Dance to the Music (Part Two)

Continuing my obsessive quest to rank & categorise my musical taste into tiny little boxes that I can file away into my increasingly shrivelled mind. Ooh I feel as unnecessary as Kate Thornton.

My Bloody Valentine - Loveless
Red Hot Chili Peppers - Blood Sugar Sex Magik
Sebadoh - Sebadoh III
Cathy Dennis - Move to This
Pearl Jam - Ten

A slightly cooler year this, with the exception of Miss Dennis, perhaps as it was the year I left school and progressed from the small town arse of Ringwood Comp to the even smaller village cow-pats of Brokenhurst College. Red Hot Chili's - Get up and dance! My Bloody Valentine - Sit down and brood. Sebadoh - Get stoned and sway. Pearl Jam - Get pissed and croon. Cathy Dennis - Get ready to vomit!

Tori Amos - Little Earthquakes
Primal Scream - Screamadelica
Shonen Knife - Let's Knife
Shakespear's Sister - Hormonally Yours
Annie Lennox - Diva

Little Earthquakes is a fan-sodding-tastic album, I remember listening to it over and over while I was going to & from university open days. It reminds me of the smell of a slow creeping fog over the deserted Severn Bridge, plus it has a mention of the groovy comic 'The Sandman', thus it also reminds me of Death. The Annie Lennox one has a slightly dated sound, but it is there for the time in my childhood when I used to point questioningly at the ginger bloke-woman on the telly and my Dad would helpfully provide her name as Henry Lennox, ho. Shonen Knife is the first poking through of the huge shitting iceberg that is my brother's love of all things Japanese rubbing off on me (I keep telling him to stop rubbing off on me, but her never listens). Primal Scream & Shakespear's Sister, two sides of the same coin? No, only one of them has an ex-member of Banarama and carn't spell Shakespeare.

Pizzicato Five - Bossa Nova 2001
The Juliana Hatfield Three - Become What You Are
Blur - Modern Life is Rubbish
Depeche Mode - Songs of Faith & Devotion
Suede - Suede

This was the year I headed off to Brighton for my ill-fated university attempt. I was left with a momentous decision during my first week there. Using my limited budget, do I buy tickets to the soulless & futile Freshers Ball at a cavernous shite-club, or plump for Blur on the 'Modern Life is Rubbish' tour at Mandella Hall? Of course the fear set in and I chose the Ball, ending up rejected and alone, and the rest is history. Ah, what can I say about Pizzicato Five that hasn't already been said before, well quite a lot, at least in english. The greatest Japanese band in existence, to my head-mounted aurally sensitive appendages. This is their most enduring record, a classic from the first track, the least rock n' roll track in the world, perversely encalled 'Rock n' Roll', to the last, a dreamy 'Eclipse' complete with many 'doo doo doo's. Just checked, and it's not actually the last track, but it's good anyway. I was never that keen on Depeche Mode till this LP, maybe it was something to do with all the unfeasibly thin whiners in their 'Violator' t-shirts at college. The Juliana Hatfield album contains the best song written in 5 on the subject matter of the sordid american game of spin the bottle. Suede, a very studenty album for a very studenty year.

Postscript: I am having some niggling regrets after listing 'Wilson Phillips' as one of my top albums in the previous instalment. In a drink-fuelled frenzy I searched them out on Youtube and was both entertained and horrified by what I saw (chiefly by their drag queen counterparts that I was forced to contend with). I remember really liking the album at the time, but listening to it now it's actually quite, quite awful (and not in a good way). Just a warning then, in case any of you are fool hardy enough to base your purchasing decisions on my otherwise flawless expert knowledge.