Hole – Live Through This [1994; City Slang, DGC, Geffen Records, MCA Records Canada]

Bridging the punk rock of 1991′s Pretty on the Inside and the (mostly) radio-friendly fare of 1998′s Celebrity Skin, Hole’s second album fully embraces the grunge style, spawning multiple singles. All of its dozen songs hover close to the three-minute mark, making for a fairly digestible listening experience in spite of the anger, directed inward and outward, which fuels each track. Allusions, similes, and metaphors are abundant, threaded through with confessions (or facsimiles thereof) and reactive lashings.

The band displays an impressive tightness of interplay and instrumental support, with Courtney Love’s vocals catching the anguished highs and resigned lows in effective form. Moody bridges and grinding assaults break up the standard grunge formations, with the percussion (which were redone, allegedly without informing drummer Patty Schemel at the time) in particular forming some of the most engaging moments. Though rumors of various kinds have emerged around the album’s creation in the years following its release, Live Through This remains Hole’s most well-rounded and cohesive album to date, with little of its initial impact lost.

Vanilla Trainwreck – Kiss Me [1994; Mammoth Records]

In the title track A-side, Vanilla Trainwreck tear off a fast-moving blear of jangling guitar, hard-bopping drums, and detached, nearly atonal singing, with the underlying bass-lines as the one piece of firmness to it. The dreamy arrangement makes its assault of electric guitar and drumming work, somehow, trailing off into a feedback fade following the finishing eruption. The band cover a Talking Heads track, “Electric Guitar”, on the B-side, slowing the pace while increasing the audio haze, gradually upping the pressure as they climb towards the end. An odd but pleasing pair, with some underexplored facets of the band on display.

Chris Hülsbeck – Vol.3: Rainbows [1994; Chris Hülsbeck Mediaproduction]

Hülsbeck

In this third installment collecting spare works by Chris
Hülsbeck (preceded by 1991′s Shades and 1992′s To Be on Top), pieces composed during his time with the German video game development studio of Rainbow Arts are the focus, including cuts from Z-Out, Jinks, and The Great Giana Sisters. Despite being rerecorded for the CD’s release, hardware from the Atari and Commodore computers for which the games were released is still used, with Hülsbeck drawing some impressively lithe performances out of the machines, and vocals appearing on four of the nineteen songs.

A broad spectrum of moods and song-writing approaches keep things moving and varied, with the expected early techno joined by more freeform and laidback compositions. On the downside, most of the tracks are main themes and medleys, which prevents much momentum or continuity from developing beyond the repetition of beat-patterns and certain synth voices. It’s a nice tour, with plenty of well-made moments (sometimes to a startling degree, considering the limited instrumentation), but it works much better in separate servings (particularly with the sound packs of the last four tracks, “Samplemania” I through IV) than taken in one go.

Sheep On Drugs – …On Drugs [1994; Island Records, PolyGram, Transglobal]

On their second album (following their debut with 1993′s Greatest Hits), Sheep On Drugs serve up a mix of hard-roll techno and mellower breakbeats, with semi-apathetic punkish attitude as connective tissue. The quick jumps in tempo and loop content work, for the most part, though it’s hard to pin down why that is. The beats don’t always flow across the jumps, the vocals are often arrhythmic and make little to no effort at being in tune, splashes of outside styles (e.g., illbient for four bars or so) are thrown in without being fitted to the emotional ramping, and so on. But the syrupy bass-waves and rough-edged treble punches come together with a satisfyingly sloppy human touch to their programming, while the nasal singing weaves through the beats and drones.

Suicide, apathy, drugs, and disaffection (with an emphasis on the suicide) are the main themes of the lyrics, and while they’re never communicated with an especially developed level of sophistication, their plain-faced weariness makes for far more emotionally convincing fare than the histrionics of Nine Inch Nails or similar acts at this point in the ‘90s. The fully instrumental portions, rare as they are, show some surprising deftness for a band so evidently bent on making sure people know they don’t care about much of anything, with enticing interplay between the assorted layers and some powerful shaping of the electronics. Fairly niche in its appeal, but with enough depth beneath its blasé presentation to warrant a listen for fans of punk/electronic crossover.

Here’s the alternate cover art.

Beastie Boys – Ill Communication [1994; Brooklyn Dust Music, Capitol Records, Capitol Records Ltd., EMI, EMI Music Canada, EMI Odeon Chilena S.A., Grand Royal]

After the success of their first three albums, the Beastie Boys continued expanding their sound palette with Ill Communication, with jazz samples, punk interludes,
electronic filters, and lots of humor. Trimming out the short joke tracks of Check Your Head, the group shows more focus on playing around with the rap components, with the members playing the instruments for a chunk of their backbeats, letting a couple of tracks run on into abrupt cut-offs, building the cop-drama-homage music video for “Sabotage”, and bringing in a handful of guests (including Suicidal Tendencies’ Amery Smith, A Tribe Called Quest’s Q-Tip, and Biz Markie).

Despite the sharp twists in style from song to song, the album keeps a chill flow intact, largely due to the persistent personalities of the three MCs, even across the instrumental tracks. The heavy use of filters on their voices does get tiresome at times, but the amount of other effects going on at the same time helps distract from it, to a degree. Though it would be four years before the next album emerged (bringing Mixmaster Mike in to replace DJ Hurricane), the diversification over the eight years between their frat rap debut and this LP shows how much their hunger for fun helped them develop.

Here’s the alternate cover art.

Bassbin Twins – EP II [1994; Bassbin Records]

In the four untitled tracks of this EP, the Bassbin Twins mix breakbeat with house rhythms. The more the ratio skews towards breakbeat, the more effective the track, but through all of them, the BTs show care in the assembly and execution of their tunes, with well-picked beat loops, interjections, and texturing. Given the lack of titles, it’s hard to get too attached to any of the tracks, but there’s enough stand-out moments to make each (except for maybe the first) get a hook in one way or another.

Lords of Acid – Voodoo-U [1994; American Recordings, Antler-Subway, Caroline Records, Mad Vox, WHTE LBLS]

With their second album, Lords of Acid tighten up the sprawl of electronic styles they explored with Lust, and find a tighter combination of high-speed techno, Euro breakbeat, sultry vocals, and sexual lyrics. Absurd perversity (e.g., being brought to orgasm by pubic lice in “The Crablouse”) is a frequent quality, and one that the group is careful not to let get drowned out by the barrages of keyboards, percussion, and samples. BDSM (”Do What You Wanna Do”, ”She & Mr. Jones”), drugs (”Marijuana in Your Brain”, “Blowing Up Your Mind”), teen sex (”Young Boys”), and a range of related topics receive focus over the course of the album, with a brashness echoed by the occasional use of electric guitar loops for extra swagger.

Dips into fully-functional dub territory, music-box imitation, and nods to disco serve as further accentuation of the group’s playfulness, but it’s rare for the songs to let that silliness rob them of their ability to bang on strong. While a track or two could have been dropped for more concentrated impact, the album taken all together has a nice flow to it, jumping from groove to groove without sinking too deeply into repetitiveness and dropping in enough instrumental breaks to keep the lyrical goofiness on the right side of overwhelming.

Here’s the censored cover art.

The cover art used in Japan.

And the cover art used for the remastered edition.