1999

Birth of a Nation 'hood: Gaze, Script and Spectacle in the O.J. Simpson Case

Mike Mosher
Three years ago O.J. imagery was inescapable. The slow White Bronco chase on sunny freeways, the police keeping a respectable distance.

Majic on the Moonlight

Plutonium
Fab.44's new recording comes in three gauges of abrasive, like a sandpaper sampler from Handy Dan's Hardware store.

A People's History of the United States - A Lecture at Reed College

Plutonium
The CD sounds like a homecoming between a knife and a whetstone, with Zinn sharpening his critical commentary before an amused and loving audience of lefty college students and professors.

Frank Black and The Catholics

Scott Till
Each time Black puts out another predictable album, passing off his Pixie howls as adolescent slip-ups, bitching about hurting "children's ears" and being "The Man Who Was Too Loud" I can't help but fear that the world is the worse off for it.

The Sebadoh

Charlie Bertsch
Listening to The Sebadoh is like watching some lout pound his fists into a seemingly solid wall, only to find it disintegrate beneath their fury like so much construction paper.

You've Got The Fucking Power

Brock Craft
The caustic, angry influence of early hardcore infuses nearly all the songs on the album, with only a couple of minimal ambient lulls.

Steal This Album

Steven Rubio
Steal This Album generally avoids two of the most unfortunate aspects of much current rap music: the romanticizing of daily violence and the glorification of making lots of money that too often passes for revolutionary thought today.

Part of the Deal

Aaron Shuman
If Sensefield is punk, then we are all living inside George Lucas' head, where origin determines character and plot.

Emergency & I

Aaron Shuman
One thing that undermines the music is the amount of space given words. Never have I encountered songs so thick with them.

Divide and Fall? Bosnia in the Annals of Partition

Joel Schalit
One of the best things to come out of the war in Kosovo is the bevy of current literature that provides accounts of the Yugoslav civil wars.

Julie Doiron and the Wooden Stars

Aaron Shuman
This album reminds me of Codeine's Frigid Stars, which fans are known to cling to and suck on as if it were a beloved stuffed animal or fuzzy blanket.

Enemymine

Plutonium
Bless their hearts, Enemymine sound just like your kid brother's angst rock band, and you have to love them for it.

This Is Acid Jazz: The Spoken Word

Joe Lockard
Revolutionary is one of the most abused words in the English language, used interminably as a pump word for technology advertising and drained of its content as a meaningful description of in-your-face social anger.

The Maggot

Nathan Keene
The Melvins are a wide band as well as a deep one when it comes to their tributary swipage on The Maggot, and it gives the album the authoritative ring of musical scripture.

Live in Siberia

Everett True
The story goes like this: I'd been hanging out in Novosiribisk, capital of Siberia, for a couple of days with two Red Army drop-outs...

The Strangest Secret and Sun Ra Research

Mike Mosher
The Strangest Secret is a Santana-like jazz-rock whatzit that's very Woodstock-era and drenched in wah-wah guitar.

The Artist

Everett True
I first heard Jonathan Richman back in '82....

Live in Oakland

Steven Rubio
The E Street Band is better now than they used to be, and Bruce sings better than ever, which astonishes those of us who expressed concern before the tour that he couldn't sing rockers anymore.

Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone

Megan Prelinger
It's ideally calibrated for late nineties public consciousness. Who needs TV when the book packages Spectacle so well?

I Want Some and Save Yourself

Aaron Shuman
By bringing it back home to Hot Chocolate City, the Make Up have created an album that deserves to be called sublime.

Minoritized Space: An Inquiry into the Spatial Order of Things

Joe Lockard
Minority spaces, in both spatial and psychic senses, are the heartland of national self-imagination in the United States.

Men Called Him Master

Aaron Shuman
Haywood serves up a good stew of underground styles. Minneapolis power-pop is the base, with a dash of Kill Rock Stars' manifesto-makers, and a whole lot of alt-country added by the down-tempo end.

Circle Gets the Square

Mike Mosher
It's as if Psywarfare, only moments before entering the studio, discovered ambient records like Brian Eno's Music for Airports and decided that the lesson to be learned from them was that it's legitimate to disregard artistic distinctiveness altogether.

Lucas and Friends Discover a World of Sounds

Mike Mosher
When I was a kid, there was a booth in Chicago's LaSalle Street Station where you could make your own records.

The Hot Rock

Steven Rubio
Sleater-Kinney's unapologetic but understated commitment to music made by women is both inspiring and encompassing of all fans.

The Heretic of Ether

Joe Lockard
Israeli fusion artists face rejection from cultural xenophobes -- both Jewish and Arab -- who feel uncomfortable with and threatened by musical weaving and intermixture.

Illuminati

John Brady
An album of remixes of songs from the Pastels last album, Illuminati is a cultural hybrid of sorts. It combines the pop idiom of the source material with the re-mix, one of the dominant cultural forms of the electronica/electronic dance genre.

Satanic Ritual Abuse

Laurie Bell
The Christal Methodists are the Linda Tripps of punk.

Spears Into Hooks

Joe Lockard
Thirty-two years of Israeli military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza have begotten Meira Asher. Her angry music rattles with the prophetic rage of a punk Jeremiah.

Bombay The Hard Way

Amardeep Singh
Behind the unforgivably grubby Mexicans and noble-savage Indian characters of old westerns, there are hundreds of profoundly affecting movie soundtracks written by an Italian immigrant named Ennio Morricone. He's still on the playlist at college radio stations in my town, in between Cuban hardcore, gamelan, death metal, free jazz and Japanese trip hop.

American Nervoso

Charlie Bertsch
It's hard to find frightening music these days. Think back to the era when Bill Haley and the Comets scared the parents of America. Now we have Marilyn Manson.

Evangelists Exposed and Mondo Tilton

Joe Lockard
The only time I am ever exposed to television evangelism and faith healing is when I check into a motel during a road trip and tune into the local cable station. I've sat up past midnight in southern Georgia, appalled at the exotic Christian circus that I'm watching.

Land and Sea

Jeremy Russell
The Crabs fourth full-length album, Land and Sea, is a pretty bit of pop punk made gorgeous ear candy through excellent layering and harmonics. However, ultimately it seems a glorious exultation of nothing special.

Live at Tower Records, April 17th 1999

Mike Mosher
I was spoiled at an early age. Most of the rock n' roll bands I saw between the ages of fourteen and eighteen were at warm-weather Sunday afternoon free concerts, among acres of hippies, bikers, radicals, college students and high school students who created a semi-autonomous arena of permissive leisure and community.

Le Coudre Grinçant de l'Anarchie

Joe Lockard
Hawad has a unique voice, one that in its quieter moments fills with the wry observations of a latter-day Benjamin of Toledo, a traveler abroad in the world. He is a North African outsider, a poet who sees Europe from the perspective of a desert nomad...

The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium: American Culture on the Brink

Molly Hankwitz
Mark Dery, coiner of the term 'culture jammer,' and author of the 'culture jammer manifesto' gives an interesting interpretation of the apocalyptic chatter characterizing the American millennium.

Espace/Paysage, Galerie Sud, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris

Joe Lockard
The question that concludes David Hockney's retrospective exhibition at the Centre Pompidou is that of a viewer's place in his work. That question is far from simple, for Hockney leaves the public with only hints.

Jerusalem Betrayed: Ancient Prophecy and Modern Conspiracy Collide in the Holy City

Joe Lockard
My five-year old daughter and I were walking up Bezalel Street in Jerusalem when the Messiah came down the steps out of the Zichronot neighborhood.

English and the Discourses of Colonialism

Joe Lockard
One of the most obvious features of English-language teaching outside the English-speaking world is that two major groups constitute the majority of teachers: young graduates out to see the world for awhile, and third- through fifth-raters who were not sufficiently competent to get a job back at from wherever they came.

Never Been Anywhere

Joe Lockard
Today's regional culture is a postindustrial industry. The national landscape is littered with towns and regions where historical memory is the major economic product, replacing material products with a potentially even more profitable re-envisioning

Wonders of Giardia

Plutonium
Wonders of Giardia is a raucous collection of post-hardcore tunes made by former members of Dead and Gone that will have you have you digging through the recycling bin for bottles fit for making Molotov cocktails.

The Zine Yearbook

Joe Lockard
The transience and local availability of zines makes them a print culture that speaks to the moment, that embraces the whim of picking them up off a rack in a locally-owned music or video shop and finding the bright spark of another mind speaking.

Uterus and Fire

Plutonium
To get you ready for this CD, first try drinking a jug of mescaline-laced moonshine, and then take a fishing trip to the Columbia River to catch some radioactive crawdads.

Degrees of Amnesia

Charlie Bertsch
There was a time during the resurrection of guitar rock in the early 1990s when any 'alternative' music made on a computer was bound to seem like a breath of fresh air.

Love is the Devil Soundtrack

Charlie Bertsch
There's a lot to blame for the mediocrity of mainstream American film, but one frequently overlooked factor its the revolution in movie soundtracks inaugurated by such 1970s blockbusters as American Graffiti, Saturday Night Fever, and, of course, Star Wars.

Anti-Theft Device and the Suprize Packidge EP

Charlie Bertsch
You know all those in-between parts on your favorite rap albums, the spoken-word intros, the public-service announcement codas, the squiggly sounds that flesh out the beat?

Arlington Road

Megan Prelinger
Arlington Road is a truly frightening movie. It is a badly-written action film disguised as a political thriller that commits a number of crimes as it cuts a swath through American movie theaters.

The Touch 7

Joel Schalit
Sixties-influenced garage rock is one of those recurrent genres that keep coming back every quarter of a generation or so.

Up Next

Frederick Luis Aldama
It's hard to imagine what part of today's Seattle fed the eclectic collection of sounds on the locally-produced Up Next compilation.

Don't Wake Me Up

Aaron Shuman
Orchestral in range, Don't Wake Me Up offers movements of the balletic and the bowel.

Self-Titled

Nathan Keene
This disk would set a great ambience for an evening of hanging your friends from the ceiling and flaying them alive.