Friday 5: ’90s Female Alternative Goes Stoner Metal!
Happy Friday, MetalSucks reader! Welcome to MetalSucks Friday 5, our awesome series that appears every Friday (duh) on MetalSucks (duhh) and involves the quantity of five (duhhh).
Here’s how it works: A list of best/worst/weirdest/whatever five somethings is posted by one of your beloved MetalSucks contributors or by one of our buds (like you?). Then you, our cherished reader, checks it out, has a chuckle, then chimes in with a list of the same. No sweat, just whatever springs to mind, k? (Just like that movie about those losers working at a Chicago record store!) After all, it’s Friday — the day dedicated by the gods to mindless, fun time-wasting. Today let’s give the devil her due!
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THE FIVE
Five Jams By Female-Fronted ’90s Alternative Bands That Sound Like Today’s Stoner Metal
THE LISTER
Anso DF, MetalSucks senior editor
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1. “S.O.F.T.”
by Elastica
from Elastica | 1995 (Elektra)
Life in 2014 is awesome thanks to bands like Lo-Pan, Black Moth, Deftones, Death Penalty, Boris, and new Alice In Chains, ie. bands who at least occasionally (if not always) traffic in awesome Poppy Stoner Metal. Buttt in the ’90s, you might’ve never found such a sound — not in metal anyway. Yet here and there, you could’ve encountered hooky, stomping heaviness in an unlikely place: the world of sweet, non-riot girl female-fronted alternative bands. Random, right? But fuck, by 1:30 of this jam by Elastica, you are headbanging. Stay for the finale and its slo-mo orgy of riffs :)
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2. “Rim Shak”
by Letters To Cleo
from Aurora Gory Alice | 1993 (Giant)
This week it was announced that the Metallica of PSM, Torche, has set a date for release of the follow-up to their Master Of Puppets. It’s called Restarter and arrives via Relapse on February 24. As it happens, this F5 would make for a killer bonus EP. All I ask is producer credit :)))
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3. “Congratulations”
by Juliana Hatfield
from Only Everything | 1995 (Atlantic)
Even a perfect composition like “Congratulations” by slight, whiny alt-rocker Juliana Hatfield — one whose riff descends in lockstep with its vocal so awesomely that a listener can’t imagine them separated — today plays like an artificial creation of a skilled mash-up artist. Like, an Avril Lavigne vocal stapled onto a High On Fire instrumental. Omg crank it up.
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4. “Aarhus”
by Medicine
from Her Highness | 1995 (American)
The jams of this week’s F5 require the addition of another thin layer of noise to move firmly in PSM territory. Except this monster from Medicine, a band whose vibe went from chirpy to proto-elephants-marching via their third album and its centerpiece, “Aarhus,” on Rick Rubin’s label. Fuck Jesu lol.
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5. “Invisible Man”
by The Breeders
from Last Splash | 1993 (4AD)
It made sense for screaming, unhinged riot-girl alternative acts to rage at an intensity similar to metal’s. But doesn’t it kinda blow your mind that five album tracks from five blockbuster pop-alternative bands predicted contemporary PSM two decades ago? Like “Rim Shak” (above), this Breeders gem might be slowed a tick for max rippage, but did its hook, its drone, and its guitar solo travel back in time from 2014? Could this F5 appear as an EP tomorrow and launch PSM to the next level? Do you want to do a Steel Panther-style band playing these and this Cibo Matto jam too?
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