1998

03.
Cold
Cold

This is all about what this album meant to me at the time. I don’t listen to it that often these days. This is partly because the follow up (13 Ways To Bleed On Stage) was so abominably awful, so heinous, that it somehow undermined their debut a bit (to be fair, their third album, Year Of the Spider, which I eventually got round to investigating out of curiosity, was fairly solid). The other reason is this does sound a little dated now. It’s very 1998. Shit, important albums from my teens are starting to sound dated! Cold’s first album remains, once dusted of all the subsequent crap, a fantastic, twisted beast of an album. Cold really got to me because the represented an unholy marriage of the two types of music that I adored most in 1998, grunge and metal. They were grunge-metal! Added to this hybrid was Scooter Ward’s unmistakable bizarre voice and his nihilistic lyrics (which today sound a little silly to me, but when I was 16 sounded like the righteousness of youth), not to mention drummer Sam McCandless, who just exuded cool (or so I thought). With songs like ‘Everyone Dies’ and ‘Serial Killer’ this album was ideal for a grumpy 16 year old. It was so important to me then that it still appears in this list now, despite me being able to see many flaws with it as an adult. A chunk of my youth on a tiny silver disc.

02.
Elliott Smith
XO

All round master musician Elliott Smith’s best album, or at least the best one I’ve got, this is acoustic magnificence. Perhaps my favourite ‘acoustic’ album ever, XO is a melancholy piece of work (much more so than preceding albums) and is perhaps an indication that all was not well with Mr Smith. The line between genius and lunacy is fine, and Elliott Smith joins a huge list of amazing dead-before-their-time musicians following his suicide in 2003. This album, despite being very sad, actually has the opposite affect on me: perhaps wrongly it makes me feel happier, because it makes me realise that at least I’m not feeling what Elliott Smith is feeling. Man, he’s got it bad! ‘Tomorrow Tomorrow’ is the best track here, but they all are superb. Smith’s lyrics are uniformly superb: “they tore your life apart/and they called your failures art/they were wrong though/but they won’t know/till tomorrow.” He could play any instrument you could wish and could sing too. He may have been out of his tiny mind, but he was a great loss to music.

Miserable and amazing.

01.
Bullyrag
Songs Of Praise

Bullyrag’s only ever release is one of the most underrated albums ever. In fact, it’s not underrated, because nobody even bothers to rate it at all. It’s just forgotten, ignored, whatever. This one of the most eclectic albums of the 1990s, and showcases a talent for completely smooth genre-hopping, often within songs, to create something that sounds nothing like anyone else. Bullyrag’s sound contains reggae, metal, funk, drum ‘n’ bass, rock… This is masterful musicianship but all delivered with a sense of fun. The lyrics move from the extremely serious (‘The Plague’ deals expertly with the effect of AIDS on modern life), to the somewhat silly. ‘Jump Up In A Fashion’, for example, is simply about jumping about. So not so serious. Great guitar work throughout is sometimes augmented by a smattering of haphazard drum ‘n’ bass beats, and the album includes one of my favourite guitar solos ever on ‘This’. As a bonus, Songs Of Praise eschews tradition by having a hidden track that is really great (as good as anything on the album proper). All in all a timeless classic: one that helped to introduce me to a wider world than my little rock/metal corner.

I noticed recently that they have it on Amazon for 98p second hand. Why not go and make the best decision of your life? You won’t find this much happiness any cheaper elsewhere.