12 Overlooked Pieces of Awesome is an article series where each month Flint hopelessly rambles about an album in his collection that he dearly loves, even when they have their flaws. Each of the albums chosen tends to be usually overlooked, or forgotten, in one way or another and thus this article series aims to give an alternative view on said albums, or simply just bring something a bit less known to the spotlight.

1 Giant Leap – 1 Giant Leap (2001)

Two men, one world.

Two electronic music wizards from the UK got an Idea. They decided to create a tribute to humanity, to mankind and to its rich splendour of countless different cultures and the sheer diversity of the planet’s population. Because they were musicians, the tribute would be one of a musical nature. So these two guys – Jamie Catto and Duncan Bridgeman – packed their backs and started their journey. They would tour the world, meet musicians, create songs with them and invite local big names to feature on the tracks they recorded onto their trusty laptop. They also planned to shoot the whole trip and create a visual extension to their audio project. The lyrics of the project would focus on everything they learned during their travels from meeting diverse people in diverse locations yet stumbling upon simple universal truths and facts about who we are as people, what humanity really is.

This project was christened as 1 Giant Leap. A leap that would reach from one end of the world to another.

That’s all fine, dandy and cutely idealistic Flint, but what about the music?

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12 Overlooked Pieces of Awesome is an article series where each month Flint hopelessly rambles about an album in his collection that he dearly loves, even when they have their flaws. Each of the albums chosen tends to be usually overlooked, or forgotten, in one way or another and thus this article series aims to give an alternative view on said albums, or simply just bring something a bit less known to the spotlight.

Peter Gabriel – Up (2002)

What can you expect from an album that was nearly ten years in the making? An album where the artist needed to take his time simply because the technology didn’t suit his needs to fulfill his vision. An album where one of the guest stars ended up actually dying during all the years between agreeing to do his part and recording it, which resulted in having to use a recording of his voice from an early live version. An album where you know that each and every one of those years was spent nitpicking each little sound, each production detail, everything. Overproduction is a phenomenon where a fairly alright song is covered in all sorts of production gimmicks and added sheen in order to make it sound better than it is. While a far rarer event than some might want to argue, it still happens. The key is in having a person who knows just what he’s doing handling the whole process.

Peter Gabriel is that sort of person. To most he’s known from the 80’s massive hit single Sledgehammer or the first singer of Genesis. After departing from Genesis due to creative differences, Gabriel’s had a slow and steady solo career that’s taken him through many guises and styles whenever he hasn’t been hopping all around the world and collaborating with regional superstars all around the world, in search for an amazing new sound to discover. After the gigantic hit album So (featuring the said Sledgehammer) Gabriel became busier and busier with his extra-curricular activities and his solo albums began growing sizeable gaps in time between one another. The man was always working on them, but because he was working on a billion other things at the same time, things simply took time. Between 1992’s somber and warm Us and his first (and seemingly only) studio album of the 00’s, 2002’s Up, Gabriel released two soundtracks and worked all around the world with countless other things. But from the very first listen of Up it’s clear that the man’s claims that he indeed did start work on its songs shortly after Us are very much true. Hell, Gabriel has also said that Up was already primarily ready around 1998 but he still took several years to apply finishing touches to it. If there’s an album that can truly claim to have the perfect sound crafted with precise touch, it’s Up.

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12 Overlooked Pieces of Awesome is an article series where each month Flint hopelessly rambles about an album in his collection that he dearly loves, even when they have their flaws. Each of the albums chosen tends to be usually overlooked, or forgotten, in one way or another and thus this article series aims to give an alternative view on said albums, or simply just bring something a bit less known to the spotlight.

Chumbawamba – Anarchy (1994)

The problem with trying to be edgily self-destructive is that you end up throwing away your audience before they even had the chance to get to know you. Publicity stunt -like take-thats against everything and everyone, putting a just-born baby on the cover of your album, trying to subvert and bend the rules of promotion in every way possible… all characteristic things that while give you a certain personality, also brush off away people. The problem with Chumbawamba has always been that they broke into general consciousness once and once only with an almost annoyingly big way – “Tubthumping” was a gigantic hit much thanks to its insanely catchy chorus and simple lyrics about pub culture, and it’s one of the most love-it-or-hate-it kind of one-hit wonders there is. The band had already been active before that for quite a while and after Tubthumping the band pretty much decided to first rebel (2000’s WYSIWYG that devoted an entire album on taking the piss, parodying, attacking and at the same time cheekingly embracing the pop consumerist culture) and then just fade away doing their own thing for their own fun and for fans’ sake (the string of more folk-styled albums released up to this very day). And even those who do get the weird, random decision to investigate the band’s works outside Tubthumping and its parent album Tubthumper will end up hitting certain walls that make it very hard to go on further.

Like that baby cover.

1994’s Anarchy, the subject of our discussion today, is the one with the infamous baby cover. If it wasn’t for that and the band’s infamous one-hit-wonder/”those damn bastards who brought us that pub song” reputation, I’d expect it to be viewed as one of the 90’s great cult classics. It’s probably the most deliciously catchy pop album with a vicious tongue stuck permanently in its cheek that the 90’s produced.

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12 Overlooked Pieces of Awesome is an article series where each month Flint hopelessly rambles about an album in his collection that he dearly loves, even when they have their flaws. Each of the albums chosen tends to be usually overlooked, or forgotten, in one way or another and thus this article series aims to give an alternative view on said albums, or simply just bring something a bit less known to the spotlight.

Manic Street Preachers – Know Your Enemy (2001)

Let’s honour the release of Manic Street Preachers‘ new album by talking about an album that is easily the most underrated piece of greatness in their catalogue. No, not Lifeblood although some of you might have expected that from me as I’ve several times mentioned its personal importance to me. Lifeblood’s a very clear hate it or love it kind of album and it frequently gets a whole load of fans to speak in its favour. No, it’s just divisive, not underrated per se. This article shall instead speak in favour of an album that often not only attracts dislike, but even the people who speak in its favour admit that there’s something very wrong with it. Today we talk about the moment in the band’s history when they decided to not give a flying shit about anything and released a sprawling mess of an album that doesn’t even attempt to have any sort of stylistic or aural unity.

After the two hit album streak of 1996’s orchestral Everything Must Go and 1998’s introspective and gorgeous This Is My Truth Tell Me Yours, Manics found themselves in the public spotlight in a way that made them feel uncomfortable. Sure, the band always wanted to be big but all of a sudden their gigantic popularity and streak of hit singles had caused them to become the flavour of the month which the band grew tired of. They had finally reached the popularity they wanted but, typically to the band, instead of relishing in it they decided to react against it. The 2000 stand-alone single “The Masses Against the Classes” showcased the group in a more furious, energetic and rawer sound than they had been for years. After Masses/Classes, the band holed themselves up in Spain and began work on the album that would be their intentional self-destruction. Songs were written, performed and recorded with max speed – no more than three play-throughs were allowed before recording the song with as few takes possible. The band wanted to bring back their rawer, more energetic and aggressive past yet at the same time take advantage of their experience in crafting more melodic songs; the result being that countless different ideas were thrown around, recorded in various ways and sometimes even mixed together. The sessions grew so fruitful that at some point the band wanted simply to release absolutely everything they recorded in the form of a double album or two different albums Use Your Illusion style.

Eventually those sessions laboured Know Your Enemy. 16 tracks (and one hidden track), bouncing from 3-minute punk rockers to keyboard-heavy Beach Boys pastiches, from ramshackle acoustic ballads to drum-machine driven weariness, from spoken word angst to [i]disco[/i]. The c-part of a song left out of the album was separated and tacked on as a mid-album hidden track. The band’s bassist who can’t sing does his lead vocal debut while a man who had never written a lyric in the band’s entire career does his lyrical debut. Even the band’s regular lyricist goes from introspective misery through half-arsed political brainfarting to things that plain do not make sense. The track order hops wildly between pretty much everything with no seeming direction or plain sense. The album was previewed by the simultanous release of two completely different singles.

Know Your Enemy does not make sense. It’s a gigantic, schizophrenic mess. It’s why the band’s fans regularly put it up as one of their least favourite albums and why “make your own KYE tracklisting” topics are such a popular sight. It’s why I love it to bits.
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12 Overlooked Pieces of Awesome is an article series where each month Flint hopelessly rambles about an album in his collection that he dearly loves, even when they have their flaws. Each of the albums chosen tends to be usually overlooked, or forgotten, in one way or another and thus this article series aims to give an alternative view on said albums, or simply just bring something a bit less known to the spotlight.

Suede – Head Music (1999)

I don’t listen to Suede anymore. Much, anyway. I used to – all of the studio albums and the Singles compilation being in my CD collection can attribute to that. They had some nice swagger, Brett Anderson had charisma, Singles is a pretty damn good collection that stands well in itself and most importantly they had songs. Overtime though, I’ve cooled down significantly to them. It’s not you, it’s me and so forth – I just can’t really get into the same mindset I was in back when I was big into them. I only ever listen to two albums because all the others just seem to have lost their magic to me – Suede is cool but requires a certain mindset to me; A New Morning is the best example there is about the dangers of overproduction and that sometimes staying a lot in studio and finecrafting every detail can result to problems, as whatever good the album’s got is wrapped in soulless plastic shine and the weaker material have been tried to turn into good stuff by endlessly polishing them so there’s nothing left; and everyone else’s favourite Dog Man Star always felt like the group’s weakest album to me because after the good start (”We Are the Pigs” is easily one of the band’s very best tunes) it derails into a horrible carcrash of overly indulgent boredom and terribly melodramatic cheese. Even Coming Up, one of my de-facto summer albums and one of Britpop’s best achievements, is a bit bogged down in my opinion because of its ballad-heavy second half these days.

The one album I still enjoy and listen to more often than not is Head Music, the band’s much-disliked 1999 electro-glam effort which is what this update is about. This just ends up proving a couple of things again: that for some reason I’m into all the albums that everyone else dislikes and that for some reason I always get into the moments when a rock band decides to add a bit more keys and synths to the mix.

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12 Overlooked Pieces of Awesome is an article series where each month Flint hopelessly rambles about an album in his collection that he dearly loves, even when they have their flaws. Each of the albums chosen tends to be usually overlooked, or forgotten, in one way or another and thus this article series aims to give an alternative view on said albums, or simply just bring something a bit less known to the spotlight.

Pet Shop Boys – Bilingual (1996)

Before I started this series, I spent literally ages thinking what sort of approach I should use with it. I eventually rejected the notion of talking about my 12 favourite albums ever because I had already talked about some of them and in the end I found it difficult to start narrowing it all down to 12 after I had listed my usual suspects. Instead I decided to create a series about albums that I love, that aren’t mentioned too frequently and which mean a lot to me even if they have flaws in them. The first two entries of this series have both been about albums I consider perfect and as two of my all-time favourites so as I began thinking what I should feature this time, I found myself to be in danger of going off the rails on what I intended this to be about.

As such, let me talk about an album that I know is flawed, that doesn’t belong to my all time top lists and isn’t even my favourite release of the said group (though it used to be). In honour of the upcoming new album that’s being released on Monday, today’s subject shall be the album that made me a fan of the group in question after falling in love with a singles compilation and feeling slightly disappointed over my first album proper, and which never gets a mention anywhere. Bilingual by Pet Shop Boys, the follow-up to the band’s grand hit Very (which has never been my PSB favourites despite some of the fantastic material it contains) rarely gets any mention because it’s not one of their big 80’s albums, not a big popular revival album they’ve released after the 80’s and possibly most importantly because of its somewhat disjointed, artistically exploring approach which isn’t to everyone’s liking.

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12 Overlooked Pieces of Awesome is an article series where each month Flint hopelessly rambles about an album in his collection that he dearly loves, even when they have their flaws. Each of the albums chosen tends to be usually overlooked, or forgotten, in one way or another and thus this article series aims to give an alternative view on said albums, or simply just bring something a bit less known to the spotlight.

Lennie Moore – Outcast OST (1999)

Those who have been following this blog for a while now have probably caught on the quirk that I’m a fan of game music. It’s simple cause and effect: I play a lot of games and in the process, I hear a lot of music. Music is music is music and game soundtracks are no different to the other stuff I listen to in that sense. While most soundtracks of any kind (well, maybe apart from musicals) tend to offer only a few good tunes and the rest of the duration is filled with background fluff that felt dull even during the actual work it was soundtracking in the first place, game music in particular seems to offer a lot more moments actually worth listening even outside the game. Maybe it’s to do with the fact that while in e.g. movies the duration of everything is entirely determined by the people who made the film, with games you have to acknowledge that the player is in control and can take just as much time as he damn well pleases. Henceforth, you better turn the soundworld into something much more interesting. The fact that the game soundtrack world hasn’t stuck on the saddening loop of boring, generic, gutless orchestral faff that most movie soundtracks are made out of certainly helps.

The album here is an actual album, not just a sound rip of tunes in the game. Outcast, developed by the Belgian company Appeal was released on PC in 1999 to overwhelmingly positive reactions. The mainstream shrugged and moved on – you could guess for any number of reasons but I think the fact that it wasn’t much advertised and that it came from a relatively small European studio were the main reasons that today it’s nothing more than a cult classic instead of the standout in gaming design it should be viewed as. Gently crafted with love and immense resources, Outcast was the grand, epic game it was destined to be. The task to craft the soundtrack was handed to a man named Lennie Moore who wrote a suitable orchestral score for the game and recruited the Moscow Symphony Orchestra to perform it.

It also happens to be my favourite game ever made.

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12 Overlooked Pieces of Awesome is an article series where each month Flint hopelessly rambles about an album in his collection that he dearly loves, even when they have their flaws. Each of the albums chosen tends to be usually overlooked, or forgotten, in one way or another and thus this article series aims to give an alternative view on said albums, or simply just bring something a bit less known to the spotlight.

R.E.M. – Up (1998)

Welcome to the first part of my monthly article series about albums that I love. It took me a long while to think what I wanted to do with this article series because I’m an OCD-nut that frets about the tiniest details that most people wouldn’t give a toss about, before I finally decided on an angle: to bring forth albums I love (even if not devoutedly so) that tend to get a bit of flak or just simply aren’t mentioned much due to the artist’s other output getting all the kudos.

To start, one of my personal very favourite albums ever made: R.E.M.’s masterpiece Up.

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