Song Of the Day: April 2, 2005
Cotton Mather-My Before and After
From the CD Kontiki, Copper Records, 1997
A quick look at what used copies of their CDs are going for on Amazon.com suggests the esteem in which this band is held by the few who managed to hear them, and it's no wonder; Kontiki is simply one of the handful of best pop records of the 90s. The ability of Robert Harrison to juxtapose great pop rock in the Beatles/Byrds tradition with strange psychedelic experiments that actually still hold together as tunes (something that bands like Olivia Tremor Control were NEVER able to pull off) is a rare gift, as is his ability to throw out damaged and achy love songs that recall Big Star's Sister Lovers. Something like Guided by Voices (of whom Harrison was a huge fan) with an attention span and an ability to distinguish their best ideas from their merely mediocre ones, they shared a similar lo-fi aesthetic, but where Guided By Voices' studio austerity sometimes seemed forced (Alien Lanes), Cotton Mather's seemed ingenious. A previous LP, Cotton Is King, had an inappropriate commercial sheen that took the edge off some pretty good material, as well as some truly horrible amateur alterna-indie artwork that would have discouraged most people who like their later records from ever picking it up. A later LP, The Big Picture, was nearly as glorious as Kontiki. Kontiki will be re-issued in the year 2013, after some advertising executive that used to be a college radio DJ places one of their songs in a commercial for whatever that year's new technology that encourages people to have loud, embarrassing conversations in public is going to be.
7 Comments:
Wasnt' this a bona fide "hit?" I thought they were one of those bands who were huge *somwhere* when I wansn't looking. And I definitely wasn't looking from about 1996-2000.
Have you thought about one of those online-radio-station things for all of these? It would be great to be able to stream them on random whilst I work ... such great stuff.
I sorta don't think so. They actually played here twice in the late 90s. At the Jazzhaus. To a maximum of 10 people per show.
Best,
Jon
I second the "streaming radio" motion. I could just leave that up all day and not mess with anything else.
P.S. "re-pro-gram-med".
this one's brilliant. it never ceases to evoke the tincture of all that was good with the best composers of the mid/late '60s. it pushes all of the appropriate Beatle buttons, and yes I've heard all the criticism but it's just fine with me. wish I knew what they were all up to now.
My Before And After^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H Sweet Lord
An on-line buddy directed me to this web site recently. I obviously have a lot of catching up to do.
I just listened to this song. It's so freaking good I can hardly believe it.
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