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90sdecoded

@90sdecoded

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Decoding the music history of the '90s
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PJ Harvey performing “Dress” Live on The Late Show in 1992 When Dry by PJ Harvey surfaced in 1992, it arrived in an alternative rock landscape that was very male dominated. Harvey tore through that scene with an uncompromising voice that dealt openly with rage, desire, vulnerability and power. It’s an album that made space for pure feminine rage at a time when those perspectives were still far less visible in alternative rock. Musically, Dry is raw and economical as the power trio format (Harvey on vocals/guitar, Rob Ellis on drums, Steve Vaughan on bass) gives the album a visceral punch. Tracks like “Sheela-Na-Gig” and “Dress” are angular and insistent, channeling punk energy through bluesy, fractured riffs. The sound is stripped down, but it never feels small. It’s tight, tense, and always on the verse of combusting. Lyrically, Harvey writes directly about sex, shame, agency and the body, often turning familiar ideas about femininity back against the listener. The writing can be confrontational, uncomfortable and exposed without ever losing its clarity. #Music #PJHarvey by @90sdecoded
30
18 hours ago
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Isolated Vocal Track of Weezer’s “Undone – The Sweater Song” “Undone – The Sweater Song” is built around three distinct vocal roles. Rivers Cuomo delivers the lead with a flat, self-conscious detachment, repeating the verses with very little theatricality even as the song itself begins to unravel around him. Matt Sharp occupies a different space entirely. Much of his contribution comes through spoken dialogue and background banter, giving the track the feeling of a conversation happening around Cuomo rather than directly with him. When the chorus arrives, Sharp and Brian Bell move into the arrangement with high backing vocals behind Cuomo. Their harmonies sit sharply against his lower, deadpan delivery, giving lines such as “Lying on the floor” a stranger, more uneasy character. That contrast between casual spoken voices, Cuomo’s detached lead and the high backing harmonies from Sharp and Bell gives “Undone” one of the most distinctive vocal arrangements on Weezer’s debut album. #Music #Weezer by @90sdecoded
24
3 days ago
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Isolated Vocal Track of Scott Weiland’s Vocal Parts on Stone Temple Pilots’s “Big Empty” Scott Weiland moves through “Big Empty” in two distinct voices. The verses are low, bluesy and restrained, almost conversational in places, with his vocal sitting close to the acoustic guitar. When the chorus arrives, he pushes into a rougher, heavier delivery, raising the intensity without losing the melancholy underneath it. That shift between the two sections is central to the performance. Weiland can sound subdued without disappearing into the arrangement, then open his voice into a full-throated rock vocal without flattening the song into aggression. The lyrics are abstract, filled with images of dizziness, distance and conversations breaking down, but Weiland sings them with complete conviction. The emotion comes through in the way he changes his phrasing, tone and intensity from one section to the next. “Big Empty” captures the range in his voice particularly well: the bluesy croon of the verses, the grit of the chorus and the ease with which he moves between them. #Music #ScottWeiland #StoneTemplePilots by @90sdecoded
279
4 days ago
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Isolated Vocal Track of Thom Yorke’s Vocal Parts on Radiohead’s “Street Spirit (Fade Out)” Thom Yorke isn’t your typical rock frontman. He approaches every song differently, reshaping his voice to give each one exactly what it needs. There’s no single “Thom Yorke voice.” Listen to the nervous urgency of “Just,” the haunting melancholy of “Street Spirit (Fade Out),” the detached melancholy of “How to Disappear Completely,” the quiet restraint of “Videotape,” or the unsettling tension of “Climbing Up the Walls.” Each performance feels like it belongs to that song alone. He never forces one vocal identity onto every composition. That’s what separates Yorke from so many great singers. His voice isn’t there to dominate the arrangement or constantly remind you who’s singing. It adapts to the emotional world of the music. Sometimes it leads from the front. Sometimes it drifts into the background as another texture alongside Jonny Greenwood’s guitars and the band’s evolving soundscapes. Every choice serves the composition before it serves the singer. The result is a catalogue of performances that rarely repeat themselves. Instead of building a career around one recognisable vocal style, Thom Yorke has spent decades proving that the greatest singers aren’t always the ones with the biggest voices. They’re often the ones who know exactly what each song is asking for and have the discipline to give it just that. #Music #ThomYorke #Radiohead by @90sdecoded
172
2 months ago
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The Music Video to “Zombie” by The Cranberries “Zombie” is one of Dolores O’Riordan’s greatest achievements as a songwriter. It came from one of the deepest emotional places she ever wrote from. Yet when she presented the finished song to her record label, she was pressured not to release it. The band’s former manager Allen Kovac revealed in an interview with Rolling Stone Magazine that Island Records urged them not to release the “politically urgent” song as a single. In fact, Dolores ripped up a $1-million cheque the label offered her to work on another song. He commented saying this: “Dolores was a very small, fragile person, but very opinionated. Her belief was that she was an international artist and she wanted to break the rest of the world, and ‘Zombie’ was part of that evolution. She felt the need to expand beyond ‘I love you, you love me’ and write about what was happening in Ireland at the time.” Guitarist Noel Hogan also revealed that the label were not expecting a lead single sounding different from the band’s output and wanted them to write something that was on the lines of “Dreams” or “Linger”. Eventually, the song was released as the lead single from “No Need of Ague” with “Away” & “I Don’t Need” as the B-Side on the 19th of September 1994. The single topped the charts in many countries as it went to the No. 1 position on the US Billboard Alternative Airplay chart, spending twenty-three weeks on the chart. #Music #TheCranberries by @90sdecoded
17
4 days ago
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Jeff Buckley performing “Hallelujah” Live in France Jeff Buckley’s version of “Hallelujah” took a song already transformed by Leonard Cohen and John Cale and stripped it down even further. With little more than his voice and the clean sound of a Fender Telecaster, Buckley turned it into something fragile, intimate and intensely physical, allowing the performance to build from near-whispered restraint into soaring falsetto. The song had already taken a long route to reach him. Leonard Cohen reportedly spent around five years writing “Hallelujah,” producing as many as 180 drafts and continuing to rework the lyrics in performance. It appeared on Various Positions in 1984, an album Columbia Records declined to release in the United States. Cohen later remembered the label’s response with characteristic dryness: “We know you are great, but don’t know if you are any good.” John Cale’s 1991 interpretation was the version that caught Buckley’s attention. Cale stripped away much of Cohen’s original production and brought the song closer to its lyric, giving Buckley the starting point for his own reading. At Bearsville Studios in 1993, Buckley reduced it again to electric guitar and voice. He recorded as many as 30 versions, and the performance eventually released on Grace was assembled from at least three takes. The song appeared on his 1994 debut album but only began reaching a much wider audience after Buckley’s death in 1997. Cohen’s own recording would not reach the Billboard charts until after his death in 2016. #Music #JeffBuckley by @90sdecoded
46
5 days ago
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Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds performing “Stagger Lee” Live at NPA Canal+ in France Here’s an excerpt of an interview with Bad Seeds drummer Jim Sclavunos on how “Stagger Lee” was included last minute into their repertoire during the recording sessions for “Murder Ballads: “I came into the studio towards the very end of the sessions, and I showed Nick a book called The Life, which was a collection of black hustler prison poetry. I pointed out an old really nasty version of ‘Stagger Lee’, and he got quite excited. Just a few minutes later, we piled into the live room, and recorded the song, fully realized, totally off-the-cuff, in one take.” #Music #NickCaveAndTheBadSeeds by @90sdecoded
63
5 days ago
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Isolated Drum Track of Sean Kinney’s drum parts on Alice In Chains’s “No Excuses” Sean Kinney’s drum parts on “No Excuses” is built around one of the most distinctive grooves in Alice in Chains’ catalogue. The song sits in 4/4, but Kinney keeps disturbing the obvious pulse with syncopated accents, moving hits away from the places your ear expects them and giving the rhythm a slightly lopsided, rolling feel. The opening groove came out of Kinney experimenting with side-stick drumming during the Jar of Flies sessions. Co-producer Toby Wright later recalled that the idea developed further in the studio, with bongos and smaller drums positioned around the hi-hat and worked into the pattern. What makes the part so good is that Kinney never settles into a plain rock backbeat. The kick, snare and cymbal accents keep answering one another across the bar, with hits arriving between the main beats and small changes constantly pulling at the groove. There is plenty happening, but it never feels busy for the sake of it. The syncopation gives “No Excuses” its movement. It is also a reminder of what made Kinney such an important part of Alice in Chains. He could make a song feel heavy without simply hitting harder. On “No Excuses,” the weight comes from where he places the beat. #Music #AliceInChains by @90sdecoded
150
11 days ago
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Isolated Vocal Track of Noel Gallagher’s Vocal parts on Oasis’s “Don’t Look Back in Anger” This became the first Oasis single to put Noel Gallagher on lead vocals. During the Morning Glory sessions, Noel presented Liam with “Wonderwall” and “Don’t Look Back in Anger” and told him he could choose which one to sing. Liam eventually took “Wonderwall,” leaving Noel with the other. Noel’s voice gives the song a very different character from Liam’s. There is less bite in the attack and more emphasis on the shape of the melody. He stretches certain vowels, pushes harder as the chorus climbs and lets some of the roughness remain around the edges. The verses feel conversational; by the time he reaches “so Sally can wait,” the vocal has opened into something built for thousands of people to sing back. Noel once described the difference between their voices by comparing his to “half a Guinness on a Tuesday” and Liam’s to “ten shots of tequila on a Friday night.” It is a funny line, but it gets surprisingly close to the distinction. Liam could make an Oasis song sound confrontational simply by opening his mouth. Noel approached “Don’t Look Back in Anger” differently, carrying the song through melody and phrasing while still allowing his voice to crack and strain when the chorus demands it. For a songwriter who had spent the band’s rise standing beside one of the most recognisable voices of the decade, “Don’t Look Back in Anger” was the moment Noel stepped up to the microphone himself and ended up singing one of Oasis’s defining songs. #Music #Oasis by @90sdecoded
119
12 days ago
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Isolated Piano Track of Eddie Harsch’s piano parts on the Black Crowes “Remedy” #Music #TheBlackCrowes by @90sdecoded
374
13 days ago
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The Music Video to “It’s Oh So Quiet” by Björk “It’s Oh So Quiet” was originally recorded by American singer Betty Huron in 1951 as the B-Side to the famous Jazz single “Murder, He Says”. However, if you dig a little depper you’ll notice that the song is a cover of the German song “Und jetzt ist es still”, which was performed by German singer Horst Winter. Four decades later, the song was revived when Björk covered it and released it as the third single from “Post”. Her rendition of the song took it in a more experimental direction, but still stayed consistent with the traditional big band jazz arrangement of the song. Keyboardist and programmer Marius De Vries recalled the recording of this track to Uncut magazine: “We booked a three-hour session for It’s ‘Oh So Quiet.’ We wanted to record the vocal live with the orchestra, but Bjork was held up. She turned up with 15 minutes to go, strolled into the vocal booth, and ran it down twice. That was it.” Upon release, the song became her biggest hit in the UK and it paved the way for future releases such as “Hyperballad” and “Possibly Maybe” to also hit the UK Top 20. A Music Video of the song was shot by Spike Jonze and was inspired by musicals of the ‘40s-‘60s, notably the 1964 film The Umbrellas of Cherbourg.  #Music #Bjork by @90sdecoded
56
12 days ago
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The Music Video to “Fell on Black Days” by Soundgarden Chris Cornell // “Fell On Black Days’ was like this ongoing fear I’ve had for years. It took me a long time to write that song. We’ve tried to do three different versions with that title, and none of them have ever worked,” he said. “It’s a feeling that everyone gets. You’re happy with your life, everything’s going well, things are exciting - when all of a sudden you realize you’re unhappy in the extreme, to the point of being really, really scared. There’s no particular event you can pin the feeling down to, it’s just that you realize one day that everything in your life is f—ked!” Source: - Chris’s interview with Melody Maker #Music #Soundgarden by @90sdecoded
36
12 days ago
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