Best song on these mixtapes I cobbled together from CMJ promo CDs, ca. 1997-1998

fantastic cat ftw

Monk & Canatella or Jonathan Fire*Eater for me

Oh, hell. It looks like half my YT links disappeared when I posted. Oh well. It's out there if you know how to google.

Wow, these tapes sure paint a picture. "California Tuffy" probably. I got my first CMJ a few years later, owe it my life for introducing me to My Favorite.

Feel free to use this as a 'whatever happened to...' space, as well, if you're able to enlighten us as to the ultimate fates of '90s alternative also-rans. Like I had no idea until a couple years back that Kara's Flowers was an Adam Levine joint.

Yeah, I don't know most of these songs but California Tuffy is a jam and I think the video is like such a perfect encapsulation of the post-Nirvana spree and how underground bands had to navigate it

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aqf_iQqI_Xk

Yeah, it's probably worth noting that a lot of these acts, who were pretty marginal and often fairly odd and mostly didn't have much of a career to speak of, were on major labels or subsidiaries thereof. So weird, in retrospect.

Five For Fighting - 'Bella's Birthday Cake'

lol

i haven't heard most of these but ofc i love "april fools" a lot

oh i might vote for "soap disco." maroon 5 having temporarily been a power-pop band in the '90s is never not amazing to me

more evidence for those ‘bizarro and old lunch are the same person’ truthers out there: ‘rose parade’ was the elliott smith song i put on a mix tape for a girlfriend at probably exactly the same time this mix was made

Ha, I was anticipating your inevitable 'I also had a mix with these exact tracks in this exact order' post.

http://www.startrek.com/uploads/assets/db_articles/4403d71af0734f504885befcce1866355cb8eb0b.jpg

Feel free to use this as a 'whatever happened to...' space, as well

The guy from Sweet 75 went on to jam with Paul McCartney and Dave Grohl on SNL, I hear.

Wow, the mid 90s. Seems like a zillion years ago.

Apples In Stereo.

Takako Minekawa is one of my all-time faves so i voted for that. that whole Roomic Cube album is incredible and dynamic. fluffy silly "Fantastic Cat" is on the same record as the brutally minimal synth drone "Destron"

I had records by or compilations featuring a lot of these bands but am struggling to recall most of the songs by title. Which probably doesn't matter, because I would vote for Quickspace - "Friend" off pretty much any list which contained it.

Nice to see the Geraldine Fibbers love too.

xpost Takaka Minekawa (alongside Alpha and Fantastic Plastic Machine) eventually entered the pantheon of my all-time favorites. 'Destron' is indeed epic and devastating.

Such a favorite that I misspell her name as 'Takaka'.

Ivy or Wheat

"Seems So" is one of my favorite songs ever.

16 Horsepower - 'For Heaven's Sake'

from 'low estate', a great preacher infused swamp rock album (perfect to go along with the next season of peaky blinders now that i put it on)

i don't know this specific lida husik song but i had two albums i liked by her so probably that

I saw Toenut play one time, so them

actively like or at one point liked the Quickspace, J*FE and Elliott Smith songs, feel broadly positive about a few other names listed but don't know these tracks

Rose Parade

Songs that are legitimately great but that are pretty much the only song of the artist's I know:

Toenut - 'Test Anxiety'
Wheat - 'Death Car'
Statuesque - 'Ton of Feathers, Ton of Steel'
Geraldine Fibbers - 'California Tuffy'
The Notwist - 'Torture Day'

Very good songs by artists with whom I'm otherwise unfamiliar:

Garageland - 'Fingerpops'
Quickspace - 'Friend'
Old 97's - 'Timebomb'
My Drug Hell - 'Girl at the Bus Stop'
16 Horsepower - 'For Heaven's Sake'
Sweet 75 - 'Lay Me Down'
Monk & Canatella - 'Picnics'
Ninian Hawick - 'Scottish Rite Temple Stomp'

Excellent songs by acts I enjoy:

Jonathan Fire*Eater - 'When the Curtain Calls for You'
Apples in Stereo - 'Seems So'
Lida Husik - 'Fly Stereophonic'
Illyah Kuryahkin - 'Crow'
Fantastic Plastic Machine - 'Electric Ladyland'
Rufus Wainwright - 'April Fools'

Good songs by artists who have other songs I like as much if not more:

Mocket - 'Should it Wait'
Laika - 'Prairie Dog'
Eric Matthews - 'My Morning Parade'
Ivy - 'The Best Thing'
Alpha - 'Rain'
Takako Minekawa - 'Fantastic Cat'
Elliott Smith - 'Rose Parade'

Pretty decent mid-to-late '90s alt pop stuff:

Mary Lou Lord - 'Lights Are Changing'
Optiganally Yours - 'Mr. Wilson'
The Nields - 'Taxi Girl'
Kara's Flowers - 'Soap Disco'
Chantal Kreviazuk - 'God Made Me'
MxPx - 'Move to Bremerton'
September '67 - 'Busy Building'

a friend of mine was super into Quickspace and used to play me that stuff when we got blazed. it was always really good. gonna have to check them out one of these days

Timebomb. Kinda an apt name for the thread too.

Wheat are (were?) a hugely underrated band, and Medeiros (the album "Death Car" is from) is an unsung classic. If you like that song, I can't imagine you not liking the rest of the album, or the follow-up Hope and Adams (the album they made after that was a blatant bid for Modern Rock radio stardom, and it didn't take off--though it did land them on the Win a Date With Tad Hamilton soundtrack--but was still a quite excellent record).

Also, the Mary Lou Lord track is one I'll still play every now and then. It's a Bevis Frond cover, if that means anything to anyone.

I also really liked the Nields around that time, and while I have a few of their records, I can't recall that particular song offhand.

Girl At The Bus Stop is the only one of these I remember, though I did have two Jonathan Fire Eater CDs

syrup usa were incredible - seana carmody’s magic realism rock - and i loved the EP version of “lights are changing.” but i voted for “fantastic cat”

definitely the laika track

this thread crashes my phone every time, it's like mexican malware

xpost There's one Bevis Frond track, High On A Downer, that comes up on one of my playlists now and again. Like that Mary Lou Lord track as well though haven't heard it in ages.

syrup usa were incredible - seana carmody’s magic realism rock - and i loved the EP version of “lights are changing.” but i voted for “fantastic cat”

I'd never heard of Syrup USA but I'm listening to the album now since that's what youtube brought up when I searched for the song title and wow, why did I not know about this? I love it. I would have been completely obsessed with this if I'd heard it in the late '90s. Catchy as hell noisy indie-pop with organs and synth gurgles = all my buttons pushed.

(and for anyone else like me who couldn't quite place the admittedly familiar name Seana Carmody, she was in the Swirlies until 1994, which is a p. solid recommendation in itself for me. I see she has two solo albums on bandcamp too)

Songs that are legitimately great but that are pretty much the only song of the artist's I know:

Toenut - 'Test Anxiety'

Atlanta band. When I moved here for a job, I found out one of my coworkers used to be the unofficial member who created/played all their tape loops onstage.

I bought a ton of cds based on songs I heard on CMJ samplers, and many of them were listened to once and never again, but...

My Drug Hell - 'Girl at the Bus Stop'

This album is crazy good. A lost 90s classic imo.

Oh, I made no judgment upthread about the Syrup USA song because it's one of the few I couldn't conjure up an aural memory of based on the song title alone, but listening to it now and, yes, it's very good '90s indie pop.

I guess I'm going to have to upload the Statuesque song because it seems to have been erased from history (like, the first page of search results features multiple mentions of the CMJ issue from whence it came, leading me to believe it didn't have much life beyond that) and it really is one of the best songs mentioned itt.

Is this Statuesque as in the one-man-band of Stephen Manning? Or was their an earlier band by that name? If so, I know some of the stuff he put out in the 2000s, but I didn't know that he had been around earlier.

I don't believe so. Looks like their discography consists of a couple albums and EPs and the track on the CMJ sampler. I can't even find personnel info. https://www.discogs.com/artist/1188320-Statuesque

Or, okay, yeah maybe? Their two albums were released about eight years apart (1998 & 2004).

Hmm. Choir Above, Fire Below is one of the Statuesque albums I have, but if this is *that* Statuesque's discography, its missing a few titles.

(also, a a search of one of their other albums--Reader, I Curried Him--turns up nothing on discogs, so yeah, I dunno)

excellent thread concept, OL!

I guess I'm going to have to upload the Statuesque song because it seems to have been erased from history

a lot of this stuff has been, streaming be damned

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

I missed this thread somehow ... NO votes for Soap Disco? That's the hookiest thing on this whole list!