Monday 4 April 2011

Various Artists [The Dog's Bollocks!] 

Well the title says it all!, a clever and humorous [though risque] take on the best Indie Rock music of 1996, and of course then there's the photos for this issue, showing Fido in all his gory... i mean glory!, a very clever use of a dog, i really like these visuals, and it's so good to have the track listing in black and white, it makes searching for a track so much easier.

Well there's 40 slabs of very different music here, even though they're gathered under the basic genre of Indie / BritPop, it's mainly comes from Bands, but there are individual soloists too, and a good selection of female vocalists too.

The tracks i really liked were 1, 3, 5-6, 8-9, 13, 15-16, 18, 20 & 32, lots of rebellion and irreverence here, and it's good to listen to some tracks that i missed out on when they first came out, i'll have to do some more digging, the track that impressed me the most was track 6 from the first disc 'Stupid Girl' by Garbage, originally i heard this song on a freebie disc from some magazine, and i just had to get their album, it's about a girl that fakes things to get what she wants, here's the opening lines,

You pretend you're high
Pretend you're bored
Pretend you're anything
Just to be adored
And what you need
Is what you get

It starts off with a nice atmospheric drumbeat, in the chorus i like the digital blips [0:48 & 1:52], Lead Singer Shirley Manson can sound like Debbie Harry at times, in the second verse there's some nice background echoes to her singing [1:36], towards the end she gets more frantic [2:56], the digital blips are fantastic, right at the very end the song comes to an abrupt stop on a final 'stupid girl!' [4:15], and a quickly dying cymbal, a great way to end a song, this is a nice compilation, worth getting to know.

Here's Garbage singing 'Stupid Girl' on YouTube.