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hippriestess · 5 years ago

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Part 3 - “ I thought we had some kind of agreement but with you it was just prurience”

So, where were we. Ah yes....Record Store Day 2019.

It was, perhaps inevitably, a heavy day for Fall fans. Lead-in times both for the manufacture of vinyl records and for participation in RSD are such that Smith's death came too late for the impact to be evident in the 2018 event but for 2019, we were absolutely flooded in a way that caused some, quite rightly, to question the judgement of the organisers in allowing so many obvious vultures to swoop in for an easy bite.

The “monitor mixes” from the 2CD edition of “The Unutterable” were pressed to vinyl for the first time. “Whoo-fucking-pee” quoth the faithful and you will have absolutely no difficulty acquiring it today should you be down to few enough marbles for it to seem like a good investment. BMG hold the rights to the group's Rough Trade recordings and went with a box set of five 7” singles under the awful title “Medicine For The Masses”. This was the exact same format as “The Rough Trade Singles Box” from 2002 although with the bonus of containing the correct Peel Session versions of “Container Drivers” and “New Puritan” (Castle/Sanctuary had updated the 5 disc CD edition once they had acquired the rights to the BBC tracks but the vinyl edition of Italy's Earmark Records retained the Grotesque and Totale's Turns versions used in the initial pressings). Given not only that none of this material is any way scarce but that an excellent single LP release had been given to all 10 tracks in the box (Peel takes included) by US imprint Superior Viaduct in 2018, it was perhaps inevitable that “Medicine For The Masses” pretty much flopped on the day and can now be acquired brand new for a good £10 less than the asking price on the day itself.

Ah yes, Superior Viaduct, let's not forget them. A well-regarded reissue label with a smattering of current artists, they had already issued some Fall vinyl in 2016/2017, putting all the studio albums up to “Perverted By Language” back onto vinyl as well as the first 2 singles and the eternally category-defying “Slates” 10”. Following Smith's passing, they have (almost) completed the task with the aforementioned “Rough Trade Singles” LP and a new pressing of “Totale's Turns”. These editions have been very well received and have been praised for the quality both of the mastering and of the pressings but they remain largely inaccessible to UK fans due to licensing restrictions preventing the editions from being imported. As such, you'll hafta pick these up on a one-to-one basis off your own bat.

Right, back to Record Store Day 2019. We also had the “opportunity” to buy a number of live albums. 5 of them, in fact. All of these had previously been released on CD towards the end of 2018...so this was going to be called Crap Rap Part 14 but it's now called “Stop Releasing Every Gig You Can Find On Some Mouldy Third Generation Maxell C90 on a double LP”

Live albums have always been canon with The Fall. “Totale's Turns” was their 3rd LP release, “Live In London 1980” was issued by Chaos Tapes with the group's permission in 1982, “Fall In A Hole” was allowed until copies were exported. We had “Seminal Live” and “The 27 Points” mixing live with studio, as did “I Am Kurious Oranj” with several tracks recorded during the original Edinburgh run of the ballet. Even the “Perverted By Language Bis” video was largely live material. Even once the shark was jumped in the late 90s/early 00s with the endless recycling of those outtake/live compilations, there were official live missives, such as the excellent “Last Night At The Palais” in 2009, the wonderfully titled but patchy “Uurop VIII-XII Places in Sun & Winter, Son” in 2014 though to the terrible “Live In Clitheroe” in 2017. So, all in, it comes as no surprise at all that over 20 more live albums have been added to The Fall's discography since Smith's sad departure from this realm.

There were no less than 5 live albums dumped merrily onto the shelves for RSD 2019, 3 of them doubles. On their own, this would have been an outlay of over £100...in fact, if you wanted the full RSD Fall, you'd have had little or no change on the day from £250. For exactly no unreleased music. No unreleased music? What were these live albums then? Let's wind back to late in 2018... (I told you this was tough to do in any kind of linear fashion).

Arriving via the PledgeMusic site, “Set Of Ten” released by “Cog Sinister”, worked like this: 10 previously unreleased live recordings were contained in a sturdy square box with spiffy new artwork from Pascal LeGras. The tariff? £100. Ouch. Now, a handful of them were announced as separate releases, however, if you bought the box you would receive an exclusive disc – a recording from Derby, 1994. Cometh the hour, the Derby CD was one of the first to be released on its own. Huh.

A small amount of digging revealed that this set was the work of Rob Ayling. With the dates running from 1980 to 1999, the general opinion re: Set Of Ten was that these tapes were very likely to be in Ayling's possession due to the “Live From The Vaults” series on Voiceprint, Ayling's previous imprint, from 2005. When that series was announced, the five releases were said to be simply the first batch. It could therefore be deduced that these tapes had been destined for future batches. At the time, there was a minor dust-up over them and no further volumes were issued. Whatever the motivations, presenting an 11 CD set of old bootlegs with so little quality control being put into the audio and asking £100 for it felt like cold ash in the mouth. Worse still, PledgeMusic went bust before many customers could receive their sets, leaving them to either claim chargebacks on their credit cards or simply out of pocket as ordinary creditors to the failed business. It must have been galling for those who lost money to see the CDs arriving on their own and several cut onto expensive vinyl.

I've picked up a couple of the CDs separately and these have been largely fine. Recording quality is listenable but obviously audience derived. The best one by far of those I've heard is “Live 23rd June 1981 @ Jimmy's Music Club New Orleans”, a great recording of a full-tilt Fall performance from a critical time in their existence (pictured) . There's a palpable tension, possibly due to the return of Burns, brought back not just out of practicalities but also to even the group up a bit, now that Smith was beginning to reconsider the wisdom of having a team of childhood friends for a group. Rehiring Burns was designed to put some grit back into the machine and it worked. Having a full set from this line-up is a worthy addition to the canon and it should be snapped up before it vanishes – this is the only one of the “Set Of Ten” CDs that seems to be thin on the ground. The artwork and credits show the level of care taken over the release; that is – pretty much none. The CD artwork has the 6 piece “Hex” line-up – Karl Burns is the only drummer here as Paul Hanley was at home doing his O Levels. However, the sleeve credits Paul Hanley and not Burns, adding a credit for Duncan Burndred, who was the group's driver at the time. The info had been sourced from the “Slates & Dates” press release which credited Burndred with “the rest” (ie anything other than music and management). Likely pilfered from thefall.org, this missive was retooled for the artwork without any real consideration.

However, it seems there was sufficient demand out there and, cometh the tail end of 2019, cometh another Set of Ten, given the snappy title...”Another Set Of Ten”. They must have been up all fucking night thinking of that one. Again, it has 11 discs. It does get interesting here insofar as most of the tapes come from between 2009 and 2013 suggesting not only that there wasn't much left from the original “Vaults”- destined batch but also making it unclear from whom these tapes were being licenced. They are, of course, under no obligation to discuss such matters publicly and, indeed the current incarnation of Cog Sinister would likely feel aggrieved at having the question asked. They are, after all, a legitimate enterprise.

A quick skwizz at the Discogs page tells you that “Another Set Of Ten” is not a triumph; all the tapes are listed as being audience tapes, one disc has just six songs from the gig and several others are also incomplete and/or mislabelled. The main contributor to the Discogs entry (to whom, hello!) notes that the tracklistings appear to be taken from photographs of setlists uploaded to thefall.org's justly revered and thoroughly sublime gigography but, where the setlist didn't match what was played, no attempt has been made to correct this. They haven't even matched up the content with the tracklistings!!! At time of writing, these ones are just starting to slip into the shops on their own, possibly Covid delayed as you could get them via online retailers for a while. The cover for a Manchester gig from 2009 looked like a sick joke and it was hard not to think similar (albeit at lower pitch) about the inclusion of an infamous Motherwell gig at which MES was completely plastered and Brix had quit the band an hour or so before the show. What's next? Worthing? Brownies?

Yet it is very hard not to be continually tempted. There's some juicy setlists in these discs and the artwork at least has some effort – Pascal LeGras has done a very fine job here and his art certainly gives the right feel to the releases. I'm guessing that was the plan. I’ve got my eye on a few. It’s a disease this, I tell you...

Anyway, one way of the other, 5 of the “Set Of Ten” discs found their way onto vinyl on RSD, courtesy of reissue imprint Let Them Eat Vinyl and all of these are still easy to score, should you wish. The whole Gonzo/Let Them Eat Vinyl hookup is interesting for scholars of who-owns-what in terms of The Fall's catalogue. As above, we know that BMG have the Rough Trade recordings but LTEV's “Grotesque”, issued in 2017, states it is licensed by Sanctuary.

LTEV have also been putting some of the other lesser releases from the catalogue onto vinyl, including 2 mid 90's live albums (Phoenix 1995 and “The Idiot Joy Show” - nothing that was wasn't available for buttons on CD in the early 00s) as well as “Interim”, the demos and live cobble-together that attempted to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory in 2004. The latter had never been pressed to vinyl before and with bloody good reason. Yr mileage, as always, may vary.

Whilst not The Fall, acolytes will doubtless want to know that Ed Blaney issued a 2CD edition of “The Train”, containing the full 40-minute “(Part Three)” CD, a similarly lengthed alternate version and a clutch of remixes. Blaney also uploaded a properly touching tribute to Smith on YouTube, including reminiscences with other friends of Smith.

One more part to come, in which we burn the spotlight of shame onto a couple of the worst products ever to have had the name The Fall unwillingly emblazoned upon their sleeves and take a quick look over some of what we know is in the pipeline.

#the fall #mark e smith

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rm-blanik · 6 years ago

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Janis Joplin - Janis Joplin's Greatest Hits Label: Supraphon - 1 13 2215, CBS ‎– 1 13 2215, Gramofonový Klub - 1 13 2215 Format: Vinyl, LP, Compilation, Club Edition, Reissue Country: Czechoslovakia Released: 1977 #JanisJoplin #JanisJoplinsgreatesthits #JanisJoplinvinyl #JanisJoplinlp #vinyl #lp #greatesthits #wearethehunters #wearethehunters77 (v místě Czech Republic) https://www.instagram.com/p/B3MgYnKptl9/?igshid=1bo6uw9v56la8

#janisjoplin #janisjoplinsgreatesthits #janisjoplinvinyl #janisjoplinlp #vinyl #lp #greatesthits #wearethehunters #wearethehunters77

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stormyrecords-blog · 7 years ago

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memorial day new arrivals

happy memorial day weekend!!

THANK YOU to all of our service men and women, past present and future. a single day a year is really not enough to thank you for all you have done for your country. your selflessness and courage deserve to be honored everyday.

in on thursday

DEVIOUS ONES Plainview Nights lp $14.99

brand new music on vinyl from detroit's own Devious Ones! LP is limited to 500 copies that are hand numbered. Very classy cover art - not a surprise for any project Rob St Mary is involved with!!

Hollie Cook Vessel Of Love LP $20.99

Many women started playing music because of history’s first all-girl punk band, the Slits. But the British singer Hollie Cook launched her career as a reggae singer after being in the Slits. She was, in some sense, destined. Cook was born in 1987 to Jeni Cook, a backing singer for Culture Club, and Paul Cook, the drummer of the Sex Pistols who infamously helped steal all the gear that history-splitting band used to get started. Boy George is Cook’s godfather, and it is unlikely that Johnny Rotten has been in a photo more adorable than one, shared recently by Cook, of the pair backstage at a 1996 Sex Pistols reunion show. At 19, Cook was tapped by a family friend to sing at a recording session. It was Ari Up: the status-quo-annihilating, dreadlock-donning, firebrand Slits singer—a woman who, in her freedom of mind, was so controversial in punk’s early days that she was knifed on the streets of London; who not only fused punk with reggae, but subsequently moved to Jamaica and made a life there.

Destroyer Your Blues LP $22.99

City Of Daughters LP $23.99

Thief LP $23.99

3 wonderful albums by Destroyer, with both City and Thief being newly remastered and pressed on heavy vinyl

Tracyanne & Danny s/t cd $14.99

lp also available $ 25.99

Throughout the whole of the 21st century, Camera Obscura have sated the world’s appetite for bookish yet luxuriant Scottish indie-pop, ruling a lane left wide open when Belle & Sebastian went full jazz-hands. But the band has been inactive in recent years following the 2015 death of keyboardist Carey Lander, so we haven’t had the privilege of hearing Tracyanne Campbell’s voice ringing out ever-so-articulately over lush retro production.

Enter Danny Coughlan of the English band Crybaby, Camera Obscura’s friends and former opening act. Glasgow-based Campbell and Bristol-based Coughlan had been talking about collaborating since before Camera Obscura released 2013’s Desire Lines, but they didn’t properly revisit the idea until some time had passed following Lander’s death. Now they’ve gotten down to business and recorded a whole album together under the name Tracyanne & Danny.

great restock on HIP HOP releases including multiple Drum Breaks lps, some J Dilla, El Michels Affair and Will Sessions!!!

in on friday

Sun Ra: God Is More Than Love

CD $15.99

LP $23.99

"God Is More Than Love Can Ever Be is something of a rarity in the Sun Ra catalog -- a cohesive album with none of the stylistic eclecticism and musical chair shifting many of the artist's self-released LPs were known for. Recorded at Variety Studios one day in 1979, the album's five tracks comprise a solid jazz trio set. God Is More Than Love... is the only complete piano-bass-drums studio session in the massive Sun Ra catalog. The album offers an intense set of cosmic vagabond moods, reflecting the telepathy that is the essence of small combo jazz. Other than an overdubbed second piano on 'Days Of Happiness' the five works were spontaneously generated and forever fixed: none of the titles recur in the encyclopedic Ra discography. Originally released on Saturn in several small press runs under the alternate title 'Days Of Happiness' between 1979 and 1981, fully realized artwork was never established and the album never got much circulation, thus it has remained a largely overlooked session in the Ra omniverse. Nearly 40 years later, the record is long overdue for acclaim on its second time around. Newly remastered edition on CD and LP (with tip-on style jackets/ RTI vinyl)"

NWW: Sinister Whimsy For The Wretched 2CD $21.99

Sinister Whimsy For The Wretched contains the long out-of-print albums, Sugar Fish Drink (1992) and Large Ladies With Cake In The Oven (1993). Both discs are remastered by Andrew Liles. You will never hear these better. Sugar Fish Drink, "Cod Surrealism", is a distinctly wet aberration on paranoid aesthetics occasionally coordinated by John Balance and Steven Stapleton. For Large Ladies With Cake In The Oven, all tracks were previously released in some form or another. Songs titles have been altered from their original forms on their original releases. "Head Cold" is very close to being the exact song as the Miss Ticker remix of "Cold" from the Thunder Perfect Mind CD reissue and "Steel Dream March Of The Metal Man".

Pharoah Sanders - Juan Les Pins Jazz Festival '68 CD $17.99

Pharoah Sanders, live from the Juan Les Pins Jazz Festival, Antibes, France on July 20th, 1968. Having made his name playing with John Coltrane as of 1965, Pharoah Sanders soon came to be recognized as one of the most innovative jazz players of his generation. Having formed his own quartet, he was invited to perform at the Antibes Jazz Festival in Juan-les-Pins, France in July 1968. Originally broadcast on French radio station WDR3, this superb recording captures a great musician in his early prime. Includes the entire WDR3-FM radio broadcast is presented here, digitally remastered, with background notes and images. Personnel: Pharoah Sanders - tenor saxophone, percussion; Lonnie Liston Smith - piano; Norman "Sirone" Jones - bass; Majeed Shabazz - drums.

Schickert, Gunter: Labyrinth LP $23.99

Günter Schickert, four decades of multi-instrumental cosmic explorations, under Berlin's sky, above genres, and compromises. Marmo present on his seventh album to date, Labyrinth, the first to be released on vinyl format since 1983's Kinder In Der Wildnis. Schickert's Samtvogel (1974), equaled the imaginative leap and sonic power of the early Pink Floyd, Manuel Gottsching's 1975 album Inventions For Electric Guitar (MGART 401CD/901LP) or A.R. & Machines's Die Grüne Reise (1971). Überfällig -- originally released on Sky Records in 1979 and reissue by Bureau B (BB 096CD/LP, 2012) -- little acclaimed, spans a large spectrum of music styles, always through a distinctive and personal aesthetic, that is deeply linked to the one he firstly crafted back in '74, when Schickert pioneered the use of echo effects applied to guitar playing. And now Labyrinth, a record that stands for versatility, where soundscapes or life situations take over. The album is divided into two parts, two different production bulks and periods of Günther Schickert's life. Side A features a selection of tracks recorded in 1996, appearing on the 2012 album HaHeHiHo, released via Pittsburgh based VCO Recordings. The raga-inspired "Morning" opens Labyrinth with exotic charm and bitter-sweet nostalgia. "Sieben" kicks off with the same guitar scales of the previous theme, before the motorized progressions of a Korg MS-20 synth surprisingly storm in. "Ninja Schwert" remains on astral dimensions, it is a struggle of cosmic forces, where the steady ride of a pounding beat gets embraced by different guitar layers and analog electronic filtering. The side closes up with "HaHeHiHo", a slow ballad featuring Schickert on vocals, guitar, bass guitar, and drum machine. Side B contains material produced between 2007 and today. "Tsunami" shows the multi-instrumental and recording abilities of Günter Schickert: a field-recorded storm with mesmerizing powers, a peculiar progressive approach to guitar playing. In contrast, "Oase" muffles the intensity and jumps into a completely different soundscape, where in liaison with the sounds of a rolling drum tom and a desert-like trumpet. Like "HaHeHiHo", "Checking" represents the vocal gem of the B side, in a raw and direct way of songwriting like if Syd Barrett was his invisible helper. "Palaver" assembles different vocal recordings of Schickert into a bizarre free-style conversation. "Morning (Slide)", reprises the opening theme, this time solely performed through the caressing dilated sounds of Günter's slide guitar. Includes printed inner sleeve and download code.

Battiato, Franco: Clic LP $33.99

"On his fourth album, Clic, Franco Battiato moves further out -- into realms of pure and elemental approaches to sound -- to create a seminal work that flows naturally from one musical form to the next. Every second ripples with orbital chords, kosmische textures and schizophrenic string quartets, yet somehow manages the same dramatic pacing and variety as his avant-rock albums Fetus and Pollution. Originally released in 1974 on Bla Bla, Clic features Battiato on VCS3 synthesizer and piano, along with trusted collaborators Gianni Mocchetti on guitar and Gianfranco D'Adda on percussion. While only 'No U Turn' bears the maestro's voice, these seven tracks contain some of his boldest melodies, an underlying thread that runs through the choral arrangements and meditative compositions. Clic's dedication to Karlheinz Stockhausen comes into focus on the final piece, 'Ethika Fon Ethica' -- a rapidfire journey into Italian shortwave radio, interrupted by fleeting fragments of folk music from around the world (sampled from Henry Cowell's celebrated Folkways compilations from the 1950's). It's the perfect ending to Battiato's beautiful and expansive tour of the cosmos, signaling the uncompromising experimentalism that would dominate much of the composer's mid-1970s oeuvre. Superior Viaduct presents the first-time domestic release of Clic. Reproducing the original gatefold jacket and booklet, this reissue is part of an archival series that chronicles Franco Battiato's masterful body of work from 1971 to 1978."

Durutti Column: LC LP $26.99

restock on this incredible release!!

David Grubbs & Taku Unami: Failed Celestial Creatures LP $33.99

Empty Editions present Failed Celestial Creatures, an unexpected collaboration between composer-guitarist David Grubbs (Gastr Del Sol, The Red Krayola) and Tokyo-based musician Taku Unami. Primarily recorded in Kyoto, the album takes inspiration from the duo's shared musical and literary influences, emerging just as much from their improvisatory explorations as from an eclectic reading list exchanged prior to the recording sessions. The album's narrative inclinations are rooted in both artists' previous experiments with the complex reciprocity between sound and text, including Grubbs' work with the poet Susan Howe and Unami's collaborations with writers such as Eugene Thacker and Evan Calder Williams. Failed Celestial Creatures draws in particular upon a group of short stories by the short-lived Japanese author Atsushi Nakajima (1909-42) -- perhaps best known for inflecting Classical Chinese folktales with a modernist vein of absurdist and existential foreboding -- as the imaginary backdrop for its set of guitar-based instrumental explorations. In Nakajima's The Moon Over The Mountain, a mad-poet metamorphosed into a hybrid-tiger recites poetry with an obscure defect, while The Rebirth of Wujing sees the titular river monster self-identifying as a "failed celestial being" [堕天使]. The cryptic collapse read in both of these episodes resonates with Unami's research into the etymology of the chinese character "堕," meaning "to fail" in modern usage, but historically understood as referencing "sacred meat from the altar fallen on the ground." Such a primordial scene evokes the violation of the sacred as a tacit aspect of ritual. This failure of ritual, always a condition (and perhaps even a technique) for musicians of Grubbs and Unami's ilk, can be broadly understood as the primary point of departure for Failed Celestial Creatures. Situated within this affective terrain, the album's title-track consists of a side-long progression of dirge-like riffs enveloped by clouds of vaporous electronics -- eventually erupting into unruly squalls of feedback as Unami joins Grubbs on electric guitar. The B-side features a cluster of luminous guitar duets which are beguiling in their seeming effortlessness and simplicity. Threadbare and fallen, Grubbs and Unami invoke the failed ritual, the spilling at the altar, always suggested at the precipice of sonic emergence. Recorded by Taku Unami at Soto, Kyoto, August 7th and 9th, 2017; Mastered by Rashad Becker at Dubplates & Mastering. 180 gram vinyl; Edition of 500.

Wire #412: June 18 MAG $10.50

"On the cover: Laurie Anderson (More active now than ever, the multimedia artist and performer discusses a career marked by hybridity, borderless networks and a new interest in virtual reality). Inside the issue: Cecil Taylor (When the revolutionary pianist died in April, jazz lost one of its most uncompromising individualists. Author, photographer and historian Val Wilmer recalls their encounters); Senyawa (Javanese musicians and instrument makers Rully Shabara and Wukir Suryadi fuse metal with trance to create overwhelming fields of sound); Global Ear: Veracruz; Invisible Jukebox: The Storm Bugs; plus: Tansy Davies, Rodrigo Tavares, Sarah Hennies, Futura Records and more."

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ricardosousalemos · 8 years ago

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Various Artists: Singles: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack-Deluxe Edition

Andrew Wood died of a heroin overdose in March of 1990, rending his tight-knit Seattle music community. As often happens in creatively fueled local scenes, community members rallied and turned their grief into art. Wood’s roommate Chris Cornell recruited Wood’s erstwhile Mother Love Bone bandmates Jeff Ament and Stone Gossard to record some songs he’d been working on. With guitarist Mike McCready, Soundgarden drummer Matt Cameron, and recently relocated San Diego native Eddie Vedder, they called themselves Temple of the Dog, after one of Wood’s lyrics. Their eponymous album, released in April 1991, sold modestly thanks to Soundgarden’s profile, but Soundgarden were signed to A&M, in rotation on 120 Minutes, and toured with Guns N’ Roses.

On the night of Wood’s funeral, many of his friends and collaborators gathered at Mother Love Bone manager Kelly Curtis’ house, including director Cameron Crowe and his wife, Heart guitarist and Seattle native Nancy Wilson. Crowe had moved to Seattle several years earlier and fell in with the area’s incestuous network of rock bands, labels, college radio stations, and venues. Then 32 years old, he was already an ex-Rolling Stone features writer and accomplished screenwriter working on a new script for a romantic comedy that used Seattle’s burgeoning rock scene as its backdrop. On the night of Wood’s memorial, something clicked. “It was the first real feeling of what it was like to have a hometown—everybody pulling together for some people they really loved,” he told an interviewer in 2001. “It made me want to do Singles as a love letter to the community that I was really moved by.”

If Temple of the Dog were a spiritual origin of “grunge”—the name associated with the mainstreaming of Seattle-area indie rock and the culture it briefly spawned—then Singles (the film and soundtrack), was its commercial coming-out party. More than a year after duetting on “Hunger Strike,” Vedder and Cornell were merged into Matt Dillon’s Cliff Poncier character. Cornell appeared in the film as himself, fronting Soundgarden playing “Birth Ritual” in a club scene and, in the film’s most Wayne’s World moment, standing in stoned silence while Poncier blew out the windows of his girlfriend’s car with too much speaker wattage. While they were recording what would become Pearl Jam’s debut album Ten, Vedder, Ament, and Gossard actually had lines in the film, playing Poncier’s backing band in Citizen Dick. In one of the few Singles scenes about band life, Vedder and Ament mumble through an alt-weekly pan of the band’s LP to protect Poncier’s feelings. Crowe cuts to a close-up of the review, which paints Poncier’s music as “pompous, dick-swinging swill” that comes from being a big fish in a small pond. If he moved to a bigger, more established city like Minneapolis, the review snarked, he’d be a nobody.

The Seattle that Singles was shot in during 1991 was a very different city than the one it was a year later when the film was released. Like Temple of the Dog, Singles was the product of a bonafide music scene that was starting to make mainstream impact (bands signing to majors, journalists sniffing around to write trend pieces on Sub Pop), but it was released into an absolute hype storm. Effectively, by late 1992, both could enjoy the rare distinction of pre-emptively canonizing a musical movement. They were “grunge” before grunge was even Grunge. At the very moment it achieved mass popularity, grunge not only had breakout stars and a fashion style guide (flannel, long underwear beneath shorts, stocking caps) but its own scene supergroup and a feature film in theaters.

Grunge “broke” thanks to Nirvana, an absent presence in the film and its soundtrack. In a Rolling Stone diary entry dated January 24, 1992, a couple weeks after “Smells Like Teen Spirit” peaked at No. 6 on Billboard’s Hot 100—the same day Nevermind became the No. 1 album in the country—Crowe noted that Warner Brothers, the studio that had been sitting on Singles for months, was now suggesting a new title for the film: “Come As You Are.” By April 1992, Singles the film still didn’t have a release date, but Epic was pushing to release its soundtrack to ride the ascendant grunge wave. By mid-year, A&M was aggressively re-promoting Temple of the Dog to radio and MTV, and Epic released the Singles soundtrack two weeks before Soundgarden and Pearl Jam played the main stage at Lollapalooza. It is impossible to underestimate how much that summer and fall were suffused with grunge. Soundgarden was big (Badmotorfinger peaked at No. 39), but Pearl Jam became massive—Ten was a slow-building success, that peaked at No. 2 on Billboard in late August, a couple weeks before Temple of the Dog entered the top ten as well. In September and October, when Singles was in theaters at the same time that “Hunger Strike,” “Outshined,” “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” and “Alive” were omnipresent on MTV and modern rock radio, grunge felt like a small version of disco in the Saturday Night Fever moment: a mass-media cultural phenomenon and style sensibility that had as many haters as acolytes. By December 1992, SPIN was calling Seattle “to the rock’n’roll world what Bethlehem was to Christianity.”

Where Singles the movie was a romantic comedy with Seattle rock as its backdrop, its soundtrack, for anyone outside of the Pacific Northwest or the college radio universe, was a revelation. The 25th-anniversary reissue of the compilation revisits and further contextualizes this moment, with a bonus disc of demos, live versions, and other film ephemera never before issued on CD or vinyl. At the time, SPIN called the Singles soundtrack, “as close as possible to the ultimate Seattle music anthology…without sounding like a masturbatory Sub Pop collection.” Amid the hippest bands of the insurgent grunge moment and Mother Love Bone’s epic “Chloe Dancer/Crown of Thorns” (which also appeared briefly in Crowe’s 1989 film Say Anything), Crowe was careful to include Seattle rock royalty (via a Hendrix deep-cut and a deeply faithful cover of Led Zeppelin’s “Battle of Evermore” by Heart (as the Lovemongers), and hire Minneapolitan Paul Westerberg for the score and two prominent songs (his first two solo recordings, to boot). Through the Singles soundtrack, Crowe expertly situated grunge within the ’60s and ’70s classic rock pantheon while, through Westerberg, not testing the rom-com demographic by putting TAD or Screaming Trees on the trailer. It’s not a perfect fit: though Westerberg’s DNA as the leader of the Replacements winds through grunge, the chipper, raspy power-pop of “Dyslexic Heart” sits oddly aside Soundgarden and Alice in Chains on the soundtrack.

About that contrast: Crowe was deeply connected to Seattle’s scene, but despite casting several of its key participants in the film, he had no pretensions about its death-fixated, deeply ironic, drop-D metal-punk indie rock scene serving as anything more than a backdrop for his du jour romp: Linda, a “U-dub” grad student in environmental policy; Steve, a civil engineer whose dream is to revolutionize the city’s urban transport with a latte-serving high-speed train; Janet, a naïve, love-seeking (and Fountainhead-reading?!) barista played by Bridget Fonda. Apart from catching bands in clubs and the Citizen Dick narrative, grunge is as much a lifestyle backdrop for Singles as the city’s booming coffee market. Consider “State of Love and Trust,” which along with “Breath,” represent the earliest (and best) Pearl Jam music (and provide evidence of how immediately the band congealed). The song appears early in the film as the background soundtrack to the moment when lovestruck Linda realizes she’d been duped by the Spanish man to whom she’d given her garage door opener. She drags her friend outside and has a good cry, in front of a graffitied wall reading “LOVE BONE.”

The broader context of Singles shows how Crowe, like the bands on his soundtrack, was coming into his own. The movie hit theaters a few months after the debut MTV’s Real World (which debuted in May 1992), and predicted Friends, which debuted on NBC in September 1994. Consider Friends through Singles: a cast of attractive late 20-somethings, all of whom (except Linda) live in the same apartment complex, date each other and…hang out at a coffee shop (Java Stop) when they should be working, with a popular soundtrack featuring…Paul Westerberg. An underrated aspect of Singles, even apart from freezing pre-grunge Seattle in celluloid, was Crowe zeroing in on an emergent audience demographic—late-20s/early-30s single white people—that television would capitalize on in the next several years, broadening the gambit of sitcoms past the workplace and family to the extended networks of young urban professionals.

Singles the film was successful, but the soundtrack was a minor phenomenon, cracking the Billboard Top 10 and eventually going double-platinum. Its success was enough to launch the career of one Screaming Trees. “They kept postponing the release of our album,” Screaming Trees drummer Barrett Martin remembered of the band’s commercial breakthrough Sweet Oblivion, “because the Singles soundtrack was getting all the attention.” Scene veterans from sleepy Ellensburg who’d signed to Epic in 1990, the Trees were filed under “heavy metal” and marketed as a hair band until grunge. Their anthemic single “Nearly Lost You,” powered by Mark Lanegan’s raspy baritone and a radio-friendly iteration of the band’s psychedelic power-sludge, made the soundtrack’s penultimate slot as a last-minute addition. Oblivion was finally released that September 8, and thanks to Singles it sold upwards of 300,000 copies, easily the band’s biggest seller.

As a commercial genre, grunge paved a lane through which bands like Screaming Trees could chase the rock mainstream. As a word, grunge was a perfect phonetic suggestion of how the music sounded and the musicians looked. The Trees were big, gruff guys—the kind of dudes who, per Mark Yarm’s essential grunge oral history Everybody Loves Our Town, got in a brawl with 10 club security guys in New Jersey the night before their national television debut on Letterman. They played “Nearly Lost You” with Lanegan sporting a shiner, after which Letterman admitted, “I’ll be honest with ya—I was kinda scared.”

The origin of “grunge”—which, though derided, is still as on-the-money as “punk” as a single-word encapsulation of music and attitude—is the stuff of legend. Sub Pop co-founders Jonathan Poneman and Bruce Pavitt had great ears for music and an even better knack for self-effacing promotion, and were obsessed with gaining credibility in the UK, which, in the label’s view, meant playing up the music’s blue-collar roots, occasionally to the cartoonish level of guitar-wielding loggers and lumberjacks (which Kurt Cobain hated). The word “grunge,” legend has it, was most prominently deployed by Melody Maker’s Everett True in a Sub Pop band review, though in Yarm’s book, Poneman claims True cribbed it from Pavitt’s description of Green River’s Dry as a Bone in Sub Pop’s mail-order catalog: “ultra-loose GRUNGE that destroyed the morals of a generation.”

The mass media didn’t care about its provenance because grunge just worked. It allowed industry types to market music (and release films like Singles), and made the perfect peg for journalistic trend pieces, which often failed to sniff out the subcultural irony that defined so much of the Seattle scene. Most legendary in this respect is the sidebar to the New York Times’ “Grunge—A Success Story,” published two months after Singles’ theatrical debut, in which Sub Pop receptionist Megan Jasper created a one-woman hoax when prompted for a grunge “lexicon,” offering made-up slang like “swingin’ on the flippity-flop,” “lamestain” and “bloated, big bag of bloatation” which were reprinted verbatim in the paper of record (Jasper later fessed up in Doug Pray’s essential 1996 documentary Hype!).

Singles the movie doesn’t even remotely trade in this level of irony—that’s the opposite of Crowe’s thing—though the soundtrack’s incorporation of Mudhoney’s “Overblown” at least offers a sincere critique from the guy who many consider the linchpin of the entire scene (the soundtrack’s deluxe version includes a demo version). Opening with ur-grunge singer Mark Arm’s studio chatter, “Okay, grunge masters, he we go,” “Overblown” sounds like a mangled version of the Go-Go’s “We Got the Beat,” as Arm deadpans, “Everybody loves us/Everybody loves our town/That’s why I’m thinking lately/The time for leaving is now.”

In a particularly great anecdote from Our Town, Truly guitarist Robert Roth recalls watching Nirvana debut “Teen Spirit” live at Seattle’s OK Hotel while “across the street, there was a private thing where they were filming Alice in Chains for Singles.” Notwithstanding the synchronicity of an actual historical moment in rock lore coinciding with Crowe’s simulacrum of another moment, these shows help to understand just how different the bands lumped in under “grunge” were. Alice in Chains played unrelentingly dark, metal-influenced sludge-rock, though the harmonized vocals of guitarist/songwriter/hesher Jerry Cantrell and the vampiric Layne Staley set them apart from their contemporaries. Their 1990 single “Man in the Box” was the early breakthrough of Seattle rock, bridging the Headbanger’s Ball and Buzz Bin crowds.

Alice in Chains appear twice in Singles, playing Facelift track “It Ain’t Like That” and “Would?” which kicked off the soundtrack. Though the compilation’s two non-Ten Pearl Jam songs made it commercially valuable, “Would?” is unquestionably its best song. Penned by Cantrell as an ode to Andrew Wood, “Would?” is more generally about making bold choices, ignoring doubters, and accepting whatever consequences might come. If any song of 1991-2 could be called pure, uncut “grunge,” this is it: starting with a menacingly low bass rumble that blooms into a slithering goth-metal groove, featuring the tense interplay between Staley’s acidic snarl and Cantrell’s placid vocal, the lyrics drenched with the kind of looming dread pioneered by Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath. The song’s odd structure lends it a further disorienting effect, like a slasher movie cutting to black at the exact second the protagonist opens the door to the dark basement. The key change signals a reprieve, but there’s no resolution; just when the song veers to a new path in the final bridge, it drops off suddenly, leaving Staley screaming a question that’s equally alluring and terrifying: “If I would, could you?!” while everything just collapses under its own weight. “Would?” concluding with a musical bridge-to-nowhere is as good an encapsulation of grunge’s performative nihilism as anything Arm, Vedder, or Cobain could summon.

“Would?” remains the best song on Singles, but the 25th-anniversary reissue of the soundtrack is dominated by Soundgarden, especially Chris Cornell, revealing just how much he contributed to the film’s blend of Seattle reality and cinematic fiction. It was Cornell who suggested Crowe include “Drown” on the soundtrack, an eight-minute epic from Chicago’s Smashing Pumpkins, who were still a year away from Siamese Dream. While Citizen Dick re-recorded Mudhoney’s epochal Sub Pop single as “Touch Me I’m Dick,” it was Cornell who actually wrote the songs for Poncier’s “solo album,” prompted by song titles jokingly devised by Ament.

Crowe loved the songs, especially the acoustic track “Seasons,” which recalled Zeppelin III and Pink Floyd circa Meddle and perfectly bridged the soundtrack’s past and present iterations of Seattle rock. Another song from what became the Poncier EP was “Spoon Man,” an ode to a quirky local street musician that appeared briefly in Singles and would be fleshed out into the lead single from Soundgarden’s magisterial 1994 LP Superunknown. The Singles reissue bonus disc contains Cornell’s original Poncier tape (along with some incidental music he composed for the film that went unused), including the stark “Nowhere But You” and the lilting, psychedelic “Flutter Girl,” both of which would reappear in more exquisitely produced form on the 1999 CD single for Cornell’s solo single debut “Can’t Change Me.” While Euphoria Morning marked a dramatic public shift for Cornell-the-solo-artist after more than a decade as Soundgarden’s howling frontman, these tracks reveal that he’d long had a quieter, more pensive side.

Cornell’s May 17th suicide after a Detroit Soundgarden concert came as a shock to rock fans and the Seattle community to which he meant so much, and, less importantly, provided a morbid coincidence for the 25th-anniversary reissue of the Singles soundtrack to which he contributed so much. As happens with rock star deaths, Cornell’s triggered countless appreciations of his significant contributions to 1990s hard rock, for which he was perhaps the single most prominent link to its 1970s and ’80s predecessors. It was also a reminder that of the five rock frontmen to emerge from that moment in rock history—Cornell, Cobain, Staley, Vedder, and Stone Temple Pilots’ Scott Weiland—only Vedder and Pearl Jam remain (they were feted in 2011 with a career-spanning documentary directed by Crowe himself). This is the thing about grunge: apart from its commercial success and validation of mass media hype, grunge-as-music was most often a very dark thing, populated by iconoclastic young men negotiating personal authenticity with unavoidable fixations on death, sickness, and pain. That many of those men sang passionately about the same things that led to their premature deaths is in the end, the legacy of that moment.

By definition, by stressing authenticity within the bounds of mainstream commerce, rock music has to die and be periodically resurrected. What made grunge—rock’s final mainstream “rebirth”—so potent and problematic was how it intertwined artistic tensions (selling out vs. staying true, community vs. commerce) with the musicians’ own deep-seated personal anxieties, fears, and sicknesses. That’s what made it feel real, what allowed for individuals to identify with it, and ultimately, what made it so commercially valuable. The music was often great, but more importantly, it was cast as the organic cultural product of a single city in the corner of a country, that, for many, marked an organic “victory” after years of post-punk indie rock bands slogging it out on college radio and vanning it between small clubs. For locals, on the other hand, grunge was an absolute hype nightmare that had little to do with music or community and everything to do with vulture-like industry encroachment and outsider social positioning.

Singles is often seen as a sui generis rock-historical document because of its ostensible realism. Crowe’s love letter to his adopted hometown--shot on site and cast with actual locals--was composed in the moments before Seattle became a synecdoche for rock’s latest rebirth, and was rush-released to coincide with a moment that it, in turn, further fueled. Twenty-five years later, when local scenes are inextricable from their immediate online hype and a churn of thinkpieces mourn rock’s latest “death,” Singles feels less like Hollywood realism and more like the conjured ghost of a dead moment. As in the early 1990s, so it is today: rock lies in wait, ready for its resurrection through some authentic commercial séance. Maybe Cornell knew best, growling on the Singles soundtrack: “The snake retreats/Admits defeat/And waits for the birth ritual.”

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