The Chicks – Fly [Sony] – 31 August 1999
It’s hard to imagine, but The Chicks existed before Natalie Maines, the outspoken and dynamic member, joined the group. Current bandmates and sisters Martie Maguire and Emily Robison co-founded the ensemble in 1989 with two others and became popular on the bluegrass circuit, releasing three albums between 1990 and 1993. During these years, the group were already experimenting with the seeds of the contemporary country and bluegrass blend that became their patented signature, much to the displeasure of fellow founder Robin Lynn Macy, who left the group. Enter Natalie Maines, and stardom was just around the corner.
Maines added that charismatic frontperson the band needed, and her musical chops, were equal to those of the accomplished Maguire and Robison. Indeed, the Chicks‘ enduring importance may well be what they have done for the visibility of female instrumentalists in a highly male dominated field. Maines may be the one that gets the bulk of the press, but Maguire and Robison’s consummate playing is the foundation of the band and the image that it projects is perhaps more powerful than even Maines’ colorful personality.
These “chicks” have never been pretty fronts for men, but are among the finest pickers in the biz. Maguire came in third at the 1989 national fiddle championships and Maines scored a full-tuition scholarship at the prestigious Berkelee College of Music.
Yet there was some doubt among the Nashville suits about the commercial viability of an all-woman group in country music. Someone either sniffed a gimmick here that would sell or, hopefully, was simply won over by the sheer excellence of their music because when they landed that deal, they hit big and fast, selling 12 million copies of 1998’s Wide Open Spaces and nabbing two Grammys in the process.
Fly followed quickly on Wide Open Spaces‘ heels, meant to maintain and build the artist’s momentum, something it succeeded at wildly as Fly is packed to the gills with stadium fillers. The album sold ten million copies, won them two more Grammys and generated two #1 singles in “Cowboy Take Me Away” and “Without You”. Fly maintained elements of bluegrass style with its emphasis on virtuoso musicianship and layered harmony singing, while adding pop friendly guitars and attitude into the mix, as well as mainstream country staples like pedal steel guitar and songs about everyday lives.
The Chicks managed the feat of sounding completely new, never easy to do, while upending Nashville traditions. It’s rare for artists to play their own backing on major label albums coming out of Music City. Even George Strait‘s superb Ace in the Hole Band usually has to sit on the sidelines while the studio players step up to the recording mics. The Chicks use some additional players to fill out their sound on recordings, but the bulk of the playing comes from the artists themselves, operating as a true team of equals and they went platinum doing it.
Fly was loaded with hits, from the Celtic influenced “Ready to Run”, the expansive classic country yearning of “Cowboy Take Me Away”, the risqué barnstormer “Sin Wagon”, and the Fried Green Tomatoes-esque “Goodbye Earl”. These songs explore love and longing, but with a real sense of empowerment and strength, never despair or victimhood. Popular culture and the music business badly needed such strong women back in 1999 and we still need them today. – Sarah Zupko
Magnetic Fields – 69 Love Songs [Merge] – 7 September 1999
When 69 Love Songs was released in 1999, the buzz could not have been greater. In addition to winning over the college radio crowd, the album charmed the press, garnering glowing reviews and a rare “10” rating from SPIN. Its influence at the time was palpable, especially as 20-somethings were introduced to Nina Rota, Ferdinad de Saussure, and Pantone color charts. The album encouraged contemporary vocalists to gender-bend their lyrics and songwriters to take on any subject matter with innocence, genre experimentation, and even, in the case of “The Night You Can’t Remember”, heroic full rhymes.
A decade past the album’s release, its impact has only begun to be revealed. Unlike other indie bands that generate hype and then fade into nowhere or face a backlash, Magnetic Fields held strong with 69 Love Songs. While the aforementioned over-hyped indie bands generally only influenced one another, it seems musicians everywhere were touched by 69 Love Songs.
Among the artists covering the titular love songs are Mary Lou Lord, Peter Gabriel, and Kelly Hogan (whose version of “Papa Was a Rodeo” is perhaps the best Magnetic Fields cover yet). Moreover, Stephin Merritt has set a dazzling precedent for men working between theatrical and pop traditions, and he may well also be responsible for the dubious ukulele craze of the past few years. – Erin Lyndal Martin
Sloan – Between the Bridges [Murder] – 12 September 1999
Sloan were always way more popular in Canada than they ever were in the United States. However, the power pop band released a string of excellent, critically adored albums in the 1990s that at least granted them the cult following they deserved. Arguments can be made in favor of each of these albums, but for my money, 1999’s Between the Bridges nudges out Navy Blues, One Chord to Another, and Twice Removed as their best.
Between the Bridges flows together like a rock opera, as songs blend into each other and themes return throughout the course of the album; this despite the band having four distinct songwriters. If there is a concept behind the record, it’s autobiographical, as it charts the band’s beginning in Nova Scotia (“The N.S.”), their flirtation with American success and eventual failure (“So Beyond Me”, “Losing California”), and their return home to Canada (“Take Good Care of the Poor Boy”).
However, the clever sequencing wouldn’t matter if the songs didn’t hold up, and the LP is chock-full of great ones. “So Beyond Me” is a gem, with tight harmonies and a soaring melody, and a bridge/outro that combines both. “Don’t You Believe a Word” is a big, beautiful slice of AM radio-style pop, with coy lyrics and singing from Jay Ferguson. “Sensory Deprivation” is possibly Andrew Scott’s most exciting hard rocker, with a big, meaty riff and huge vocals.
“Losing California” has the album’s most infectious chorus and a kickass dual-guitar solo, while “The Marquee and the Moon” is a powerfully catchy piano-based song that uses its change-of-pace 6/8 time signature to great effect. In a more rock-friendly time for mainstream music, Between the Bridges could’ve been huge. But in the boy band pop and nu-metal dominated late ’90s, it never had a shot at showing up on the charts. – Chris Conaton
Gomez – Liquid Skin [Virgin] – 13 September 1999
Part two of the Merseyside indie band’s career overture, Liquid Skin shared the textural nuances of Gomez‘s Mercury Prize-winning debut Bring It On. Indeed, the albums were almost twins, down to the implied diptych of their cover art. Liquid Skin even inherited Bring It On‘s discarded title track, a bluesy fugue that became a top-25 single in the UK, but it ultimately outstrips its older sibling in both ambition and in the polished grit of its neo-blues confabulations.
For certain, it features more glorious uvula-scraping sustained notes from Ben Ottewell’s burnt-copper pipes than any other Gomez release: the sitar-drenched “Hangover” begins with his potent entreaty to “be the light at my window”, “Blue Moon Rising” climaxes with explosive iterations of the title phrase, and “Rosalita” bears out his vocal dexterity for its entire length.
The songwriting and production remains solid throughout (“Rhythm & Blues Alibi” could well be the band’s theme song), but it’s the rambling splendor of “California” and “Devil Will Ride” that sees Liquid Skin pull ahead of its well-laurelled predecessor. The latter in particular takes the cake, with its gobsmacking vocoder effects, marching-band horns, and Beatle-esque sing-along fadeout. “Even the Royal Mail / Can’t deliver us from what we got into,” Ian Ball sings. But on Liquid Skin, Gomez evades the sophomore jinx and convincingly delivers. – Ross Langager
Eve – Let There Be Eve… Ruff Ryders’ First Lady [Interscope] – 14 September 1999
Our nostalgic trip down memory lane would be incomplete without recognizing one of 1999’s brightest stars: Eve Jihan Jeffers. Carving out a space for herself in the male-dominated world of hip-hop, Eve achieved commercial success and critical acclaim with her debut, Let There Be Eve… Ruff Ryders’ First Lady. Sensual yet devoid of the hyper-sexuality that plagued the careers of more than a few of her female contemporaries, Eve appealed to young and old, female and male, the converted and the unconverted.
Amazingly, in a black cultural universe increasingly fragmented along the lines of rhythm and bullshit (see: Mark Anthony Neal), neo-soul, commercial rap, and backpacker hip-hop, Eve possessed the rare ability to endear herself to disparate communities.
Nowhere was this more apparent than on her debut release. Unafraid to signify with and on her hip-hop brethren, Eve shares the mic with rap’s man of the hour, DMX, her Philly comrade Beanie Sigel, and fellow newcomer Drag-On. Certain to oblige the most rudimentary requirements of hip-hop, the talented rapper from the City of Brotherly Love states her claim as the baddest chick in the game (“Scenario”), pays homage to her hometown (“Philly, Philly”), and tackles the complex subject of relations between the sexes (“Let’s Talk About” and “Gotta Man”).
To her credit, Eve gives voice to women struggling with issues of self-esteem and caught in abusive relationships. It seems only fitting in a milieu in which black music tilted toward a more conscious stance that Eve’s biggest single would address the issue of domestic violence. “Love Is Blind”, produced by Kasseem “Swizz Beats” Dean and featuring soulful vocals from Faith Evans, raced up the charts, due in no small part to its accompanying video.
Opening with “I don’t even know you and I hate you”, Eve told the story of the havoc domestic violence reeks on the lives of its victims and the communities they inhabit. On this track and others, Eve revealed a layer of black femininity that differed from that associated with neo-soul’s Earth Mamas. As cultural critic Greg Tate astutely noted, Eve put forth a vision of “inner-city sisterhood that may be understandably lost on folk all caught up in her platinum blond, butch haircut, pouty lips, and breast-stalking paw prints.”
Coming out the same year as Me’Shell Ndegeocello’s masterful Bitter, Angie Stone’s underrated Diamonds, and Mary J. Blige’s beautiful Mary, Eve was one of many artists providing a thought-provoking take on the complexity of black womanhood at the turn of the 21st century. – Claudrena Harold
Ol’ Dirty Bastard – Nigga Please [Elektra] – 14 September 1999
There’s no questioning the late, great Ol’ Dirty Bastard’s place as the wild man of the hip-hop idiom. He was Rudy Ray Moore, Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, and Fear of a Black Planet-era Flavor Flav all rolled up in a dusted Phillies blunt with the words “Big Baby Jesus” written across it with a bootleg Sharpie. Though the co-founding (and confounding) member of the Wu-Tang Clan was labeled an MC and a rapper by trade and association, his accidentally Dadaistic approach to the craft was exactly the eye jammie hip-hop needed to keep itself in check.
Largely produced by the Neptunes with accompanying beats by the likes of the RZA and Irv Gotti, Dirty’s second solo album is indeed his absurdist masterpiece as he blurts, sings, chants, and rants his way through what can easily be considered the most non-linear mainstream rap album ever created. Nigga Please was released in September of 1999 in the midst of a personal tornado of chaos and bad publicity.
It came in the wake of ODB’s full year of criminal mischief, which found Dirty hijacking the 1998 Grammys during the “Song of the Year” award announcement to proclaim that “Wu-Tang is for the children,” getting arrested in California after making “terrorist threats” against security at the House of Blues in Los Angeles, being kicked out of a hotel in Berlin, Germany for lounging in the nude on a balcony, getting pulled over in New York for driving with a suspended license and drug possession charges twice within a five-day span, and hiring OJ Simpson’s lawyer to represent him in court among other ill-fated instances.
Anchored by one hit song, the freaky club banger “Got Your Money”, featuring a memorable hook by a pre-“Milkshake” Kelis, Nigga Please zig zags from a faithful reading of Rick James’ “Cold Blooded” to sloppy-yet-entirely-endearing warble through the Billie Holiday classic “Good Morning Heartache” with one-time Timbaland protégé Lil’ Mo. Then there’s ODB doing what the Dirt Dog does best on “I Can’t Wait”, featuring a sample fashioned from the theme music to the William Shatner police drama TJ Hooker.
Those who didn’t get it still can’t understand where ODB was coming from on this, the absolute oddest gem in the Wu-Tang Clan catalog. But for those in the know — Jesus, we still rollin’ wit you. – Ron Hart
Supergrass – Supergrass [Capitol] – 20 September 1999
This album was a crucial step for Supergrass. While their chart position has slunk down incrementally with almost every album they’ve released, their eponymous third album established them as a solid career band. While the Britney Spears and Eminem types manufacture carbon copy blockbuster releases on pure hype, the so-called “X-Ray” album saw the band’s early, unrefined alternative punk and ramshackle twee influences coalesce into a consistently understated and subtle record, commanding their destiny while maintaining their unpretentious spirit and sense of humor.
Their 1995 debut I Should Coco ended up at number one in the UK charts, garnering them a Mercury Prize nomination and best new artist awards from NME and Q. The lead single “Caught by the Fuzz” and the Ivor Novello-winning “Alright” saw them touching back on their formative teenage years, capturing the unchecked hope and energy of youth. In 1997, In It for the Money followed it up to number two in the UK with a more ambitious and sonically varied sound, and sold more worldwide than its predecessor. This direction continued for their eponymous 1999 release.
The band was all safely in their mid-twenties at that point, and the time for naive noodling had passed. The album announced Supergrass as a mature group of talented musicians, no longer dependent on, but not devoid of, spunk. It helped to opens doors to the US market thanks to the surprise summer hit “Pumping on Your Stereo” (which made the Road Trip soundtrack) and its now-legendary supporting Muppet video.
The core of the album was not in its flashy riffs, but emotionally its contemplative, composed tracks. Among these, “Eon” is a slow moving epic that builds to a drifting downtempo peak, and “Born Again” follows suit, from an orchestra-warming-up intro to an electric piano and string-laden groove penetrated by vocoder-dampened vocals. The album was bookended by “Moving”, a touring song documenting various attributes of life on the road, and “Mama & Papa”, which closes the album on the notion that, once the nest is empty, you never can go back home.
Granted, their third album was their last to gain platinum sales, so one may be inclined to assume this was where it all went wrong. To the contrary, I see this as the album where they finally became themselves, reaching the place where all of the promise from their debut took them. The consumer only concerned with the here and now would likely miss the progression the band took to get to this point, and it’s one they continued.
2002’s Life on Other Planets would be their first album on the Billboard 200, while Road to Rouen from 2005 and last year’s Diamond Hoo Ha reached 41 and 22 on Top Heatseekers charts respectively. Yet, although their earlier albums may have had more raw energy and their later works may be more refined, in my mind, Supergrass still holds up as their best. – Alan Ranta
Leftfield – Rhythm and Stealth [Sony] – 20 September 1999
They don’t make music like this anymore. It’s not so much a value judgment as a simple statement of fact. Few acts ever made dance music as powerful and pummeling as Leftfield, and even fewer acts were able to combine this kind of strength with such a keenly cerebral intelligence. At some point, dance music got small: what happened to the bass? What happened to the cathartic pulse of amniotic bass? When did everything get so damned hip and self-conscious? Where’s the passion?
Leftfield were big, bigger than life, even if they themselves were almost comically anonymous. Just another couple of English blokes making house music — but not just that. Their brand of house music blew out sound systems across the continent. For their first trick they conjured up John Lydon and the era-defining “Open Up”, and subsequently dropped Leftism, still one of the most highly-esteemed dance LPs of all time. Rhythm & Stealth was their second album, and if it is sometimes overlooked in favor of their debut that’s no scratch on Rhythm & Stealth.
Only ten tracks, and not a bum in the joint: all killer, no filler, and nothing but massive beats and monstrous, all-encompassing synths. Few tracks have ever kicked like “Afrika Shox” (with Afrika Bambaataa!); few dance ballads have ever felt as dangerous as “Swords”; precious few hard house tracks have ever swelled with the destructive fury of “6/8 War”.
It was a phenomenally potent second act, and rather than tempt fate, Leftfield decided to call it a day soon after. It seemed like a shame at the time, but in hindsight perhaps it wasn’t such a bad idea. There are worse ideas than releasing two all-time classic albums and then fading gracefully into the night. – Tim O’Neil
Nine Inch Nails – The Fragile [Nothing] – 21 September 1999
Listening to The Fragile is a lot like hearing a mash-up of Nine Inch Nails’ albums,’ Ghosts I-IV and The Slip. There are some really great instrumentals and some great rock songs here, but there are also a few boring instrumentals and some truly uninspired rock songs. Theoretically, The Fragile was five years in the making, and Trent Reznor had so much material that his only choice was to go the double-disc, massive album route. But in practice, there really is about one full CD’s worth of strong music here. That was true when the album came out, and it’s still true today.
Age has not improved the more lackluster songs. What is striking about hearing The Fragile today is how much the guitars are turned up. We tend to think of Nine Inch Nails as having an electronic bedrock in which heavy, distorted guitars are used to fill out the sound, with certain rocking exceptions, of course (“Wish”, “March of the Pigs”). But the guitars throughout this album are huge, and they dominate just about every song they’re used in. Opener “Somewhat Damaged” illustrates this perfectly. A jagged riff kicks off the song and continues throughout, getting louder and more distorted as it goes. This riff ends up so thoroughly overwhelming the rest of the music that it renders the song inert.
The second track and first single, “The Day the World Went Away”, fares better with its apocalyptic lyrics and slow-and-heavy music. However, it’s the third track “The Frail” that highlights the album’s other striking feature. A slow, piano-based instrumental, it has a quiet minor-key melody and is the first of several excellent instrumentals spaced throughout the album.
These instrumentals expanded the sound of the band, pushing forward and exploring new territory, which would later bear fruit on the aforementioned Ghosts album and the excellent acoustic Still CD. However, the rock songs, even when great, today sound pretty stagnant for Nine Inch Nails, rehashing a lot of what Reznor did on Broken and The Downward Spiral. – Chris Conaton
Stereolab – Cobra and Phases Group Play Voltage in the Milky Night [Elektra] – 21 September 1999
As the 1990s drew to a close, so did Stereolab‘s ability to sound fresh, vital, and relevant. By this point in their career, the “groop” could play their particular brand of space age lounge-pop in their sleep. Indeed, Cobra and Phases Group Play Voltage in the Milky Night found them going through the motions like never before, and still ranks as the worst record in their incredibly extensive catalogue. Properly speaking, nothing had changed.
All of the elements were slotted into their expected places; every droning Farfisa organ, every vibraphone hit, every “ba-ba-ba” vocal tic and harmonized verse by Laetitia Sadier and backup singer Mary Hansen. Abetted by Jim O’Rourke and John McEntire’s aloof and thoroughly boring production, Stereolab effectively turned the music that had once galvanized the college rock underground with early classics like “Jenny Ondioline” and “Ping Pong” into predictable pop pabulum.
Cobra and Phases Group also coincided with the obsolescence (if not the outright death) of the 1990s Exotica movement, led by Mexican easy listening composer Juan García Esquivel, Stereolab’s major influence. (In a sad and poignant turn of events, the aging Esquivel would die only three years later.) But if the record justifiably represents Stereolab’s lowest descent into lifelessness, it also stands as the clear dividing line between their early- and late-career successes.
Perhaps it took a blatantly autopilot album and the critical backlash that followed it to jolt the group out of their holding pattern. Even after Hansen was killed in a tragic biking accident in 2002, Stereolab would continue to recharge their batteries and produce the excellent Margarine Eclipse and Chemical Chords, which didn’t alter their formula so much as suffuse it with new, vivifying force. We all make mistakes, and the once do-no-wrong Stereolab wasn’t an exception. It’s what we do about those mistakes that really matters. – M. Newmark
