Flux Capacitor: Skip Spence - Oar (1969)

The story goes something like this: Skip Spence, guitarist for American psych rockers Moby Grape, was taking copious amounts of acid and dating a Wiccan who convinced him that his bandmates were evil. He then broke down their hotel room door with an axe and tried to kill them, earning him a six month stint in a mental institution, after which he recorded Oar, his only solo album. Legend has it that the album sold 600 copies, making it the worst seller in the history of Columbia Records. In any case it was a massive flop, but gained a snowballing cult status over time. Thirty years later, three things happened. First, Oar was issued on CD for the second time, this version including a batch of incomplete bonus tracks. Second, Spence died of lung cancer at the age of 52. Third, a tribute album called More Oar was released. Spence got to hear it; how he felt about it I don't know. It featured covers of every Oar song (including the bonus tracks) by artists such as Tom Waits, Robert Plant, Mudhoney and Beck (who contributed an excellent, fleshed-out version of the unfinished "Halo of Gold" and more recently covered the whole album, minus the bonus tracks, as part of his Record Club series).

Spence played everything on Oar, and it is the musical equivalent of a lonely, crazy man mumbling to himself. The album visits psychedelic rock ("War in Peace", "Grey/Afro"), folk and country ("Cripple Creek", "Broken Heart") among other styles, but even the upbeat numbers have a deflating effect. The simple acoustic numbers are some of the best; "Weighted Down (The Prison Song)" sounds exactly that, as if gravity is forcing Spence's staccato strumming almost to a halt. "Broken Heart" is given one of his most animated vocal performances, which is a stark contrast to the metaphors for disappointment such as a parched cowboy reaching a lake only to drown. The album's original sequence ends with the amazing, experimental "Grey/Afro". Like the bonus tracks, it's all bass, drums and vocals. Unlike those, it's nine and a half minutes long and makes extensive use of the early analog flanging techniques popularised by The Beatles and Jimi Hendrix. It's a worthy coda to a quaint yet engaging document from a strange young man who never quite found his place in the musical landscape.

Flux Capacitor: Throwing Muses - Untitled (Throwing Muses) (1986)

There's no question that Throwing Muses deserve to be honoured in Flux Capacitor. They molded the then relatively new indie or "college" rock sound in the mid 80s more than most bands (and more than any other female-led band, if that matters), and, as the first American band signed to 4AD, permanently redefined the English label along with acolytes Pixies. The question is which album to pick, as their isn't really an accepted Throwing Muses classic album or ideal starting point. I've decided to go with the officially untitled debut for the same reason it was the first Muses album I listened to: why the hell not?

Cognitive dissonance set in straight away the first time I heard this album. My first thoughts were "this sounds familiar" and "I've never heard anything like this before". Kristin Hersh created the Throwing Muses sound by borrowing from REM, Wire, Joy Division, The Beatles and others, but, like the best innovators, fashioned it into something new. The debut never lets the listener get comfortable because it never sits still; you think the unrelenting post-punk ditty "Call Me" is going to set the tone for the rest of the album, but then the next track slows down the tempo and switches the time signature. The rhythmic shifts never stop, but Hersh's intricate arpeggios knit the whole thing together. Throwing Muses went on to release at least three albums as good as this one, but they wouldn't exist without this initial artistic triumph.

Related:

Throwing Muses - Purgatory/Paradise
50 Foot Wave - With Love From the Men's Room EP

Flux Capacitor: Sonic Youth - Goo (1990)

In an effort to force myself to update this blog at least every two months, I'm kicking off a series of classic album reviews. Maybe yet another obscure blogger's take on a much written about album is the last thing you'd want to read, but too bad. You're not reading this anyway, statistically speaking. I'll try to stay away from albums that have been hammered into the collective consciousness for decades such as Sgt. Pepper's or anything by Led Zeppelin, but I make no guarantees. And yes, I am aware that Coke Machine Glow or Tiny Mix Tapes or some other e-rag I don't read has or had a similar feature called The Delorean, another Back to the Future reference. You just watch how much fucking sleep I lose over that. So anyway, I want to tell you about my friend Goo...

Many people would have you believe that Sonic Youth's catalogue can be divided neatly and chronologically into a few groups, along with its fans: the self-titled EP through Daydream Nation are for aging indie fans and noise fetishists, Goo through Washing Machine is the point where the alt-rockers started taking notice, the awkward A Thousand Leaves through NYC Ghosts & Flowers period is for diehard fans who own everything else, and Murray Street through The Eternal is the entry point for young indie fans. Such profiling is obviously true to an extent, but really, Sonic Youth fans are as diverse a group as any, and their perspectives vary greatly.

Goo and Daydream Nation have never been as separate in my mind as for others, but it's easy to see why Goo is often seen as a clean break. It was the band's major label debut and found them a whole new audience, helped greatly by slicker production. On the other hand, it deals in the same odd tunings, feedback, dissonance and frantic hardcore-ish riffs, is thematically obscure and is only short in comparison to Daydream Nation. Old fans yelled "sellout" purely on principle. I mean did they listen to the fucking thing?

Oh yeah, the songs. I almost forgot about that. Goo sure has 'em! Kim Gordon's best song is here ("Tunic") and "Mote" is not only Lee Renaldo's finest moment, but also probably my favourite Sonic Youth song. That guy consistently manages to reduce an album's elements to a simple form and make a song that's all the better for it, but for some reason he's only ever allowed one song per album, if that. Shenanigans! Chuck D wins the award for Most Pointless Guest Appearance Ever for "Kool Thing", but nonetheless, that song is the perfect bridge between the "art rock" Sonic Youth (for want of a far better term) and the more straight ahead model that would see out most of the 90s. It'd be "Smells Like Teen Spirit" if there was no "Smells Like Teen Spirit". And by extension, Goo is the perfect primer for Nevermind, the production opus of future Sonic Youth collaborator Butch Vig; less accessible, sure, but built on the same clean, powerful sound (Steve Shelley's drums are rarely as prominent as they are here and on the Vig-produced follow-up Dirty), and, more importantly, similarly grand and ambitious, two traits that would be in increasingly short supply for rock music throughout the next two decades.