1. "It's Only Life"
   Only Life
   The Feelies
   read about this song
   
   
2. "Chinese Bones"
   Globe of Frogs
   Robyn Hitchcock
   read about this song
   
   
3. "Bottle of Smoke"
   If I Should Fall From Grace With God
   The Pogues
   read about this song
   
   
4. "Juno"
   House Tornado
   Throwing Muses
   read about this song
   
   
5. "Birthday"
   Life's Too Good
   The Sugarcubes
   read about this song
   
   
6. "Wish I Could Stand or Have"
   Two Steps From the Middle Ages
   Game Theory
   read about this song
   
   
7. "Everyday Is Like Sunday"
   Viva Hate
   Morrissey
   read about this song
   
   
8. "One of These Days"
   Our Beloved Revolutionary Sweetheart
   Camper Van Beethoven
   read about this song
   
   
9. "Storms in Africa"
   Watermark
   Enya
   read about this song
   
   
10. "Misguided Angel"
    The Trinity Session
    Cowboy Junkies
    read about this song
    
    
11. "Venice"
    Themes From Venus
    Love Tractor
    read about this song
    
    
12. "Out of Reach"
    Lovely
    The Primitives
    read about this song
    
    
13. "Standing in the Shower...Thinking"
    Nothing's Shocking
    Jane's Addiction
    
    
14. "Ghetto Soundwave"
    Truth and Soul
    Fishbone
    
    
15. "Gigantic"
    Surfer Rosa
    The Pixies
    
    
16. "Silver Rocket"
    Daydream Nation
    Sonic Youth
    
    
17. "Anchorage"
    Short Sharp Shocked
    Michelle Shocked
    
    
18. "I'll Treat You Right Someday"
    Monkey on a Chain Gang
    House of Freaks
    
    
19. "Chains"
    Clam Dip and Other Delights
    Soul Asylum
    
    
20. "If I Was a Mekon"
    Son of Sam I Am
    Too Much Joy
    
    
21. "Green Thoughts"
    Green Thoughts
    The Smithereens
    
    
22. "A New Season"
    Starfish
    The Church
    
    
23. "Untitled"
    Green
    R.E.M.

Track 1
"It's Only Life"
Only Life
The Feelies

The Feelies have a lot of interesting little factoids in their history——their name comes from a more immersive form of movies described in Aldous Huxley's Brave New World; Golden Palominos prime mover Anton Fier was the drummer on their debut album; one of the members later went on to found Luna, etc.——but what they will be most remembered for is their uncanny ability to sound more like the Velvet Underground than even Lou Reed's most Velvet-y solo efforts.

And on none of their albums is this more true than Only Life, whose lead-off track, "It's Only Life", could be a leftover gem from the Velvets heyday. The Feelies even close the album by covering "What Goes On", which is both a homage to their most obvious primary source and a reminder that, at the end of the day, no one can ever really comes close to recreating the sound and the mystery of the Velvet Underground.

Still, the Feelies give it a pretty good shot on this record, and while most bands would aspire to something more than being remembered as the best band ever to ape the sound of a legendary predecessor like the Velvet Underground, I guess it's better to be remembered for that than nothing at all.

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Track 2
"Chinese Bones"
Globe of Frogs
Robyn Hitchcock

While I would eventually go on to own almost everything in Robyn Hitchcock's extensive catalog (Gotta Let This Hen Out! and Groovy Decoy, along with a couple of the Soft Boys records, are the only widely available releases I'm missing at this point), Globe of Frogs was my first introduction to the man, and I almost didn't buy it because 1) I don't generally trust guys named "Robyn" and 2) especially when they spell it with a "y". Back in my high school years, when funds were limited and you could never buy everything you wanted to hear, it didn't take much more than that to bump someone off the purchase list.

Luckily, I didn't let my distaste for foppery get in the way (I let him slide because he was English, and, well, there's some foppery to be expected from the inhabitants of that peculiar isle), and it's a good thing, too——not only is Robyn one of my favorite artists, Globe of Frogs just happens to be one of his two best albums, along with Moss Elixir.

As is usual on a great Hitchcock album, the songs vary widely in tone and style, and also as is usual, oblique non-sequitors abound. "Chinese Bones" is a quiet, shimmering tune with lyrics that don't follow any kind of linear narrative path no matter how much you try to read into them, but it contains one of the best lines Robyn has ever written: "Something Shakespeare never said was, 'You've got to be kidding.'"

I don't know how that line sounds to anyone else, but it just kills me every time I hear it. Truth comes in many strange forms, and Robyn seems to have a special knack for dispensing it in easily digestible but slightly bizarre couplets.

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Track 3
"Bottle of Smoke"
If I Should Fall From Grace With God
The Pogues

So...I guess I've really been slacking about this whole mixtape thing, and back when I first put the 1988 mix together, I had an entirely different entry in mind than the one you're going to get now. There was probably going to be some lamenting about the decline at the end of the Pogues career, even while frontman Shane McGowan was still with them, and some further griping that bands like the Pogues come around so rarely, and what a shame it was that I didn't know about them until they had already started to go downhill and never got to see one of their legendary live shows.

Since then, however, the Pogues have reformed (as a touring act, anyway——no new material in sight, and that might be for the best, really) and made their first trip stateside since the early 90s, and I was lucky enough to get tickets to see one of the shows in DC at the 9:30 Club. The revised entry I had planned to write on "Bottle of Smoke" (which they played, thank god) was going to talk a lot about that show, about how there was still so much vitality to their performance despite the obvious decay of Shane's body, and how there was also so much corresponding life left in the songs.

But that started to drift into a near-eulogy for the band, which somehow doesn't feel right. Because if I were going to write a eulogy for this band, it would go something like this: the Pogues kicked ass, and as long as we have copies of their records, or as long as they can find a way to get onstage every now and then, they will continue to kick ass. So let's leave it at that.

"Bottle of Smoke" is one of my favorite songs off of what is undoubtedly the band's most fully realized work, If I Should Fall From Grace With God. Regardless of its other charms, it's worth it to go to a Pogues show just so you can yell "Twenty-fucking-five to one!" at the top of your lungs with a crowd of hundreds of other Pogues fans.

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Track 4
"Juno"
House Tornado
Throwing Muses

One of my favorite stories about Throwing Muses is when I went to see them at the Cat's Cradle in Chapel Hill while they were touring in support of House Tornado's successor, Hunkpapa. They played a decently long set, but it consisted entirely of material from their debut and from Hunkpapa; not a single song from House Tornado made it onto the setlist. When the band came back onstage for the encore and played yet another non-House Tornado song, someone in the crowd yelled what we were all thinking: "Play something from House Tornado!" Singer/guitarist Kristin Hersh's response: "YOU play something from House Tornado."

Anyone who has heard this record gets the joke: House Tornado is fiendishly difficult from a technical standpoint, with multiple time changes and some very delicate guitar work on nearly every track. Not that the band wasn't capable of reproducing the songs in a live context (they toured behind it, after all), but I'm sure that, after a couple of years of non-stop touring and recording, it was probably nice to take a night off from House Tornado and its complexities every now and then.

House Tornado is one of my favorite records of all time, and it's one of those records that's really hard to talk about because it is tied to such deeply personal emotions and events (I was in high school when it came out——need I explain further?) that I feel like when I talk about it, I'm revealing some very vulnerable parts of myself. It's a record that I can really only listen to alone; as brilliant as I think this record is, I can only share it with others by telling them about it or writing about it. This is partly because I get so lost in this record that I don't want to have anything interrupt the experience, and partly because if I was listening to it with someone I cared about and they didn't have the same response to it that I do, I'm afraid I would think a little less highly of them, however ridiculous that might sound.

The record has a lot more sharp edges and sudden time changes than the Muses self-titled debut (which is also amazing), and the intricacy of the guitar interplay between Kristin Hersh and Tanya Donnelly presages the complex roar of intertwining guitars that would become the hallmark of the late, lamented Sleater-Kinney. There is a real austerity to the House Tornado recordings; the mental picture I get of the recording process is the band stranded in a single room, a concrete block building engulfed in a winter-long snowstorm. There's an echo that haunts the otherwise pristine clarity of the instruments on every song, and it somehow feels as if every band member is playing alone even though they're all in the same room together. Lyrically and musically, it speaks strongly to the isolation that's at the core of the human condition: no matter how close we feel to someone, no matter how many friends we have, at the end of the day, we're all by ourselves in our own skulls, and there's a certain separation from the people closest to us that no amount of openess and intimacy can overcome.

I'd say that "Juno" is one of the more accessible tracks on the record, but that's on a very relative scale. I actually love every song on this record, and I find them all catchy as hell, but I'm guessing that not many people would agree. On the liner notes for In a Doghouse, which compiles their earliest recordings, including a demo cassette and their debut album, Kristin writes:

I swear to God, I thought we were a party band. As Throwing Muses, at age oh, sixteen or seventeen, we were gleefully impressed with ourselves and our ability to bring joy to people through sound. We were then stunned and horrified to see our audiences react with something like stunned horror.

This pretty much sums up my experiences trying to proselytize about the band to my peers in high school: at best they thought some of the songs were okay, and at worst they thought everything about Throwing Muses was horrible. My roommate junior year even got so sick of me listening to their debut that he actually hid the CD for a few weeks, convincing me that I'd lost it somewhere (I think he thought about destroying it, but whatever small fragment of a conscience he had left kicked in and made him just withhold it from me for a bit).

Anyway. I love this band, even though they (or ringleader Kristen, either as a solo act or with her latest project, 50 Foot Wave) would rarely reach the perfection of House Tornado on their subsequent efforts. And if you love House Tornado as much as I do...well, I'm not saying we'd be instant best friends or anything, but there is some sort of cosmic frequency we're both tuned into that not many other people seem to be able to hear.

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Track 5
"Birthday"
Life's Too Good
The Sugarcubes

Before Bjork became Bjork, she was known as one of the two singers for Iceland's the Sugarcubes. And she wasn't even the weirdest of the two——although she has since gone on to outweird just about everyone on the planet, the award for oddest Sugarcube would have to go to Einar Benediktsson, the male singer whose hesitant, barking vocal style can only be considered singing in the loosest sense of the word. Make no mistake, though, to fans, Bjork's voice was always the heart of the group, even though her bandmates not have given her the same standing.

Given how much I liked Life's Too Good when it came out, and how much I still liked it in the following years when the Sugarcubes released their second and third albums, I'm still a little surprised that I didn't purchase anything else by the band. I never really got into Bjork as a solo artist, either (although I'm aware of her influence, and over time I've added some of her work to my music collection), so this record is really the only strong

Life's Too Good holds up pretty well as a bit of quirky pop ("Deus" in particular is charmingly weird but also pretty radio friendly), but the darker (though still fun) "Birthday" is clearly the standout, the song that hints most strongly at the future direction of Bjork's career. It's almost indescribable (and therefore indescribably good); there's really not much else before or since with which you can compare this track. If I had been doing an annual top 10 singles list back in those days, "Birthday" would easily have been at the top of the list.

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Track 6
"Wish I Could Stand or Have"
Two Steps From the Middle Ages
Game Theory

Two Steps From the Middle Ages was the unexpected swan song for Game Theory, and also a return to more straightforward pop sound after the dizzyingly eclectic (and brilliant) double album, Lolita Nation. This began a pattern that frontman Scott Miller would continue over the next several years with his next band, Loud Family, which debuted with a album full of sonic experiments and spoken word collages (a hallmark of Lolita), followed by album with ten unambiguous pop songs, followed by an experimental album, and so on.

But no matter how many studio tricks made their way onto the records, pop songs with great hooks and clever lyrics were always at the heart of Scott Miller's records, and that's the case with Two Steps. It's a pretty decent album, but it's probably the most predictable work Game Theory produced (which may be why Miller broke up the band and went on to continue his pop vision with a new cast of characters who could bring a few new ideas to the mix).

However, when you're as good as Game Theory, being predictable isn't necessarily a bad thing, and Two Steps may contain the quintessential Game Theory track, "Throwing the Election". The only reason this isn't on this mixtape (and this may seem like twisted reasoning given that I'm trying to compile the stuff that I listened to most often and liked the best during these years) is because I put it on pretty much every mixtape I made for at least two years after this album came out. I chose "Wish I Could Stand or Have" instead because it's always been a close second for my favorite song on this record. Some people find it too short or too repetitive or too relentlessly upbeat, but whatever. I've never spent much time examining why I love it, I just love it and I have from my first listen.

The song also worked really well as bridge between the Sugarcubes and Morrissey, both musically and as a study in career transitions: with the Sugarcubes, we see future solo artist Bjork making her first major foray into the musical world as a member of a collaborative band, and with Morrissey, we see the frontman for a major band making his first attempt to define himself as a solo act. On Two Steps, Scott Miller falls somewhere in between, making his last record with a band he's fronted since he was a teenager, but on the verge of defining himself as a Billy Corgan-like solo artist who carries his unique vision from band to band while never officially becoming a solo act.

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Track 7
"Everyday Is Like Sunday"
Viva Hate
Morrissey

Like many Smiths fans after the band's unexpected breakup, I was tempted to think that I was really a Morrissey fan, and that Morrissey's solo records would elicit the same kind of response in me that the Smiths' records had. And Morrissey tried damn hard to ape the sound that Johnny Marr had created to envelop his words, hiring former Smiths producer Stehpen Street to write Marr-like tracks and writing lyrics that would have fit perfectly well on a Smiths record.

But as much as the faithful wanted to believe, Morrissey wasn't the only ingredient that made the Smiths so special; no one could match Marr's songwriting for the band, not even Marr himself——his post-Smiths work, whether solo or as part of a band, doesn't begin to come close to anything he did with the Smiths (although his recent allliance with Modest Mouse, the fruits of which were just released, holds some promise). There was just something about the music Morrissey and Marr made together that can't be recreated by either one of them alone.

You have to give Marr some credit for not attempting to recreate the Smiths——nothing he's done since the band's last album has sounded remotely like he's trying to write more songs for Morrissey's voice and melodies. Morrissey, being the frontman and the literal and figurative voice for the band, had a harder time avoiding Smiths comparisons, but he also didn't shy away from them, especially on his first two or three solo releases, and that's certainly the case on his first solo outing, Viva Hate.

"Suedehead", the first single from the album, was my original selection to represent Viva Hate on this list, but the more I re-listened to the record, the more it became clear that "Everyday Is Like Sunday" is more solidly constructed, more biting, more melodic——in short, I guess, more Smiths-like——than anything else on the album.

I don't think I've ever been totally in love with a solo album from a leading player in a band I'm already devoted to, whether that artist is trying to recreate the sound of their original band or striking off in a new direction——but I'd have to say that Morrissey's Viva Hate probably comes the closest of any other similar attempt in my CD collection. Many of the tracks wouldn't be out of place on a proper Smiths album, or at least on an odds and ends compilation like Louder Than Bombs, and nearly 20 years later (god that was a weird phrase to write), "Everyday Is Like Sunday" is the clear standout.

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Track 8
"One of These Days"
Our Beloved Revolutionary Sweetheart
Camper Van Beethoven

I have very specific memories associated with this album; when it came out, I was going to a public boarding magnet school for science and math, and aside from general curfews about when we had to be back in the dorms at night and strict policies about class attendance, we were pretty much left to our own devices. Sure, technically they did a bed check around 11 every night, but after that it wasn't too hard to sneak out to someone else's room and hang out there for as long as you wanted.

Second semester of my senior year, I spent a lot of time down in the room of two juniors who happened to have a computer (and this was back when almost no one had their own computer, even students who were attending a science and math oriented high school). It wasn't a very good computer by today's standards——a simple monochrome green and black screen that was really designed as a terminal for text-based commands and programming. Remember Matthew Broderick's computer from Wargames? Yeah, like that.

But just like in Wargames, even though the computers weren't really designed for gaming, people wrote games for this PC anyway, and the one game that my friends had loaded was Pirates, which my recent research tells me was Sid Meier's (of Civilization fame) first great creation and which has been redeveloped for the PC and PSP in the last few years. It was the first of many games that I would get addicted to over the years——Sim City, Diablo II, and now World of Warcraft——and it holds a special place in my heart because of the communal way in which I experienced the game. Since it was in my friend's room, there was almost always someone else in there watching over your shoulder as you played, or if someone got to the computer before you did, you'd hang out with them while they planed.

This is a long way round to get to Camper Van Beethoven's Our Beloved Revolutionary Sweetheart, but this album was the constant soundtrack for all those hours spent playing Pirates——it was always on in that room, even at 3 in the morning when the actual occupants of the room were asleep and the only light was the toxic green glow of the computer screen. Camper Van's country-infused indie rock, with a violin that snaked its way through almost every track, fit well with the nautical outlaw settings of Pirates.

The "sweetheart" in the album title refers to Patty Hearst, aka Tania, the heir to the Hearst publishing fortune who was kidnapped by a band of radicals in the 60s and brainwashed to the point where she participated in an armed bank robbery with the rest of the cult. Camper Van always had a penchant for the weird——in many of their early interviews, they claimed that they were being monitored and infiltrated by the Illuminati, a favorite target of conspiracy theorists for centuries——and although there were certainly elements of that weirdness in the lyrics on this record, there were also a lot of relatively straightforward songs, including a few instrumentals and a cover of the traditional tune "O Death" (which you might recognize from another version that appeared on the O Brother, Where Art Thou? soundtrack).

I saw the band play live several times in the late 80s in support of this record and their next, Key Lime Pie, and I felt a real connection with them. Sweetheart remains one of my favorite albums from that time in my life, mostly because the laid-back vibe of many of the songs and the positive tone of the lyrics, which were hopeful without being sappy, gave me some vague sense that everything would work out in the end. "One of These Days" is one of these optimistic tracks, although its optimism about the future is cut with a melancholy about the present that is reinforced by the music——slower than midtempo, with a pensive violin that serves as a complimentary voice to David Lowery's restrained vocals.

I don't know quite how to wrap this up——despite the length of this post, I've only just begun to explain my complex relationship with this album. But think I've gone on quite long enough for now, and all I can say is, it's remarkable how well these songs hold up after nearly two decades. This was a brilliant, underappreciated album in its own time, and it's unfortunate that it remains so today.

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Track 9
"Storms in Africa"
Watermark
Enya

Yeah, I know. It's Enya. Paul Simon's Graceland was the one CD that my father and I could agree on when we were in the car together; Enya's Watermark was the one the my stepmother and I saw eye to eye on. I loved this record at the time, and much of it holds up pretty well. But Enya has always been a very divisive artist: either you love her or you hate her with a passion. A subset of folks in the hate group are those who have never actually listened to her music, but just hate her on principle, a group that I probably would have been in myself had I not actually had an open mind about her music the first few times I listened to Watermark. If you've really given her an honest shot at least once and you just don't like her, I'm not going to try to convert you. Her work is definitely made for a specific mood, and some people are just never in that mood.

After hearing her second album, Shepherd Moons, via my stepmother, and finding it to be so similar to Watermark as to be indistinguishable, I realized that Enya was one of those artists I would never need to own more than one album's worth of songs for. So before I started writing this entry, I had no clue about her subsequent career: was she still recording, had she fallen into the cult category, etc. It turns out that she is still actively releasing music, and while her sound will always keep her in a certain niche, she's probably far too successful to be labeled a cult act. According to iTunes, she's the second most successful Irish artist of all time, behind only Bono and the rest of the U2 kids; she apparently had a fairly successful single in the wake of 9.11; and she appears to have contributed some songs to the Lord of the Rings movies (I recall thinking when I saw the films that certain soundtrack elements were ripping her off bigtime, but knowing now that she actually contributed music to the project, it makes a little more sense).

There are two versions of "Storms in Africa" on this record; the one I've chosen for this mix is the one that closes out the album, which uses syncopated African percussion much more prominently and which is a little less approaching storm-like than the version situated in the middle of the album. It's a mood piece that contrasts well with the Camper Van song before it and gives a nice lead-in to the Cowboy Junkies' haunted, understated sound.

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Track 10
"Misguided Angel"
The Trinity Session
Cowboy Junkies

The day I bought The Trinity Session, I was in a particularly ornery teen mood and I was looking for something loud, raucous, and angry. I didn't know anything about the band and hadn't heard a single song off of the album, but I remembered seeing it on the college music top 10 in the back of Rolling Stone, and I figured with a band name like the Cowboy Junkies, there was a good chance it was what I was looking for.

Those of you who have heard the record can imagine my deep disappointment when I heard the first track, which turned to even deeper disappointment with each successive track, until I finally gave up around five songs in. I didn't even pretend to give the record a chance that day; it just wasn't right for the mood I was in.

But eventually I came around and started to appreciate the uniqueness of this record, from the live single-microphone recording technique to the mixture of original material, covers, and traditional songs to the haunting beauty that underpins it all. The Trinity Session is so called because it was recorded in the Church of the Holy Trinity in Toronto in a single session (although not in one continuous take).

The Cowboy Junkies share some unusual affinities with the previous artist in this mix, Enya. Like the Irish vocalist, the Cowboy Junkies are still making music nearly 20 years after their best known work was released (in fact, they just released a new album last week), and, like Enya, you really don't need to own more than one of their records, since their style has been so consistent over the years. I don't, however, think that these Canucks are the second highest-grossing act of all time from their home country.

The album (and really the band) is probably best known for the cover of the Velvet Underground's "Sweet Jane", but for me, the standouts are the first two tracks: the traditional "Mining for Gold", sung a cappella by lead vocalist Margo Timmins, and the original piece "Misguided Angel", composed by her brother, lead songwriter and guitarist Michael Timmins. There aren't many bands that would mix in their own original material with covers of songs like "Blue Moon", "So Lonesome I Could Cry", "Walkin' After Midnight", and the previously mentioned "Sweet Jane", but "Misguided Angel" and "200 More Miles" more than hold their own.

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Track 11
"Venice"
Themes From Venus
Love Tractor

I wrote a lot about Love Tractor for the 1986 mixtape, which featured their song "Beatle Boots", and there's not a whole lot more to add here. Themes From Venus was an admirable successor to This Ain't No Outerspace Ship, keeping the same quirky pop sensibilities intact and maybe ratcheting up the oddball quotient a notch or two. But all in all, this seemed like another solid album from a band that was really hitting its stride...until they broke up for more than a decade.

"Satan" was another top choice for this slot, but "Venice" gets me every time with that "lost in passages after midnight" phrase. Both this record and Outerspace Ship, along with their earlier instrumental records, are now available on iTunes, so there's really no excuse not to at least give them a listen if you've never heard them before. Just do us all a favor and avoid the recent stuff, starting with 2005's Black Hole——these aren't true Love Tractor records, as they feature only one person who was in the band during the 80s, and he's basically using the band name to market his solo work (whereas 2001's The Sky at Night features three of the four people who played on this record).

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Track 12
"Out of Reach"
Lovely
The Primitives

This band rose and fell pretty quickly——the fuzz guitar pop of Lovely was widely heralded on the college radio circuit in the US and in the snarky British music press, and they even had a pretty big hit in the UK, but by the time they released their sophomore disc they were at best ignored and at worst ridiculed——I remembered they even canceled a gig in their ostensible hometown of London because they just couldn't sell any tickets.

Still, this is a pretty listenable album, one of those records where it seems like almost any song could be a single. And it's not a stretch to say that the Primitives could be just as strongly linked to the Raveonettes sound as the Jesus and Mary Chain, with whom the Raveonettes are ALWAYS compared. But that just wouldn't be as cool now would it? And that's what the Primitives' brief career really seems to boil down to: they just weren't cool enough to withstand the backlash for whatever reason. And I'm just as guilty as anyone——I can almost guarantee I never heard the follow-up, Pure, but for some reason I never bought it, and I'm the kind of guy who gives pretty much everyone at least one chance to fuck up if I liked their last record.

Lovely is stuffed with armloads of little pop gems, and I'm not ashamed to say I'm still a fan of this record. It's just too bad that I can't tell you what I thought of their next record as well.

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