Leftfield, Nine Inch Nails and Stereolab
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20 September 1999
Leftfield
Rhythm and Stealth
They don’t make music like this anymore. It’s not so much a value judgment as a simple statement of fact. Few acts ever made dance music as powerful and pummeling as Leftfield, and even fewer acts were able to combine this kind of strength with such a keenly cerebral intelligence. At some point, dance music got small: what happened to the bass? What happened to the cathartic pulse of amniotic bass? When did everything get so damned hip and self-conscious? Where’s the passion?
Leftfield were big, bigger than life, even if they themselves were almost comically anonymous. Just another couple of English blokes making house music—but not just that. Their brand of house music blew out sound systems across the continent. For their first trick they conjured up John Lydon and the era-defining “Open Up”, and subsequently dropped Leftism, still one of the most highly-esteemed dance LPs of all time. Rhythm & Stealth was their second album, and if it is sometimes overlooked in favor of their debut that’s no scratch on Rhythm & Stealth.
Only ten tracks, and not a bum in the joint: all killer, no filler—nothing but massive beats and monstrous, all-encompassing synths. Few tracks have ever kicked like “Afrika Shox” (with Afrika Bambaataa!); few dance ballads have ever felt as dangerous as “Swords”; precious few hard house tracks have ever swelled with the destructive fury of “6/8 War”. It was a phenomenally potent second act, and rather than tempt fate, Leftfield decided to call it a day soon after. It seemed like a shame at the time, but in hindsight perhaps it wasn’t such a bad idea. There are worse ideas than releasing two all-time classic albums and then fading gracefully into the night. 
Tim O’Neil
21 September 1999
Nine Inch Nails
The Fragile
Listening to The Fragile 10 years later is a lot like hearing a mash-up of last year’s two Nine Inch Nails albums, Ghosts I-IV and The Slip. There are some really great instrumentals and some great rock songs here, but there are also a few boring instrumentals and some truly uninspired rock songs. Theoretically, The Fragile was five years in the making, and Trent Reznor had so much material that his only choice was to go the double-disc, massive album route. But in practice, there really is about one full CD’s worth of strong music here. That was true when the album came out, and it’s still true today.
Age has not improved the more lackluster songs. What is striking about hearing The Fragile today is how much the guitars are turned up. We tend to think of Nine Inch Nails as having an electronic bedrock in which heavy, distorted guitars are used to fill out the sound—with certain rocking exceptions, of course (“Wish”, “March of the Pigs”). But the guitars throughout this album are huge, and they dominate just about every song they’re used in. Opener “Somewhat Damaged” illustrates this perfectly. A jagged riff kicks off the song and continues throughout, getting louder and more distorted as it goes. This riff ends up so thoroughly overwhelming the rest of the music that it renders the song inert. Second track and first single “The Day the World Went Away” fares better with its apocalyptic lyrics and slow-and-heavy music. But it’s the third track “The Frail” that highlights the album’s other striking feature. A slow, piano-based instrumental, it has a quiet minor-key melody and is the first of several excellent instrumentals spaced throughout the album. These instrumentals expanded the sound of the band, pushing forward and exploring new territory, which would later bear fruit on the aforementioned Ghosts album and the excellent acoustic Still CD. But the rock songs, even when great, today sound pretty stagnant for Nine Inch Nails, rehashing a lot of what Reznor did on Broken and The Downward Spiral. Chris Conaton
21 September 1999
Stereolab
Cobra and Phases Group Play Voltage in the Milky Night
As the 1990s drew to a close, so did Stereolab’s ability to sound fresh, vital, and relevant. By this point in their career, the “groop” could play their particular brand of space age lounge-pop in their sleep. And indeed, Cobra and Phases Group Play Voltage in the Milky Night found them going through the motions like never before, and still ranks as the worst record in their incredibly extensive catalogue. Properly speaking, nothing had changed. All of the elements were slotted into their expected places—every droning Farfisa organ, every vibraphone hit, every “ba-ba-ba” vocal tic and harmonized verse by Laetitia Sadier and backup singer Mary Hansen. Abetted by Jim O’Rourke and John McEntire’s aloof and thoroughly boring production, Stereolab effectively turned the music that had once galvanized the college rock underground with early classics like “Jenny Ondioline” and “Ping Pong” into predictable pop pabulum.
Cobra and Phases Group also coincided with the obsolescence (if not the outright death) of the ‘90s Exotica movement, led by Mexican easy listening composer Juan García Esquivel, Stereolab’s major influence. (In a sad and poignant turn of events, the aging Esquivel would die only three years later.) But if the record justifiably represents Stereolab’s lowest descent into lifelessness, it also stands as the clear dividing line between their early- and late-career successes. Perhaps it took a blatantly autopilot album and the critical backlash that followed it to jolt the group out of their holding pattern. Even after Hansen was killed in a tragic biking accident in 2002, Stereolab would continue to recharge their batteries and produce the excellent Margarine Eclipse and last year’s fine Chemical Chords, which didn’t alter their formula so much as suffuse it with new, vivifying force. We all make mistakes, and the once do-no-wrong Stereolab wasn’t an exception. It’s what we do about those mistakes that really matters. Mike Newmark
