1990: "Staring at the Sun", Ultra Vivid Scene

Sounding for all the world like a British band too dedicated to the melodic hook to fully embrace shoegaze, Ultra Vivid Scene were actually an American band whose singer sported a slight, faux-English accent peeking gently through the gauzy vocals. Their rise coincided with the genesis and early gestation of shoegaze, but aside from a tangential affinity for the breezier aspects of dream pop, Ultra Vivid Scene pretty much made their own way.

None too coincidentally given their sound, UVS broke through in the UK first with their self titled debut in 1989, notching several chart hits there and focusing their touring almost exclusively overseas. When Joy 1967-1990 - an obvious allusion to their penchant for classic Britpop melodies - emerged in 1990, the trend reversed, with no further hits forthcoming in the UK, but literally every single from that point on placing (at least modestly) in the US Modern Rock chart.

Apparently that wasn't enough. After a final album two years later, Ultra Vivid Scene disbanded, singer / guitarist Kurt Ralske going on to do production work for several years before eventually becoming a well respected visual artist. The rest of the band... who knows?

1990: "Let Love Speak Up Itself", The Beautiful South

When the Housemartins broke up in 1988, Paul Heaton and Dave Hemingway quickly regrouped as the soulful alternative quintet the Beautiful South. Picking up more or less where the Housemartins left off, but ratcheting up the R&B / 60s pop influences, both Heaton and Hemingway would share vocal duties with a revolving door procession of female vocalists. As is typical of most bands that are distinctly English, the Beautiful South didn't make much noise in the US, but back home they were a reasonably successful top 40 group.

1990's Choke LP gave the group their first - and so far only - #1 hit in the UK with "A Little Time". My own American ears prefers "Let Love Speak Up Itself", which was the final single released off the album and fared a less significant #51 even in Great Britain, but that just goes to show how much tastes can change from one side of the pond to the other.

1990: "Don Henley Must Die", Mojo Nixon

Surprisingly this live rendition is the only version of "Don Henley Must Die" that Youtube currently boasts, and the recording quality is juuuuuuuuuuuust good enough that I'm willing to settle for it rather than slapping together my own out of static images and beer-fueled motivation.

Mojo Nixon, along with partner Skid Roper, managed to milk his brand of college humor and redneck roots rock for a number of entertaining albums starting in the mid-80s, but by 1990's Roper-less Otis things had largely taken a turn for the stale and obligatory. "Don Henley Must Die" is one of the few cuts from that album worth hearing, frankly, but it's also one of Mojo Nixon's most beloved so it's worth salvaging.

Legend has it that Mojo was playing the Hole in the Wall across from the University of Texas one night when Don Henley unexpectedly emerged from the crowd and joined Nixon on stage for a rousing version of Henley's namesake ditty. No word, however, on whether Debbie Gibson ever actually spawned Nixon's illegitimate mutant seed. That one I'm treating as a rumor.

1990: "Obscurity Knocks", The Trash Can Sinatras

The Trash Can Sinatras hailed from Scotland and, having been together for a solid three years by the time 1990 rolled around, were understandably a bit more mired in jangly new wave while most of their British peers were off exploring folksier idioms, or indulging in the trendy Madchester / acid house crossover that was all the rage at the time. Their penchant for sing-song pop melodies ties them closely to their hometown Postcard Records sound - a label that only turned out around a dozen singles at the turn of the 80s but were very influential - but the Sinatras have a much more accessible, mainstream sound than their Postcard brethren. Their hooks are not necessarily over-the-top infectious, but the articulate, poetic lyrics need repeat listens to sink in anyway. Except for breaking up during most of the late 90s the Trash Can Sinatras have been an ongoing concern since Cake, their debut album, came out shortly on the heels of the "Obscurity Knocks" single in 1990.

[NOTE: you'll see it spelled both Trash Can Sinatras and Trashcan Sinatras; on the Cake sleeve it bears the grammar that I've given here, but albums released in the 2000s have the truncated version. Because the band themselves currently prefer two words over three, many fans refer to even the older material as Trashcan Sinatras]

1990: "Celebrate", An Emotional Fish

Contemporaries of A House, An Emotional Fish also hailed from Dublin but followed neither in the path of U2 - throughout the 80s a prevailing influence on Irish alternative rock - nor the burgeoning neo-folk strains of indie rock other of their countrymen were dabbling in. Listening to "Celebrate", in fact, one hears an almost stubborn adherence to the tropes of 80s English new wave. The critics raved, nonetheless, as the songwriting was compelling in spite of all lack of trendiness, but the public had heard enough by this point, and An Emotional Fish would take another three years to pump out a follow up album (to much less acclaim this time) before packing it in after their third effort in 1994 (that third album being such an afterthought it wasn't released in the US until 1996).

1990: "The Patron Saint of Mediocrity", A House

With a number of modern folk-based indie rock bands from the UK making waves - ie. Frightened Rabbit, The Frames - it's worth revisiting A House, a Dublin band that, starting in the late 80s, willfully eschewed the ringing chords of countrymen U2 in favor of a trad "return to zero"... not trad in the sense of the Pogues, necessarily, but rather a defiantly nationalist mix of rock and folk music a la the type that provided the springboard for the singer-songwriter movement in 60s America, except in the vein of traditional British folk idioms rather than the protest songs of Woody Guthrie or the bluesier roots music of Leadbelly. Never charting during their lifespan (even in the UK), A House have nonetheless become somewhat of a cult classic over the years - particularly in their homeland - though no reunions have been forthcoming since their 1997 breakup, and frontman Dave Couse has released only three solo albums over the years, almost universally to indifference from all but the most hardcore A House fans.

1990: "My Little Problem", The Replacements

I already had to break out the Windows Movie Maker on account of not being able to find a single Youtube video of the Silos, so I figured I'd kill two birds and get around to that homebrewed Replacements video like I earlier promised. It's still astounding to me that "My Little Problem" hasn't been handed down as one of the six or eight best Paul Westerberg songs ever, but considering it heralds from the hands down worst of the non-punk Replacements records perhaps it's no surprise (ie. Sorry Ma Forgot to Take Out the Trash is worse but that's like comparing Meat Puppets to Huevos).

Originally intended as Westerberg's solo debut, All Shook Down has a smattering of the Replacements here and there functioning as session musicians, but rarely in the same place. "My Little Problem" was buried toward the end of the track sequencing but, again, I don't see how anyone can listen to the full album and not cherry pick this song as its brightest moment. A duet with Concrete Blonde's Johnette Napolitano, whose fierce singing makes the likes of Chrissie Hynde and Joan Jett both look like shoegazers by comparison, "Problem" rides a clean, driving riff hearkening back to mid-80s LA (no, not hair band LA, LA LA). A fitting end to the Replacements legacy, even if the rest of the album did its best to sandbag that effort.

SPOTLIGHT: Decline of Hair Metal pre-"Nevermind"

There's a common narrative that has long since spilled over from academic / journalist circles into public discourse: in 1991, hair metal bands like Poison, Motley Crue, Winger, etc still ruled over the kingdom of pop music, their reign unchallenged and seemingly bulletproof until Nirvana came along in September of that year and banished the hairspray and Spandex brigade to the hinterlands, never to be heard from again.

Well, I'm not here to argue the idea that Nevermind changed the popular music landscape - that it certainly did - but there is a decided bit of myth making to the other end of the argument that it's high time was exposed, that being the idea that hair metal was still in a sanguine state at the time. On the contrary, as we'll see below, hair metal peaked around 1987-88 and by two years later was already a shadow of its former self.

1990: "F*!#in' Up", Neil Young & Crazy Horse

The alt-country movement (I've always been disappointed that "insurgent country" didn't stick) was nothing if not a reevaluation of 70s country rock filtered through punk's ragged energy and insistent authenticity, and on those terms you'd think someone like Neil Young would have made a stellar figurehead: literate yet vocally lower class, willfully defiant of prepackaged record label bullshit, immersed in fat-of-the-land, rural Americana though unafraid of offering a fringe dweller's revisionist take on it... Young seemed custom built to carry this grassroots subgenre on his back.

Except Neil Young has never been a "movement" kind of guy, and as bands like Uncle Tupelo, the Silos, Blood Oranges, Freakwater, etc were pioneering an indie take on American roots music at the dawn of the 90s, Young just so happened to be in the midst of a hard rocking renaissance after spending most of the 80s sans Crazy Horse, his longtime backing band. So, like it or not, Neil Young was about to be nominated the unofficial godfather of the nascent grunge scene instead, a genre which had been around for a few years by that point but - in 1990 - was only just sloughing off the shackling hardcore and noise rock influences, and thus finally coalescing into a sustainable form of rock & roll.

Young would go on to collaborate on a decidedly non-commercial album with Pearl Jam (which is arguably the pivot that set the latter band off on their "difficult" phase) and be name checked in Kurt Cobain's suicide note, a nod that Young himself would return with "Sleeps With Angels", his ode to grunge's fallen godhead.

In 1990, however, Young was concentrating on recapturing the old magic after basically sucking for the majority of the 80s. That year's Ragged Glory was only the second album Young had recorded with Crazy Horse since 1981, and that had little to do with any falling out or creative differences, it was just that Neil was off experimenting during the Reagan Era with different styles that were not Crazy Horse's forte... or Neil's either, for that matter (contrast the split with Crazy Horse with, say, Tom Petty's solo Full Moon Fever from the year prior, which by all accounts should have been a fucking Heartbreakers album).

1987's Life - Young's most recent collaboration with Crazy Horse at the time - may not have been an embarrassment but it was hardly loved by anyone either. Since then, however, he'd made a pretty compelling comeback bid with the bluesy This Note's For You (which actually featured several unbilled Crazy Horse members as session musicians) and 1989's Freedom. The latter in particular is generally regarded as square one in Young's late period reemergence as an artistic force, and featured his first significant "hit" in years, "Keep On Rocking in the Free World".

"F*!#in' Up" not only has a set of lyrics that would do his Seattle acolytes proud, but the central guitar riff has a filthy insistence to it as if it were custom built for a band like Pearl Jam to cover in their live act... which they have, along with "Keep On Rocking in the Free World", time and time again. The fact that Eddie Vedder's crew choose these particular Neil Young songs to pay tribute to is no accident... they were contemporary with the members of Pearl Jam' beginning their music careers and, as such, were no doubt tremendously influential. As with anyone of Neil Young's proficiency, the man has continued to have his peaks and valleys artistically over the ensuing two decades; but then, so has Pearl Jam, the last of the true grunge bands, and they're not exactly shitting out three albums every two years either.

1990: "Shady Grove", Blood Oranges

Another early entry in the alt-country sweepstakes, Blood Oranges were a band that had their hearts in the right places but were maybe a bit too polished and loyal to the dying roots rock scene. Never remotely popular in their time, even today the Oranges are rarely mentioned outside of Americana crate digging circles. Still a fine band in their own right, but if you've already done Uncle Tupelo to death and want more stripped down alt country of similar authenticity, you're better off ditching the slick veneers of the Silos and Blood Oranges and going with either the Jayhawks or Freakwater, neither of which had albums out in 1990 to fit in with present coverage. They both beat Uncle Tupelo to vinyl, though.