Prince Paul – A Prince Among Thieves [Tommy Boy] – 23 February 1999
It’s safe to say there hasn’t been a concept album in the hip-hop world nearly as effective and self-realized as Prince Paul‘s A Prince Among Thieves before or since its conception. Since the album’s release, other valiant efforts have been at hip-hop concept albums, namely Kanye West’s 808s and Heartbreak, MF Grimm’s American Hunger, and MF Doom’s Mmm Food. However, they’re all missing the actual substance and imagination that Prince Paul mustered up.
The aforementioned albums deal with either realistic issues directly or obscure, bizarre references (I’m talking to you, Doom), while A Prince Among Thieves thrives in the simple nature of storytelling. Where Paul’s earlier production on De La Soul’s 3 Feet High and Rising was highly conceptual, it didn’t have the cohesive storytelling and imaginative premise that his own pet project did.
A Prince Among Thieves is an entire world created by Prince Paul, and he has complete control over the story, the characters, the beats, and the overall experience. There are a number of things that made the album significant. Most importantly, he recruited some of the era’s best emcees to fill the roles he had planned out. Tariq, the main character that strives for a record deal, is played by the highly underrated and relatively unknown Juggaknots’ Breeze, with additional appearances by Big Daddy Kane as a pimp, Sadat X and Xzibit as inmates, and the best part of all — Chris Rock and De La Soul as the neighborhood crackheads.
Not only was A Prince Among Thieves a testament to Paul’s talent, but it was also a testament to the late 1990s alternative hip-hop world. This was the culmination of all his best work rolled into one, and its meticulous planning and inimitable delivery make it one of the landmark albums in hip-hop history. – John Bohannon
TLC – FanMail [LaFace] – 23 February 1999
Surprisingly scoring one of the decade’s best R&B albums with 1994’s CrazySexyCool, TLC took a long five-year vacation (precipitated by everything from group member T-Boz’s sickle cell anemia to the band’s bankruptcy) before returning with the decidedly mediocre FanMail. Barely featuring group sparkplug Lisa “Left Eye” Lopes (sadly, it would be the last album the group released while she was alive), Fanmail is mainly missing the sass and the sense of fun that carried this merely moderately talented group through two successful albums.
This multi-producer hodgepodge features a well-past-their-primes Dallas Austin and Babyface (with no Puff Daddy and only a cameo from Jermaine Dupri). It goes heavy on the goopy balladry, with ghastly adult contemporary slow jams like “Dear Lie” and “I Miss You So Much”. In retrospect, you could have waited for TLC’s greatest hits compilation to catch this album’s good moments: the playground singalong “No Scrubs”, the electro-hop “Silly Ho”, and the surprisingly effective rock ballad “Unpretty”.
FanMail went on to sell a kazillion copies and win a handful of Grammy Awards, so I may be in the minority here, but the number of copies that line the bins of used record shops these days is probably the most telling fact about this album. – Mike Heyliger
Underworld – Beaucoup Fish [V2] – 1 March 1999
In 1999, techno, rave, electronica, dance music, whatever you want to call it, was exploding. Even if 1997’s predicted transformation into an e-shaped, glowstick-twirling, PLUR-rific globe didn’t exactly materialize, filmmakers, journalists, cultural theorists, and aging musicians were still, two years later, struggling to figure out what the hell this music was, what it represented, where the hell it came from, and what the hell it wanted from us.
Underworld, nearly two decades old by 1999, had already fully embraced the style and became a major player with their massive club anthem “Born Slippy .NUXX”, known to most Americans as “that song from Trainspotting“. Expectations for the new album were insanely high. Purists wanted something without a hint of sell-out or crossover to keep the scene from being gentrified. Newbie party-crashers wanted “Born Slippy parts II-XII”, ecstatic rave-ups translatable to rock and hip-hop audiences.
Beaucoup Fish was instead a wide plate that seemed neither too unapproachably Underworld, particularly since only one track on the album didn’t have vocals (“Kittens”), nor lacking in Underworld’s signature trance riffs, tribal drum exercises, or pummeling club sensibility.
Far from a compromise though, Beaucoup Fish is a diverse and mature outing by a band comfortable enough in their own skin to expand their depths, be it through melancholy vocoder elegies (“Winjer”), ambient space croons with no beats (“Skym”), braindead-simple hip-hop with gigantic beats (“Bruce Lee”), or arresting and sublime synthpop that outshines the entirety of the band’s catalogue back when they used to solely do synthpop (“Jumbo”).
Karl Hyde’s stream of consciousness verse provided absurdist propulsion for the record, with his slam-style reading of “Push Upstairs” being perhaps the first and last slam-style reading to ever work on record post-Soul Coughing. Perhaps the most recondite is all the babbling about ding-dongs and Tom and Jerry in the album’s most massive track, “Shudder/King of Snakes”, which interpolates arpeggios off of the pivotal Summer/Moroder anthem “I Feel Love”.
The album’s diversity is likely what has kept it fresh, as a recent spin confirmed in this reviewer that it hasn’t aged an inch. After this album, Darren Emerson departed, and Underworld soon fell from great heights as the Ritalin flirtation with techno came to a close. – Timothy Gabriele
Godspeed You! Black Emperor – Slow Riot for New Zerø Kanada [Constellation] – 8 March 1999
On the front cover of Godspeed You! Black Emperor’s sole EP sits a Hebrew phrase from the Book of Jeremiah: tohu va-vohu, in English, “void” or “nothingness”. It comes from the verse in which the Lord goes medieval on the Earth and turns it into a barren wasteland, which is printed in the liners and a scribbled call to action: “Let’s build quiet armies, friends.”
On the reverse side is an Italian pictorial diagram of a homemade bomb. Nothing out of the ordinary for this shadowy Canadian collective, who, from their first proper album (F#A#(infinity)) in 1997 until their indefinite hiatus in 2003, possessed the dumbfounding ability to make all this fire-and-brimstone mishegaas seem as serious as a heart attack. An apocalyptic black mystique still surrounds Slow Riot for New Zerø Kanada; ten years, the disclosure of the players’ identities, and a glut of post-rock copycats have done nothing to diminish its power.
Although it’s only two tracks and runs a bit under half an hour, Slow Riot is an EP in name only, given the reputation of EPs as precursors or B-side fat. In Godspeed’s case, it was simply another way to release the monolithic music they explored on F#A#(infinity) in twice the time. As many educators have told us, conciseness is a virtue, and here, the band made impressive use of an economical format, cultivating the songs to maturity without wasting an iota of space. At the same time, they were beginning to move away from the post-apocalyptic drift of their debut and toward tightly wound passages of tension and release.
On “Moya”, the first track, strings caterwaul for several minutes before the floor drops out and a lone guitar weeps for them in near-silence. The band then flips the elegiac scene right on its head as the instruments pick themselves up and fuse together, climbing like espaliers and collecting enough strength for a hard-won climax. Not casual listening by any standard, but the song’s objectively high quality managed to keep swaths of diverse audiences mesmerized over its daunting length.
Godspeed You! Black Emperor’s improved compositional skills extended to their field recordings, which were both more effective in themselves and more effectively placed into the overall context. Only Mogwai and a scarce few others ever came close. Slow Riot is especially significant for featuring what is arguably (and boy, have we argued) the best track in Godspeed’s oeuvre: “Blaise Bailey Finnegan III”, a synthesis of orchestral sturm und drang and man-on-the-street diatribes that would make any sound artist envious.
The group found the titular derelict on a sidewalk in Providence, Rhode Island, and taped him spewing scarily focused vitriol at the country that abandoned him. When he lists off his weapons one by one, it’s hard to tell whether he’s merely nuts or extremely dangerous, just as we’re forced to question if music by itself can’t contain actual violence.
However, Godspeed deal in destructiveness of a very particular kind. The verse in Jeremiah concludes with the Lord assuring, “Yet I will not make a full end.” With its multitude of languages and conflicting messages of religiosity and anarchy, Slow Riot for New Zerø Kanada was the place where Godspeed You! Black Emperor looked a bit like gods themselves, pissed off at a fucked-up world they’d be willing to destroy if it would bring about a new beginning. – M. Newmark
Silverchair – Neon Ballroom [Sony] – 8 March 1999
Regarded by Daniel Johns as Silverchair’s “first record”, Neon Ballroom was indeed an evolution from the adolescent grunge days of Frogstomp and Freak Show. The band members were only 18 when they composed Neon Ballroom, but the band always proved more mature than their age. Immediately, the opener, “Emotion Sickness”, showed a whole new side of the band’s ability to compose. Adding strings, piano, and a new, more evolved level of song structure, “Emotion Sickness” remains a fan favorite, often regarded as one of the band’s best songs ever written.
Even the generic rocker “Anthem for the Year 2000” proved the band’s ability to evolve with the times. As grunge died, they moved on, becoming a more versatile act than grunge giants Pearl Jam or Soundgarden. Throughout the album, electronic flourishes grace the album to further the band’s experimentation into poppier territory. Of course, these influences would come to dominate their later albums Diorama and Young Modern.
Johns also grew as a lyricist, evolving from the pure angst he demonstrated on the band’s first two albums. “Ana’s Song (Open Fire)”, of course, dealt with his struggle with anorexia, a condition that would set the band on hiatus in later years. It’s already an elevated topic, but the way he develops the topic is quite original: slurring his words “Ana wrecks your life” to sound more like “anorexia.” Neon Ballroom may have been more of a stepping stone to Diorama than anything, but it was surely Silverchair’s coming-out party in terms of musicality. – Tyler Fisher
Stereophonics – Performance & Cocktails [V2] – 8 March 1999
Following the passionate and invigorating pub-rock of Word Gets Around, Performance and Cocktails couldn’t help but sound jaded and disappointed in comparison. Though the Welsh band’s 1997 debut hardly viewed the vagaries of small-town life through rose-colored glasses, it presumed a deep deposit of proletarian sincerity beneath the stratum of alcoholism, sex, and social dysfunction. Performance and Cocktails, however, follows frontman/lyricist Kelly Jones as he tours the world and finds it wanting.
The album is a balanced, bewildered take on hypocrisy and inauthenticity, from the country-club culture evoked by the title on down to the glazed stare of the woman being kissed on the cover (the model later revealed that an absinthe-and-opium hangover contributed to her iconic mask of detachment). Jones’ blunt truisms may not have the sophistication of Thom Yorke’s alienated Orwellian enigmas, but they display a sturdy poetry all their own. He sniffs at plastic Californias, incredulous wireless radios, head-standing lotharios with bad tans, and those who “rely on a lie that’s true”.
The album’s best moments claw fitfully at the deeper anxieties beneath the Formica patina of postmodern culture: capitalist wish-fulfillment (“Just Looking”), bureaucratic diffidence (“Hurry Up and Wait”), free-wheeling exploitation (“The Bartender and the Thief”), and, of course, aging and death (“She Takes Her Clothes Off”).
Jones saves his neatest trick for last, suggesting in the wily and smoky closer “I Stopped to Fill My Car Up” that storytelling is the greatest lie one can tell. The world-weary doubt that serves Stereophonics so well here would congeal into bored cynicism on their weaker later releases. Still, on Performance and Cocktails, it remains a blunt instrument of considerable might. – Ross Langager
Beulah – When Your Heartstrings Break [Sugar Free] – 9 March 1999
Has anyone in indie rock sported a bigger heart on his sleeve in the past ten years than Beulah frontman Miles Kurosky? The San Francisco-based pop collective called it a day back in 2004, citing intraband strife and the dreaded growing up and growing older. Still, it’s small wonder that Kurosky didn’t die of a broken heart on 1999’s masterpiece, When Your Heartstrings Break — an album fixated on love and all its twists and turns, drenched in horns, strings, and keyboards until it’s overflowing with (sigh) everything.
Don’t let the refrigerator magnet poetry song titles (“Emma Blowgun’s Last Stand”, “Comrade’s Twenty Sixth”) and full-to-bursting production fool you; with eleven songs in 34 minutes, opening with the joyous horns and “ahhhh”s of “Score from Augusta” and capped by the says-it-all closer “If We Can Land a Man on the Moon, Surely I Can Win Your Heart”, Heartstrings perfectly captures the pulse-quickening highs and head-in-hands lows that accompany being a 20-something in love.
Ten years out, though, what’s the lesson? First, to thine own self be true: Beulah felt in, if not necessarily of, the Elephant 6 collective, opting for cynical directness where their peers went obtuse. Second, growing up and pinpointing that moment when your heartstrings break can be a bitch, but a trumpet section can always lift your spirits. – Stephen Haag
Wilco – Summerteeth [Reprise] – 9 March 1999
Even if I pretend to know nothing about the circumstances behind the recording of Wilco‘s Summerteeth (because I think records should stand on their own), it still comes across as one of the loneliest and most despairing records of its time. And the fact that Summerteeth is an alt-country album rather than a raging slab of dysfunctional deathcore makes the despair that much more palpable.
Look at the band members, posing individually in desolate settings in the CD booklet: under unforgiving fluorescent lights in an institutional hallway; by a self-service gas pump late at night; in a bleak wood-paneled room furnished by two plain chairs and an unused megaphone. (The band member in the room with the megaphone, hands in his pockets and eyes focused on nothing, is the talented multi-instrumentalist Jay Bennett, who passed away on May 24 of this year.)
And consider the lyrics: “The shadow grows / His heart’s in a bowl behind the bank / And every evening when he gets home / To make his supper and eat it alone / His black shirt cries / While his shoes grow cold.” Or “The ashtray says / You were up all night / When you went to bed / With your darkest mind / Your pillow wept / And covered your eyes / You finally slept / While the sun caught fire.” Or, simply, in a Dylanesque song called “She’s a Jar”: “She begged me not to hit her.”
The pop side of Wilco prevents the loneliness from becoming lugubrious, and songs such as “Can’t Stand It” (a should-have-been-hit-single) and the moodily beautiful string arrangement in “She’s a Jar” speak to Wilco’s — and Jeff Tweedy’s — ability to get outside of their own heads and connect with discerning listeners. A relative disappointment in terms of sales, Summerteeth deserves another listen ten years down the road. – Michael Antman
Blur – 13 [EMI/Virgin] – 15 March 1999
With 13, a sprawling, noisy, meandering mess of a would-be masterpiece, Blur completed their break from the classicist Britpop that had been their bread and butter since 1993. This transition began on 1997’s self-titled album and is consummated on their most adventurous, interesting, and flawed record.
Though on its surface it sounds like it might be a bold, but clumsy, attempt at rebirth, a possible new beginning, 13 is actually primarily concerned with endings: the end of the band’s longtime relationship with legendary producer Stephen Street (who was instrumental in shaping the sound of another little British group by the name of the Smiths) in favor of knob twiddler William Orbit; the end of their former pop formalism and lyrical wit in favor of a more fluid, almost formless aesthetic; the end of Albarn’s long-term romantic relationship with Elastica frontwoman Justine Frischmann (which break-up fueled a good portion of the album’s lyrical content and its overall tone); the beginning of the end of the core songwriting relationship in the band between singer Damon Albarn and guitarist Graham Coxon (though the latter wouldn’t actually leave the band formally until the next album, Think Tank); and, I suppose, the end of the millennium (or the “End of a Century”… ha!).
A classic case of ambition far outstripping actual reach (and being all the better for it), 13 is less of a reinvention than an attempt to completely dissolve the band’s old crisp concision and pop eclecticism in a blurry sonic soup of squalling distortion, electronic flourishes, buzzsaw guitars, jammed out noodling, extraneous instrumental interstitials, indulgent song lengths, and nonsense lyrics. There are a few recognizable parts of the old Blur buried in there somewhere, but the band seems fully intent on sloughing off its old self; damn the fans, damn sales, damn Britpop.
The kitchen sink approach taken to both the songwriting and overall production and sound yields a wildly uneven, but always captivating, album that is relentless in its desire both to discourage and surprise in equal measure. The latter applies to the stunning album opener, and lead single (at nearly eight minutes!), “Tender”, a towering, shambling, sad sack break-up song buoyed up and thrown heavenward by a gospel-tinged choir. Its slow, swelling, almost tribal build-up on a simple repetitive guitar line and vocal melody, coursing from emotional frailty up through to exultation, is the frontloaded highpoint of the album, and possibly of Blur’s entire career.
13 veers off sharply thereafter, perhaps by accident, perhaps by design, crashing down into the howling paranoid glam rave-up “Bugman”, followed by the only really recognizable old school Blur song, “Coffee and TV”, before wandering off and losing its way in a number of muddled, confounding songs in its middle section. These seem often more like the germs of songs than songs proper, experiments that are picked up and then abandoned before completion and paring down (most of them stretch out needlessly past five minutes, and a few past seven).
13 redeems itself on its back third, though, before adjourning with the bookend and answer to “Tender”, the beautiful, wistful ballad “No Distance Left to Run” — a tired dirge that caves in to resignation and acceptance in the face of the inevitable end of things. The end of love, of the millennium, of the old Blur. – Jake Meaney
Tom Russell – The Man From God Knows Where [Hightone] – 16 March 1999
To suggest that Tom Russell’s album The Man from God Knows Where should feature on American History syllabuses may not sound like the ultimate compliment. But part of the brilliance of this undervalued multi-vocal song-cycle, or “folk opera”, is to illuminate American immigrant experience in a complex, ambitious-but-accessible, vivid, and thoroughly enjoyable way.
Drawing deeply on his own background as the child of Norwegian and Irish immigrants, Russell produces a record that is at once utterly personal and totally expansive, charting the experiences of various characters in a manner both intimate and mythic. Subtle and tasteful arrangements built around Old and New World musical traditions and augmented with snatches of hymns and folk songs provide the rich musical context.
Vocally, Russell enlists the help of a stellar line-up of roots music luminaries, placing his own burly, authoritative, Johnny Cash-ish tones alongside Dolores Keane’s smouldering soul-of-Ireland burr, Iris DeMent’s aching high lonesome twang, the austere Scandinavian sounds of Kari Bremnes and Sondre Bratland, and the off-kilter croak of Dave Van Ronk. Even Walt Whitman gets in on the act, with Russell brilliantly incorporating a bit of the poet’s voice as recorded by Thomas Edison on wax cylinder in 1890.
The cast sensitively inhabit characters ranging from Sitting Bull to a lonely prairie housewife, and the album broadens out into a dazzling array of narratives and perspectives, unfolding like an epic motion picture as its characters confront homesickness, prejudice, joy, and disillusionment in their new land. Russell’s potent investigation of American realities and mythologies makes The Man from God Knows Where an album not simply for 1999 or 2025 but for the ages. – Alexander Ramon