album — the one that’s endured throughout a decade of break-ups and reunions, through the Beyoncé legacy, and even through Obsessed — is that pop music, at its best, doesn’t owe allegiance to anything except the beat. – Emily Tartanella
Basement Jaxx – Remedy [XL] – 3 August 1999
At the time, Basement Jaxx seemed monstrously weird, and in all honesty, they’re still pretty weird. Considering the general seriousness of popular electronic music at the end of the decade, Remedy was a bizarre little curio from another planet, a disc of effusive Latin-flavored pop-house disco anthems that seemed like the bastard love child of Fatboy Slim and Armand Van Helden.
Of course, Basement Jaxx didn’t rise up overnight: they’d released successful singles and remixes for years. But this was their first big push, and the universal acclaim from Spin and Rolling Stone — along with some actual MTV and radio play — made their sound instantly recognizable. That they actually had songs as good as “Rendez-Vu”, “Red Alert”, and “Bingo Bango” was the best part. This was, and is, electrifying good stuff.
The best part is that not only was Remedy good, but it was no fluke. 2001’s Rooty was arguably even better, and subsequently, 2003’s Kish Kash was one of the decade’s most acclaimed albums — not just the most acclaimed dance albums, but the most acclaimed period. Considering how good they are at making awesome singles, it would be easy to forgive them for slapping together perfunctory albums.
However, they almost always come through with quality LPs, even if, truth be told, they’ve sometimes been too overstuffed, too jam-packed with fantastic ideas for their own legibility. Remedy seems positively lean in comparison to Kish Kash or 2007’s Crazy Itch Radio, sleek and sexy almost to distraction.
The Jaxx may lack the intellectual bona fides of the Chemical Brothers of Underworld, or the crossover appeal of Moby, but for people who love, really love, dance music, a Jaxx single sounds like nothing so much as shaking up a cold, fizzy Coca-Cola on a hot summer’s day and swallowing it down with a mouth full of Pop Rocks. In other words: not to be missed. – Tim O’Neil
Guided by Voices – Do the Collapse [TVT] – 3 August 1999
In the mid-1990s, few bands were as beloved as the Dayton, Ohio, indie rock group Guided by Voices. Their admirers weren’t mere fans; they were fanatics, worshipping a cult of DIY aesthetics that made the band seem accessible and relatable to every vinyl nerd with a garage sale guitar and a used four-track. From 1994’s Bee Thousand to 1996’s Under the Bushes, Under the Stars, the band were critical darlings, issuing near-perfect treatises on the power of great songwriting to not only transcend lo-fi production but to be somehow enhanced by it.
By 1999, though, Guided by Voices leader Robert Pollard had jettisoned the act’s “classic lineup”, abandoned hip indie label Matador for TVT, and taken on former Cars frontman Ric Ocasek as producer. The resulting album, Do the Collapse, is predictably slicker, more polished, and bigger sounding than any prior Guided by Voices release. These factors alone were enough to disappoint fans and receive tepid reviews.
However, seen from another perspective, Pollard was aiming for a wider audience of music buyers, and he delivered the goods. Do the Collapse‘s sharper production meant it could be readily appreciated by the casual alternative radio listener. If you’d survived the 1990s on a steady diet of Flaming Lips, Smashing Pumpkins, Sugar, and Beck, then this was the Guided by Voices album for you.
The opening track, “Teenage FBI”, ranks among the group’s very best, with its chugging rhythm blooming into the chorus’s delicious power-pop chords. “Things I Will Keep”, with its fuzzy guitars and keening melody, is another of the record’s best tracks. Also in this category are buzzing rocker “Surgical Focus” and, with its heavenly refrain, “Liquid Indian”.
Then there are the slow songs. The warm, strummy “Dragons Awake” is flat-out lovely, while “Hold on Hope” is the gorgeous power ballad that has rankled the hardcore lo-fi lovers the most. Perhaps a bit syrupy, it’s the band’s “Everybody Hurts”. It’s also kinda great, pairing sweeping strings with the typically oddball and unsentimental line, “There hides the cowboy”. Do the Collapse is the Guided by Voices album that’s not for the fans, but that doesn’t mean it’s bad. In fact, ten years later, it sounds pretty darn good. – Michael Keefe
Kool Keith – Black Elvis/Lost in Space [Ruffhouse/Columbia] – 10 August 1999
Kool Keith was at an interesting crossroads in 1999. The success of his album, Dr. Octagonecologyst, endeared him to the burgeoning scene of “backpacker hip-hop”, an indie spin on the 1990s hip-hop underground. Kool Keith was the funky sci-fi freak of the moment, successor in spirit to George Clinton, except it was the intellectuals, not the party people, who were celebrating. Never one to censor himself, Keith bluntly declared independence from Dr. Octagon by having his supervillain persona, Dr. Dooom, kill him on the first track of First Come, First Served. With that out of the way, Keith was free to drop his masterpiece of bouncy sci-funk.
Black Elvis/Lost in Space introduced us to the persona of the title, one who brought Keith’s neo-Clinton potential home. The album chronicles the life of an intergalactic eccentric celebrity over tweaked-out beats full of booming bass drums and synthesizers galore. At the time, it was thought that this would be the record to launch Keith to another level of popularity, and it’s easy to see why: Black Elvis/Lost in Space was filled with hooks and buttressed by some of Keith’s best rhymes to date.
“Master of the Game”, featuring one of the final recorded performances from talk box king Roger Troutman, sees Keith busting out a fast rap that evokes the old school and space girl titties, while singles “Livin’ Astro” and “I’m Seein’ Robots” are both infectious celebrations of Black Elvis’s neon-colored lifestyle.
Unfortunately, Black Elvis/Lost in Space failed to make Keith huge, and he has spent the rest of his career in the underground (save for a subpar “return” by Dr. Octagon, who was then promptly killed — again — by Dr. Dooom). On the other hand, maybe it’s better for Keith’s crazy genius to flow free of major-label expectations. Regardless, Black Elvis/Lost in Space remains the most accessible distillation of Keith’s obsessions with sex and sci-fi. – David Abravanel
Andrew Bird’s Bowl of Fire – Oh! The Grandeur [Rykodisc] – 24 August 1999
In 1999, no one could have predicted that the man responsible for this 15-song excursion into American pop and jazz from the Roaring 1920s would ultimately grow to be the public radio indie rock juggernaut that Andrew Bird is today. If you listen closely enough, Oh! The Grandeur reveals hints and clues to the high-wire act Bird would ultimately embrace, but mostly it sounds like an especially adept Squirrel Nut Zippers side project.
In some sense, that’s what it is. It wasn’t until Bird’s next album, The Swimming Hour, that he began synthesizing the genre exercises that fascinated him, transforming a budding musicologist into a brilliant composer. Oh! The Grandeur is weighted down by songs that sound doubly dated. “Candy Shop” sounds like Django Reinhardt filtered through the swinging 1990s.
“Vidalia” is a nostalgic trip to a Yiddish Vaudeville stage, and many other tracks sound like studies in Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht, rather than the product of a mature singer and songwriter, more cabaret than chamber pop. Even “Tea and Thorazine” and “Wait”, which weave a playful web of words and thus recall Bird’s later work, are notably missing his trademark whistle.
A virtuoso on violin and guitar, Bird may be best known for his whistling prowess: he can emit a sound that evokes the Theremin in pitch and vibrato. However, for all his multitasking and warbling, Bird’s true talent lies in crafting albums that are unrivaled in scope and depth, some of the most sophisticated music in contemporary pop. That said, Oh! The Grandeur sounds like an artist wading through an archive of musical history, and the album feels more like an artifact of interest to collectors than an engaging work of art.
Bird had an unconventional but auspicious start for a pop musician; he studied the Suzuki method of piano at a young age. However, if that method is notable for its formally rigid approach to music, Bird balanced it with a supple and adept ear for, in his words, “harvesting” the sounds around him. Oh! The Grandeur sounds like a collection of song styles and might be more aptly titled Andrew Bird’s Anthology of American Music. – Luke Fenchel
Christina Aguilera – Christina Aguilera [RCA] – 24 August 1999
Some albums don’t date well, sounding less like art and more like artifacts, while others are timeless, continuing to sound fresh years after they were released. Christina Aguilera’s self-titled debut lands somewhere in between. On the one hand, the record is a time capsule from a long-forgotten era when lumbering record companies dominated the industry and pretty-faced alumni of the G-rated genre held sway within them.
On the other hand, the 12 pieces of bubblegum on Aguilera’s first release mirror the current over-sexed landscape of popular music so well that it wouldn’t be surprising to see a bizarro Aguilera fabricated by hit-makers this autumn.
Aguilera was the third in a Disney dynasty whose late 1990s releases reaped profits that lined the pockets of executives, and whose products filled minds with the sonic equivalent of soft taffy: sugar-sweet, sexy, slick, and not too good for you. Although the last of the late 1990s Big Three (co-Mouseketeers Britney and Justin topped the charts first), Aguilera came to the table armed with the biggest voice, the fewest hang-ups, and the most malleable image.
Christina Aguilera is chock full of strong singles: “Genie in a Bottle”, “What a Girl Wants”, and “Come on Over (All I Want Is You)”; all of which sound appropriately bouncy, and the last one was even co-written by Aguilera (even if she shared songwriting credit with five other people and one hit-making trio). Furthermore, two of the tracks, the chart-topping “I Turn to You” and the retro “Somebody’s Somebody”, were penned by the legendary pop songwriter Diane Warren.
Though she would later complain about the tribulations of celebrity, following her debut with a few missteps and attempts at alleged authenticity and creative control, Christina Aguilera won over audiences. She became a pop star in the process. – Luke Fenchel
Meshell Ndegeocello – Bitter [Maverick] – 24 August 1999
Bitter was the taste in Meshell Ndegeocello’s mouth after a failed relationship, the feeling in her soul as its twists and turns gave way to months of emptiness and even more questions. Always somewhat challenging anyhow, the German-born R&B siren and bass prodigy quietly shut the door on her pop self and recorded what was to become her darkest and most pained release.
Bitter allowed Ndegeocello a vast space to explore a range of difficult emotions, from confusion to resignation to loneliness, which she verbalized with startling candor. There’s no real poeticism in a line like “You have no interest in anything that I have to say,” yet it devastates all the same. Her funk-laden bass, an instrument for the best of times, took a well-advised back seat to Lisa Coleman’s piano, which shed tears with each stark note, and strings that recalled 4hero’s Two Pages stunned and slowed to a sad crawl.
It straight up hurt to hear her in this state, which may have been the reason the album won critical adoration but flopped commercially, peaking at only #105 on the Billboard Top 200. The great irony of Bitter is that “bitte” means “please” in German, highlighting the pathos in Ndegeocello’s struggle to separate that wrenches the heart so. – M. Newmark
P.O.D. – The Fundamental Elements of Southtown [Atlantic] – 24 August 1999
1999 was a bad year to be a metal fan. Though the genre provided many true metal bands an opportunity to deliver good albums, like those of Opeth, Children of Bodom, and Dimmu Borgir, mainstream radio was overwhelmed by a strange new music hybrid known as nu metal. The nu-metal sound was essentially hard rock with elements of turntablism, funk, hip-hop, and grunge, but not as strong as any of its individual parts. No band represented this weak attempt at heavy metal as visibly as Southern California’s P.O.D..
Payable on Death (P.O.D.) was a Christian nu-metal band that grew up in the poorer sections of San Diego, also known as Southtown, which yielded experiences that formed the basis for much of their lyrics. Listening to their third album, The Fundamental Elements of Southtown, it’s easy to see why this record became their first mainstream success. The group was part of a scene that thrived on rap-rock fusion, and it’s clear that the music would have fit in with other popular bands of that time, such as Limp Bizkit, Korn, and Deftones.
Retrospectively, though, I am ashamed to say how much I liked most of that music, because listening to The Fundamental Elements now, I am alarmed at how badly this record has aged. Don’t get me wrong, P.O.D. was a good band and could produce some angry, socially relevant lyrics. But as a whole, this album is a weak effort from a band where each member is trying to replicate the sounds of other musicians.
Lead singer Sonny Sandoval tries to rhyme like pro-Jesus rockers DC Talk, but sounds like a contestant on VH1’s White Rapper Show. Guitarist Marcos Curiel and drummer Wuv Bernardo try to emulate Tom Morello and Brad Wilk, respectively, of Rage Against the Machine, but with little success. The notable exceptions are bassist Traa Daniels, who fairly succeeds at channeling a funky, thick bass sound a la Faith No More, and guest performer DJ Circa, who lays down exquisite scratching.
In the end, what are The Fundamental Elements of Southtown? Two radio-friendly singles, “Southtown” and “Rock the Party (Off the Hook)”, an atrocious nu-metallic emo cover of U2’s “Bullet the Blue Sky”, more references to “Jah” than in a Peter Tosh record, and a band that tries to make Christianity ROCK, but with little effect. – Shyam Sriram