Album Recommendations | mari@macintosh.garden
Artist: Remy Zero
Albums are graded on a five-point scale of "Awful-Eh-Good-Great-Classic". I'm highly biased, so don't take it too seriously. Most of these come from my own collection, so the grades skew rather high. Your results may vary if you send me stuff to review.
Each album is given three Essential tracks, my personal favorites, regardless of how weird and inconsequential they are. The Quintessential pick is the one I think best represents the album as a whole, so you can try one song instead of a whole album of songs. Non-Essential picks range from merely disappointing to outright unlistenable. Read the review.
Remy Zero (1996)
It blows through and then it's gone.
Unlike a lot of 90s rock records, Remy Zero's self-titled debut hasn't gotten much of a reappraisal—from anybody. The band got its singular gasp of relevancy on its way out when "Save Me" wound up the theme to a little show called Smallville, but even among the band's fans, Remy Zero seems to underwhelm. I've been pondering why. This Alabama quintet produced the kind of album that Internet music fans seem to fawn over, rock music as sound exploration, a set of ten mood pieces that prompted Radiohead to bring them along on tour, but they're still a pop band at heart. By writing a 90s rock record without hooks, they don't please casual listeners, and the capital-D Discerning Music Listeners find this style old hat anyway. Another one through the cracks.
Intro "Temenos" is a perfect demonstration of the band's commitment to writing rock without the catchy bits, as that cool, biting dissonant riff stabs aimlessly and they bury their vocals to the point where the words don't stick out. Remy should've leaned more on the vocals, really: the best songs on here, "Descent" and especially "Twister", are powered by the same deeply aching vocals as "Save Me" that'd fit them snug on a thousand teenagers' wallowing playlists. If you give this album a few listens, though, you start to grow warm to the ether-tornado-through-a-dusty-attic sound Remy Zero craft through their harmonies and acoustic guitar misery on tracks like "Gold Star Speaker" and "Shadowcasting". It's a cool album if you like eerie mope music—just don't expect to remember most of the songs by name.
| Essential: | Quintessential: | Non-Essential: | Rating: |
|---|---|---|---|
| "Descent", "Twister", "Shadowcasting" | "Gold Star Speaker" | "Chromosome" | Good |