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Music > Features > The Edge of Change: The Most Memorable Albums of 1999 The Edge of Change: The Most Memorable Albums of 1999January - March 1999: Britney Spears to Blur[22 June 2009] By PopMatters Staff
1 February 1999
That Kieran Hebden’s Four Tet project could ever be charged with spearheading the insipidly-named folktronica movement is far from apparent on his debut full length Dialogue, though he does seem to be moving music forward a couple essential steps. Unlike most folk music, or electronic music of the time for that matter, Dialogue was fluid and loose, unguarded and, yes, organic. Even with such a stunning and phantasmagoric mix of freeform psychedelic noodling and rusty groove basslines, it’s hard to deny the preeminence of Hebden’s beat science on the album. It was those meticulous rhythmic cues, informed by his membership in post-rockers Fridge—though hardly expected even from those who knew that band, which made the album take on the unique shape it did. It culled free-jazz, psychedelic, raga, prog, hip-hop, fusion, indie, exotica, and beyond into a free-associative amalgamation that sounded like a family reunion wherein you could trace the genetic makeup of all those styles back to a single ancestry. The landscape of music in the years that followed the release of the album seems to have formed in its underbelly. Even if not directly influenced by Dialogue, it’s easy to see its reflection in the woozy hard-drumming blue sunshine of Manitoba/Caribou’s “Up in Flames”, or the whimsical flutter of vintage jazz reimagined as 22nd century astral beat voyages for Madlib and the like (the late J Dilla would later remix Four Tet). Even the ecstatic tribal drumming and strange woodland/woodwind noises of tracks like “3.3 Degrees from the Pole” (built on a trance-like loop from Roxy Music’s “2HB” to add another influence to the pot) have echoes in the freakiest of folk being put out today, like Sunburned Hand of the Man, who had one album produced by Hebden. Ultimately, though, Dialogue stands as a singularity, both in Hebden’s own catalogue and in the music world in general. That it came at the end of the 20th century, typifying the abstractions of the past couple decades and signaling what was to come, is simply the icing on this delectable multilayered cake.
1 February 1999
The middle chapter of Stefan Betke’s trilogy of seminal ambient dub albums is also the shortest one, which means that it, and not 1, is the best place for novices to start. Although the three albums do differ, Pole’s sound is such that the differences are all but invisible to anyone beyond already-committed fans. Certainly the staticky pops, crackles, and bass pulses of 2 are a little more active than the almost parodically withdrawn 1, and given the lack of variation in Betke’s sound, 2’s brief running time and unusually sprightly tracks make it the most palatable. Betke started working as Pole after he was gifted with a damaged Waldorf 4-Pole filter—Betke was interested enough in the glitchy, cracked end of dub techno that the hissing and popping the filter now produced were turned from a defect into not just a virtue, but a production aesthetic. The nine-minute “Fahren”, which opens 2, should give any listener more than enough material to figure out whether Betke’s uncompromising style is for them. If early Pole is a dub of anything, it’s a dub of broken machinery, and it sounds like it. But there’s a reason Betke’s first three records are still lauded by the type of people who lionize Basic Channel, Deepchord, and Gas: the furiously twitching (for the genre) “Streit” and the hazy “Hafen” are pretty much as compelling as ambient dub gets, and for converts that’s very compelling indeed. Most listeners who find Betke’s work intriguing probably don’t need to go beyond this brief record, but that’s part of what makes 2 so great.
2 February 1999
On the family tree of Northwest rock music, Built to Spill may not be godfathers, but they are certainly the cool uncles, mixing drinks in the kitchen while the party takes place on the patio. This splendid Boise, Idaho, band spent most of the 1990s quietly drafting the blueprint for the Northwest Sound (their DNA residue is evident in the strains of Modest Mouse, Death Cab for Cutie, and other crucial Northwest bands), closing the decade with Keep It Like a Secret, ten tracks of gangly, melodic delight. Keep It Like a Secret works at once as a firm handshake to new listeners and a warm embrace for disciples, an amalgam of the crisp, clever structures demonstrated on 1993’s There’s Nothing Wrong with Love and the gorgeous, languid sprawl of 1996’s Perfect From Now On. Meandering guitar lines wander into infectious choruses, propulsive rhythms demand sympathetic movement of appendages (tapping feet, pumping fists, air drumming, etc.), beguiling lyrics offer literate, coherent documentation of incoherent events (or perhaps vice versa)—the record secured Built to Spill’s status as demigods of the indie set, even as skeptics dismissed them as a stoner mutation of Dinosaur Jr. Ten years later, the album still defies easy placement into a genre, sounding as vibrant today as it did on the day of its release. Perhaps the band’s fusion of muscle and melody will elicit the raising of one eyebrow instead of two from some listeners, but Keep It Like a Secret remains a stellar document from a seminal Northwest band, and a sonic pleasure in the present tense. 
 The Edge of Change: The Most Memorable Albums of 1999 |
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Comments
No offense but, it’s really an amazing stretch to say that Silverchair was more versatile than Pearl Jam or especially Soundgarden. I politely dissent. Go back and listen to the discographies of those two bands. I still think that Silverchair, even though Diorama, are a fairly generic and boring band.
Comment by Bob — June 22, 2009 @ 12:55 am
There are so many things wrong with your critique of Britney’s deput album and her influence of youth I hardly know where to start, but here’s one. If you are going to somehow blame the Backstreet Boys for poor Britney’s success, at least explain why. A sample of Britney’s debut album was included on some, not all copies of Backstreet’s brilliant MILLLINEUM album-which sold over a million copies in one week, millions upon millions upon MILLIONS total sales around the world. I assure you-those sales did NOT occur BECAUSE of Britney’s song. Most copies did NOT have that song.
Comment by Marlena — June 22, 2009 @ 5:30 am
about the Britney article:
first of all Britney was just a girl following her dream, when you get the opportunity to make you dream come true you don’t really say no cause you’re 2 years younger than you should be to get into the music business and wait for the second opportunity that might never come…
second of all, her problems and her meltdown don’t come just from the fact that she’s famous, Britney has bipolar disorder so the fame only added to it but didn’t cause it…
plus her songs are nothing like Michael Jackson’s, she’s got her own style of music and her songs are great, otherwise they wouldn’t have gotten into the top 10 of the billboard charts
she’s a very talented girl so even if it got her through some serious problems, she is where she should be: a successful artist to remember.
even though she messed up a lot, she’s proven to be a survivor, a girl doing what she loves to do and fighting for it !
Comment by Sandy — June 22, 2009 @ 6:21 am
That’s one take on <i>13</i> - the “jilted Blur fan” take, I suppose. Marianne Faithfull’s rebuttal (paraphrased): “It’s this generation’s <i>Pet Sounds</i>.”
Comment by Joseph M — June 22, 2009 @ 6:47 am
BSB wasn’t bringin’ it so that’s when Jive unleashed Britney? Um, no. Britney got famous during the height of BSBs’ career. They could hold their own. Also, I have never heard of copies of Millennium that had a sampler of Britney’s album on them. I’m not doubting that they exist, but between the 40 million copies that have moved of their “Millennium” album, I’m sure those rarer copies with Britney samplers are few and far between. I’m a BSB fan of 12 years, and I have never seen a such said copy of the album myself. Most of what I’ve seen are either the 12-track US version, or some other international versions that had extras such as postcards, mousepads, etc but mostly bonus tracks that were also found on the singles, like “I’ll be there for you,” “My Heart stays with you,” “If you knew what I knew,” “You wrote the book on love” and such.
Where I DO know that Britney WAS sampled on when it came to BSB stuff, however, was an additional extra bonus Jive sampler CD that came with BSBs’ All Access VHS (the tape that has some music videos like “Everybody” (and the making of it), “ALAYLM” (plus on-set footage), “Quit Playing Games”, some live performances, and such). The CD has maybe a couple of Britney’s old songs on it (don’t remember one of the songs, the other one was “Soda Pop”), and songs by other artists that were signed to Jive at the time as well. Most BSB fans I know (myself excluded though) pitched the CD because they already had the only BSB content from it, a performance of “Darlin” that they obtained through another concert special of theirs on VHS—the “Live in Concert” special from 1996.
Comment by Anna from Kansas City, Missouri — June 23, 2009 @ 11:05 am
Those are some pretty grandiose statements for a fairly decent - not great, but decent - rap record, regarding The Roots’ Things Fall Apart.
“Act Too: Love of My Life”, the only love song I’ve heard written for hip-hop as a whole.”
—-Uhm… Common’s “I Used To Love Her” doesn’t apply, huh? I guess because it was five years earlier.
“But if we educated our youth on the true meaning of hip-hop and its roots—socially-relevant lyrics, jazz, blues, and rock and roll—then we, as a people, would be in a much better position to vocalize our thoughts and our emotions through positive music.”
—- What is the “True meaning” of hip hop? I guess rappers, or MCs (emcees) from the late 70’s and early 80’s weren’t full of braggadocio and weren’t interested in superficial materialsim, ie: heavy jewelry, money and “shakin that ass”. That’s what Shyam means, yeah?
Yeah because modern day hip-hop has nothing to offer when the ‘Golden Age’ was all about uplifting humanity because - ahem - it wasn’t.
There’s nothing wrong with identifying with history, having socially-relevant lyrics, referencing or sampling jazz and rock, but I feel too many of us in the “hip-hop community” romanticize the late 80’s - early 90’s hip hop Golden Age, when that era was full of many of the contradictions we see unfolded today.
This is not to argue that hip hop isn’t a “mockery of itself” becoming the new Hair Metal, but if we are truly to “educate our youth”, we have to soberly look at hiphop’s past and understand that the seemingly selfish and seemingly socially uplifting elements of rap have always been apart of the hip hip community and as we see so often (Kanye, JayZ, The Wu, et al)these traits can be occupied by a sole artist all at once.
One can cite a hip hop album that has also stood the test of time from 1999 to get a grasp of hip hop’s contradictory nature: MF Doom’s “Operation Doomsday”. I guess it wasn’t cited because upon release unlike now, it wasn’t very “pop"ular.
This is just the tip of the iceberg.
Even though I love popmatters.com, there’s no need to over-credit an album just for a 10-year look-back retrospective to have relevance.
Sorry, I got work to do.
Paz.
Comment by Hip Hop Attacks? — June 25, 2009 @ 2:54 pm