This list was originally posted in 2004 on one of my old weblogs. Songs 10-6 were re-posted here on 19 September.
No. 5: 'Over and Over' - Neil YoungFrom Ragged Glory, released in September 1990. Two Neil Young tracks in the top ten, and he can't even sing! Ragged Glory influenced many of the grunge acts that followed ... After an opening guitar salvo that sounds like it wants to go on forever, Young's declamatory whine cuts in ... The song is a sad nostalgia trip tinged with regret, and the guitars are just an attempt to deafen the pain. It works. They deafen the listener too. ...
But we paid the price of time/and now it's out of reach/And so the broken circle goes/Over and over again
... the guitars fuzz out to one long, sustained, distorted note - finally dying away like the embers of love's fire.
—posted on 3 June 2004
No. 4: 'November Rain' - Guns N' Roses
This 1991 song is a tour de force, a knockout blow to people who thought they could write a great rock song, or any great song. Even a great poem. Or a great piece of writing period ...
It's an odd fit in some ways. Weren't Guns N' Roses a hard rock or heavy metal band? It just shows something very, very good can break through typecasting ...
The track is, of course, as much a symphony as a song, complete with sections ... The guitar soars over everything, as usual, and the notes eventually shatter off into shards of electricity like some modern version of a rococo fugue ... In some ways the raspy vocals and the lead guitar seem to swap roles ... then the chanting starts, a haunting outro sounding eerily like an orchestra string section.
I had a bad dose of November rain myself in '91 ...
It's a long time ago now.
—posted on 25 June 2004
No. 3: 'These Days' - Jesus and Mary Chain
From Stoned and Dethroned, 1994. Where do I start with this? Stoned and Dethroned has never left my CD player for long, after I first bought it in 1994 (except when my daughter purloined it along with several others in my collection) ... The album is a-glitter with glorious acoustic guitar chords and breaks, along with haunting, spine-tingling melodies; dark-themed, beautiful, unforgettable ... the songs have a kind of reverent single-syllable vocal delivery. The sadness of the lyrics is belied by the sheer precociousness of the guitar notes ... sunshine radiating out of your speakers. In all truthfulness, I had great difficulty picking this track from the rest on the album.
If you have not heard These Days and all of this brilliant album, I thoroughly recommend it.
—posted on 1 July 2004
—posted on 1 July 2004
No. 2: ‘Twisterella’ - Ride
From 1992's Going Blank Again. The second Ride song in my1990s top ten, just to balance shoegaze against Neil Young and grunge. I was obsessed with this track from the first time I heard it. A friend (at Grey Advertising in the dark days of 1992) taped his copy of the album onto a blank Sony cassette and gave it to me. This guy used to walk around with the distinctive Christopher Gunson cover image (below) on his T-shirt.
Oddly, hard-core Ride fans sometimes regard 'Twisterella' as Ride-lite. Band devotees 'expect' a certain kind of sound ... Musicians find it frustrating that audiences essentially want them to keep doing the same song over ...
‘Twisterella’ burned itself into my brain in those faraway days of 1992 when things were a little simpler, the days a little colder, the memories a bittersweet mixture, and the A3 layout pad on my desk in that black St Kilda Road building a white unfilled wasteland. So I played ‘Twisterella’ over and over again. I tried to kill it ... you expect to reach a kind of plateau with favourites where you think, I love this, but today, I've decided I don't need to hear it again for another two months. But I couldn't kill it. I never reached the plateau. I just wanted to keep playing it.
And now, having written this, I want to hear it again in all its swirling, transcendent, sonic nectar-filled goodness.
—posted on 8 July 2004
—posted on 8 July 2004
No. 1: 'Dreams' - The Cranberries
Everyone Else Is Doing It, So Why Can't We was released in 1993. Some of my top ten songs of the 1990s have been a little obscure; Kenneth McKellar performing ‘Silent Worship’, for example, but 'Dreams' appears on many 1990s lists ...
From the introduction that sounds like the excited heartbeat of a newborn baby, to the glorious harmonies of Dolores O'Riordan's overdubbed voice; to the primeval wail at the end that echoes countless happy/sad keening laments that rang from Irish stone cottages and over emerald green fields, marking a million personal triumphs and tragedies, this simple song brings home both the strength and the fragility of the human spirit ...
... a strength and fragility that are both, puzzlingly, amplified by a dream coming true.
—posted on 22 July 2004
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A Cantonese version of ‘Dreams’ featured in the 1994 film Chungking Express for which performer Faye Wong, arguably should have won an Oscar for improvised choreography. (There is no Oscar for choreography period; and that is a travesty, and another story!)
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