Tis the season for year-end best-of lists, and The Record Exchange is pleased to bring you our 2012 Staff Picks!
Take a gander at Esti‘s list:
TY SEGALL AND WHITE FENCE
Hair
PURITY RING
Shrines
GODSPEED YOU! BLACK EMPEROR
Allelujah! Don’t Bend! Ascend!
CHROMATICS
Kill for Love
BLACK MARBLE
A Different Arrangement
MAC DEMARCO
2
DIIV
Oshin
TRUST
TRST
GRIMES
Visions
THEE OH SEES
Putrifiers II
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Mellon Collie is the latest Smashing Pumpkins release to get the reissue treatment (it just came out today, actually), and it’s even more impressive than the previous collections. There are three extra CDs full of demos, outtakes, and remixes, plus a DVD of live performances from the Spring of 1996. The big box also contains all the lyrics, new liner notes on every song from the original album, and a Decoupage kit. All the extras are nice, but what the reissue really does it drive home how incredibly sprawling, bold, ambitious, and audacious Mellon Collie was.
Frontman Billy Corgan had a lot riding on his band’s third proper album, as they were coming off a major breakthrough. Siamese Dream was the rock album of 1993, signifying the Pumpkins’ ascent to radio and MTV dominance on the back of singles like “Today,” “Rocket,” and “Disarm.” Though they were lumped into the catch-all moniker “alternative” (they did headline Lollapalooza, after all), there were only hints of counter-culture in Siamese Dream‘s thick radio-ready production (provided by Nevermind helmer Butch Vig). Really, only frontman Billy Corgan’s unusual voice and occasionally dark worldview put him shoulder to shoulder with his grungier peers on Alternative Nation. Corgan once compared Siamese Dream to the first Boston album, and while there’s still a lot more guttural heft in his work, I always understood that he didn’t think there was that much sonic distance between “Cherub Rock” and “More Than a Feeling.”
Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness has even less to do with the predominant rock poses that had already morphed into cliché by the time 1995 rolled around. It was a strange time, as the highs of ’93 had given way to the sadness of ’94: The death of Kurt Cobain, the beginning of Pearl Jam’s withdrawl from the spotlight, the first wave of wildly successful pretenders like Bush. Radio rock in ’95 was rough, as many of the biggest albums of that fall—including Red Hot Chili Peppers’ One Hot Minute, Green Day’s Insomniac, and Alice in Chains’ Alice in Chains—were grand disappointments, and they had trouble forcing slightly aggro pop stars like Alanis Morissette off the airwaves. A lot of people were going big, but fewer and fewer seemed to be breaking through.
That’s the environment into which Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness was born. Any way you look at it, it’s huge: Two discs, 28 songs, massive theatrical production, and grand, sweeping ideas. Corgan is really reaching for the stars depicted on the album’s cover—right from jumpstreet, he opens up his magnum opus with the instrumental title track (a sort of ent’ract for the affair), follows it with the billowing, fantastical “Tonight, Tonight,” and closes the kick-off triptych with a high-speed grinder called “Jellybelly.” It’s a bold gambit, letting the listener know that Mellon Collie would not sit still long enough for anybody to get a proper read on it—at least not in one sitting.—Entertainment Weekly
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When the Pittsburgh spitter first broke into mainstream consciousness in 2010 with his ink-covered body, camo shorts and Chuck Taylor sneakers, he was unlike any rapper we had seen, and now that the game has clearly caught on, Wiz Khalifa chose to upgrade on his newest LP,O.N.I.F.C.
Khalifa not only heard the criticisms surrounding his 2011 major-label debut, Rolling Papers, he’s addressed them head-on with O.N.I.F.C. Critics complained about RP’s pop-friendly selections, so Khalifa enlisted Taylor Gang production veterans like Cardo (“Intro”) and Sledgren (“Initiation”) to balance out his latest sonic trip.
“Rise Above” not only features contributions from Pharrell, Wiz also properly introduces his new TG artist Tuki Carter and his future wife Amber Rose, who raps a few bars toward the end. Khalifa even goes as far as to dedicate a few tracks to his hunny on the X-rated “Up in It” and the 1990s R&B-inspired “Got Everything.” On the latter, he professes his love for Rose as stylistically as he professes his love for marijuana. “And I swear you deserve a wedding ring/ Can’t ever see you choosing nothin’ over or instead of me,” he raps.
It’s new ground for Khalifa, who in his younger days, openly celebrated his free-wheeling lifestyle on tracks like 2009’s “Ms. Rightfernow” from hisFlight School mixtape or “The Thrill” from Burn After Rolling.—MTV
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In honor of Pearl Jam‘s twentieth anniversary, Academy Award®-winning director and music journalist Cameron Crowe created a definitive portrait of the seminal band carved from over 1,200 hours of rarely and never-before-seen footage, plus 24 hours of recently shot concert and interview footage. Pearl Jam Twenty chronicles the years leading up to the band’s formation, the chaos that ensued soon after their rise to megastardom, their step back from center stage, and the creation of a trusted circle that would surround them giving way to a work culture that would sustain them. Told in big themes and bold colors with blistering sound, the film is carved from over 1,200 hours of rarely seen and never before seen footage spanning the band s career. Pearl Jam Twenty is the definitive portrait of Pearl Jam: part concert film, part intimate insider-hang, part testimonial to the power of music and uncompromising artists.
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“Pain is not alone.” It’s hard to imagine an artist more successfully merging grandeur with the grotesque than does the legendary Scott Walker on Bish Bosch—the latest decadal zero-crossing on his intrepid voyage deftly skirting the edges of black holes. Beginning in 1978, when he penned the magnificent first four tracks on The Walker Brothers’ reunion, Nite Flights, Walker has been torturously unlatching a Pandora’s toolbox of increasingly entropic, disease-ridden, godless jazz-prayers. Approaching 75 minutes, Bosch is the most Brobdingnagian volume in Walker’s nightmare encyclopedia, but is also more profuse than both Tilt (1995) and The Drift (2006). Torture, bestiality, flatulence, severed genitalia and, well, “blowing up bullfrogs with a straw” all have a home on this record (sit back down, PETA, Walker has stated that his songwriting is in no way autobiographical). During the climax of the record’s centerpiece, “SDSS1416+13B (Zercon, A Flagpole Sitter),” a 21-plus minute track aptly titled after the universe’s coldest sub-stellar body yet discovered, Walker laces a string of schoolyard-caliber fat jokes. Ukelele, whisking machetes and a giant, helical African horn called a kudu shofar—yep, all present.
But what’s really amazing about Bish Bosch is that all of its myriad components are somehow pulled in to exist on the same insane planet. The source of the gravity? Walker’s immense, disgruntled-god croon, of course. Much like the works of Hieronymus Bosch—the album’s namesake painter—it’s foolish to try to absorb the whole piece on first listen, but isolated portions are readily appreciable in their own right. Try to imagine a negative image of The Garden of Earthly Delights. As existentially terrifying as it is impossibly distant, movements of this record are transcendent—the kind that seize the nervous system (refer also to “Corps De Blah,” “Phrasing” and “Epizootics!”). So why endure the horror show? If for no other reason—and there are far too many to list here—Walker’s music should be braved for the simple fact that you won’t encounter anything else like it again, ever.—Filter