Our cultural writers wax lyrical about the old (and often daggy) albums that continue to mean a lot

David Harden

on

Radiohead’s
ok computer
(1997)

If I had been truthful from the start, I could have saved myself much deliberation in coming to this conclusion. Due to the romantic nostalgia of albums my parents listened to and a confrontation between my self and the self I felt I needed to portray, it took me exactly thirteen days of disjointed thinking on the matter to throw down the proverbial shackles and fervently state that OK Computer is my favourite album of all time.
For days I toyed with choosing something decidedly pompous by Serge Gainsbourg or Throbbing Gristle. Then I realised that I wasn’t writing for Pitchfork and my readership would see through me. It’s the sort of pretentiousness I usually embrace. Hell, I even own a threadless tee announcing that I listen to bands that don’t even exist yet. But enough is enough. There is not one other album that I can so emphatically declare to be so enamoured with.
OK Computer is a beautiful, delicately layered record. Upon my first listen, I felt inherently connected to it. It was simultaneously like nothing and everything I had heard before. As cliché as it sounds, Radiohead were certainly ahead of their time. It sounds as fresh now as it did back in 1996 upon its initial release, and in 2002, when I, as a straight-laced 13-year-old school boy bought it from the best triangular record store in the world.
Take, for example, the epic ‘Paranoid Android’; an eclectic, six and a half minute ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ for the Facebook generation. Or the deliciously down-tempo ‘No Surprises’, which evokes an emotional response from even the most cold-hearted of wenches. I kid you not, each track demands praise and attention. For an album so diverse, it fits effortlessly into a seamless 53.3 minute package of unadulterated audiophilic bliss.
It was, and still is, an incredible rush to listen to something that sounds so damn good, all the while discussing the consumerist destruction and dehumanisation of society. While my classmates spent their newly pubescent existence masturbating, skipping class and dabbling with reefer and beer, I masturbated, pondered the imminent downfall of mankind and listened to OK Computer.
A modern classic, OK Computer demands immersive listening. Lock the door, close the blinds, slip on some headphones, recline, and see what all the fuss is about.

Seb Tonkin

on

Tool’s Lateralus
(2001)

I’m not going to write about my favourite album. Heck, knowing me, it’d be different in a few weeks anyway. My attention tends to flit from record to record quite rapidly – which brings me to what I will write about. It’s not my favourite album, or even an album I like these days. However, embarrassing as it is, it’s an album that held my attention longer than any other, and the one that first got me into modern music. Tool’s Lateralus.
I won’t bore you with the precise story – it will suffice to say that I was young, impressionable, and musically sheltered. What’s important is that I ended up with the album on my iPod, and soon after on my shelf. The orchestra geek in me loved the strange time signatures and virtuosity. To my ears, it was experimental – much better than the simple 4/4 music  other bands played. Tool were perhaps heavier than I would have liked, true. But it was the good kind of heavy, the heavy made by guys who talked about philosophy and took psychedelics for enlightenment purposes. Tool seemed smart. Looking back, they were kind of smart. Smarter at least than the Korn-style nu-metal they got lumped in with. Lyrically and conceptually, they were more intelligent than Muse are today (not that that’s saying much). I had two things yet to realise: that Tool were only a little smart; and that smartness wasn’t everything.
Nowadays I’d be more sceptical, but 14-year-old me ate that shit up. Before long, I had Tool’s entire discography. Not long after that, I’d entered a world of dark-backgrounded fan-sites full of drug-addled musings and complex song interpretations.

Did you know that the chorus to ‘Lateralus’ rhythmically fits the Fibonacci sequence? Because I sure did. Open your third eye, people.

I don’t need to be told that it was pretty wanky, and you certainly won’t catch me listening to Lateralus today. However, and this might just be nostalgia, I don’t think it’s a terrible album – for what it is. Within its own intent and context, the execution is pretty much flawless. Lateralus is a cohesive and polished artistic statement. It’s just a pretty boring one. What I thought was experimental is actually stuff King Crimson did in the ’60s. What I thought was heavy is in fact pretty mall-friendly. It’s a protracted prog-metal opus wrapped in a thin shroud of mysticism that says nothing of any profundity. But at least it’s not Dream Theater.
Tool were kind of self-defeating simply because they liked to tour with bands a lot more interesting than they were. The Melvins led me down the loud rabbit-hole of doom and sludge. Post-metal-heads Isis were, oddly enough, my indirect introduction to shoegaze bands like Ride (we’ve been best friends since). Melt-Banana, an utterly baffling choice for Tool opener, were my first band that could be called “noisy”. This introduction to a slightly weirder world, coupled with an increasing curiosity about what lay under that giant “indie” umbrella, left Tool in an unnecessary middle ground. Actually, thinking about it, nearly all the guitar music I listen to today can be traced back to one of three things: the Shrek soundtrack, the Radiohead album my dad didn’t really like, or Lateralus. It won’t do any wonders for my fledgling indie cred, but it’s true.
Tool released 10,000 Days in 2006, five years after Lateralus. They then promised a much shorter wait for the next album, of which nothing substantial’s been heard since. I’ve stopped caring. Five years between albums gives one ample time to move on a little. It’s sad (and a little revealing) that a band that meant so much to me can mean so little after so few years. But sometimes, part of me yearns. Not for the record itself, but for the simpler past, when I could be genuinely, intensely, exclusively obsessed by an album. The times when it was just 14-year-old me, some shitty headphones, and a well-worn copy of Lateralus.

Walter Marsh

on

Rodney Crowell’s
The Houston Kid
(2001)

I kind of like country music. There, I said it. When you’ve been less than subtly brainwashed from birth to have a profound appreciation of Johnny Cash’s extended family, it’s difficult to detest it. Rodney Crowell is, and has been, my father’s favourite male artist for as long as I’ve known. His stuff was played to me in the womb, so I never stood a chance. After 19-plus years of near-relentless bombardment, I now feel somewhat at one with the twangy, slightly nauseating harmonies as filtered through myriad time periods and production styles; from the earnest rock n’ roll and violin-driven country of his 1977 debut, to the horribly kitsch 80’s production values of cheesy hit ‘Life is Messy’. This song featured the memorable lyric “life is messy, I feel like Elvis Presley”. Now, for a long time, I thought maybe this was a childish mistake, that I’d misheard that woeful rhyme as a 4-year-old, only for it to become cemented in my mind. But I listened to it again recently. That’s exactly how the song goes.
You know in primary school, when you have no specific or formed musical tastes and you ingest pretty much anything on Video Hits without question, only to have something of a significant (in retrospect quite pedestrian) breakthrough in taste at the start of high school? Well, for me, that musical re-awakening was led by Ben Folds, The Beatles, and, of course, Rodney Crowell. Rodney went through a wilderness of sorts too. After spending the 90’s better known as the now ex-husband of Rosanne Cash, he seemed to be in the familiar rut of another once great Nashville songwriter turned a little bit shit. Then in 2001, on the rough side of of 50, he pulled off a masterstroke: he showed his age. The Houston Kid embraced his childhood and adulthood; his mistakes and his joys were all rendered gloriously in a spell of newly inspired and mature songwriting. These reminiscences were never saccharine in their nostalgia. They were often downbeat, but carried a subtley pervasive optimism.
On ‘I Walk The Line Revisited’, a single from the album, he thinks back to his earliest exposure to the music he loves: “the first time I heard Johnny Cash sing I walk the line”, followed by his now ex-father-in-law Cash re-delivering his most famous chorus in his smooth baritone. Tracks like these show a man at one with his childhood and debauched adulthood, as well as all the joy, music, abuse, and divorce that came with it. At other times, he ruminates on the fate of his baby twin neighbours; he sings ‘I Wish It Would Rain’ and ‘Wandering Boy’ from the perspective of each brother as one of them succumbs to AIDS. Turmoil befalls all Houston Kids, you see.
It’s perhaps appropriate that this, his most honest and emotive work (as well as his most “mature” sounding to date) found a whole new audience in the same moody, burgeoning alt-country scene that his former life as a Nashville gun-for-hire would have alienated and repulsed. It triggered a late career renaissance of sorts, with a series of three albums that similarly showed a man simultaneously growing old and bursting with creativity. Since then he’s been covered by everyone from Keith Urban to The Mountain Goats.
Last year, he announced his first Australian tour in a long time. Dad and I both made the pilgrimage to Melbourne for the show. Sure, he was old as hell, wore a tacky vest, looked one facelift short of Robert Redford, and was promoting an album creepily entitled Sex and Gasoline, but I’ll be damned if it wasn’t one of the best things I’ve seen.