50-25=25.
Always a good idea to show your workings.
Looking at what's coming up it strikes me that these really are pretty much all killers now. The vast majority of what's coming up are regularly bandied about as the top albums and artists of the 90s, and that really brings it home to me just how mainstream 90s indie I really am. But I'm sure you all knew that already, and love me for it.
Because I seem to have really slacked off with the fascinating purchase details of late I'm going to add some Post Scripts to posts where there's nothing that fits nicely into the main body of the post.
Just two for tonight.
25. Teenage Fanclub - Grand Prix
I never gave up on Teenage Fanclub. There were enough moments on the, granted, not quite up to their usual standard, Thirteen to give me hope. Imagine if Thirteen had been as chock-full of great tunes as your usual TFC album. Grand Prix would have been the third in one of the greatest runs of albums of all time.
As it stands Grand Prix is to be looked at more as a return to form of sorts. Rarely, if ever, has a band contained such a blend of 3 ridiculously gifted songwriters (a Blake - 5, Love - 4, McGinley - 4 mix here) and they have the music to back up the songs. I usually find myself saying that I'm a Blake man, but then who can ignore Love's Discolite and Don't Look Back or such McGinley gems as About You and the wonderful Verisimilitude?
My memory of buying the album has gone the way of many others, although I'm willing to take a punt on Rhyl Our Price again. I absolutely remember buying all the CD singles from there, and they all had different versions of the lead track on the second disc, which in an era of multi-format exploitation by the record labels, made a refreshing change. TFC were always good value with their singles & b-sides.
Of course there's a whole separate post to be written just about the genius that is Sparky's Dream. Gerard Love created one of the touchstones of 90s indie with a tune that seems so simple but that seems to have struck a chord with a generation of indie kids. Maybe I'm a Love man after all.
I'm a Love man.
Yeah baby...
24. Björk - Homogenic
Another return to form I suppose. Although I've already told you how I feel about Debut, and Post is a damn fine album, I think Homogenic is the best Björk album. After this there's some stunning work, but as an album - I think this is the best collection of songs she's ever produced.
It's a beautiful thing. As the picture on the front of the sleeve might suggest, it's a colder, crisper sound in general than Debut, with far less emphasis on the dancier, poppier stuff that infused the first two albums. The beats are less mainstream, the songs slightly more challenging to the listener (penultimate track Pluto being a case in point - some serious BPM pushing the song along to somewhere it might not otherwise have gone), but as ever, it is definitively Björk. I would even say definitive Björk.
By the time you get to final track All Is Full Of Love you're ready for it to ease you gently back down to normality, but even then it does it in a haunting way. No beats, just layers of the voice and synths/strings bringing the album to a shimmering conclusion.
Of course All Is Full Of Love is complemented by one of the greatest videos ever made. Or maybe I'm just a sucker for robot lesbian Björks.
P.S.
Homogenic comes in a very nice multiple fold-out digipak CD case, but I can't for the life of me remember where I got it from. I do know that I got a 3CD box set thing of the single of Jóga from Rhyl Our Price which is still sealed in cellophane because I probably thought it would be worth something one day. I used to do this a lot. There was a time when my limited double album of Deacon Blue's Raintown / Riches was worth £40 in Record Collector. I doubt it is now.
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