#2. My Bloody Valentine -- Loveless. MBV changed rock. They heard the Mary Chain and ran with the ball. They took some guitars, and made them sound fuzzed up, jacked up, and totally f***ed up. They married this to one of the best collection of sweet and dirty pop songs of the postpunk era, all while distorting these beautiful melodies behind a hazy fog of twisted frequencies and subdued erotic vocal meanderings.
Three years later, they made "Loveless".
"Loveless" doesn't rock. It doesn't even have real drums on it. Nothing on it, save perhaps "What You Want" and "When You Sleep", rocks out with the wantonness of "When You Wake (You're Still In A Dream)" or "Suisfine". Nothing purrs and simultaneously unsettles like "Isn't Anything"'s "No More Sorry" or "All I Need". Instead, "Loveless" is a collection of lurchings and mid-tempo strolls set to an army of effects that try their best to blanket the lack of strong fuzz-pop scorchers. Compared to the more visceral rush of its predecessor, it is mechanical, submerged, and its overall emotional rush muffled behind a screen of cotton balls. As an engineering marvel, it is top notch. As a pop album, it is not. Just because everyone else went dance in 1990 doesn't excuse "Soon", their "contribution" to the new ecstacy culture. There are fine tunes here, such as "Blown a Wish" and "Sometimes", but their "more is more" approach swamps these simple paeans of love beneath their sound experiments, without ever letting the melody breathe. Listen to "I Can See It (But I Can't Feel It)" or "Lose My Breath" to prove to yourself that a little acoustic clarity doesn't diminish the hazy atmospherics. Noise may be everything, but it's not the only thing.
#1. Orbital -- Insides. Sometime in 1994, Orbital realized they needed to stop making groundbreaking techno and start making groundbreaking music. "Snivilisation", their concept piece extraordinare, made you think about how society breeds confusion and it even made you dance. And for those without much of a brain, it offered radical new sounds -- the dizzying jungle of "Are We Here?", the futuristic lounge jazz of "Forever", the clanging minimalism of "Philosophy By Numbers". There were a million new things combined in a million new ways.
"Insides" combined a million old things in a million new ways. It contained an even stronger political agenda, but it was set to a soundtrack of old and easily found sounds. Everyone and their dog had gone drum n bass by this time, and the light, shuffling breakbeats of "The Girl With the Sun In Her Head" and "PETROL" were Orbital's perfunctory take on such rhythms. Now that DnB is but a shadow of its former stature, those tracks have aged disconcertingly rapidly. Orbital's more straightahead, banging techno updates of their old material during their recent tour seem to find them scrambling to cover up this fact.
The sequencing of the melodies, the way they skirt and dart all around the mix like cats chasing mice (particularly during the concluding half of "Out There Somewhere") are pure late 70's Kraftwerk and Georgio Moroder. Yes, they did the same thing on "Snivilisation"'s "Kein Trink Vasser", but that was but one song, not an entire album. The homogenous feel to the album's "instrumentation" may make for a smooth ride, but as a statement of electronic sound innovation, it is passable at best.
Orbital wanted to make a proper album. They succeeded.
