Top 5 - Steve Kandell
1) Silver Jews, American Water (Drag City). David Berman reunites with Pavement's Stephen Malkmus on this, the third and best Silver Jews album. The music is country-tinged and low-key, but what that sets this record apart are Berman's brilliant lyrics and deadpan delivery. "In 1984 I was hospitalized for approaching perfection / Slowly screwing my way across Europe, they had to make a correction." That's the very first line on the album, and it gets better.
2) R.E.M., Up (Warner). And just when I was ready to give up on them. Advance word was not promising, as rumors of drum loops and synthesizers indicated that the recovering jangle-guitar band would the latest casualty of the techno bandwagon. Words like 'abstract' and 'inaccessible' were bandied around, almost like warnings to the faithful to lower expectations. But don't believe the hype. The album is packed with beautifully constructed songs that would not have sounded terribly out of place on any R.E.M. album in the past decade. Rather that attempt to replace departed drummer Bill Berry, the band simply wrote lush pop songs that didn't need drums. Memo to the WB suits: "Hope" should have been the single.
3) Fugazi, End Hits (Dischord). Punk rock for grown-ups.
4) Money Mark, Push the Button (Mo' Wax). In this, the year of the Beasties, it was actually their keyboardist who put out the more interesting album. An eclectic mix of jazzy instrumentals and the best Elvis Costello songs since Blood and Chocolate, this record shows more variety and talent than some artists display over the course of an entire career.
5) Hard Core Logo (Soundtrack/Movie) (Velvel). This Canadian mockumentary chronicling a punk band's ill-fated reunion tour sounds on paper like Spinal Tap for the SST set, and indeed there are a few explicit references to Rob Reiner's quintessential rock satire. But this visually imaginative film is decidedly less over-the-top, and despite its comic tone, features one of the most devastating endings seen in a long time anywhere. The sell-out-or-not-to-sell-out question drives the central conflict, but the movie's really about four aging friends who drive across the country in a van to play punk rock for drunken Canucks because they want to. If that sounds like I'm trivializing matters, I'm not. It's fucking beautiful.
