Image Credit: Steve Eichner/WireImage
Earlier this week, the brand new reissue of Blind Melon’s self-titled debut album arrived in the EW offices. After giving it a few spins and discussing its worth, a handful of us in the music department came to the same conclusion many of us did back when this thing first landed in record stores: It’s terrible. “No Rain” is the only good song on there, and “No Rain” is just the worst.
However, a lot of people will defend “No Rain” simply because of nostalgia. If you’re in your late 20s or early 30s now, it’s entirely possible that “No Rain” was in super-heavy rotation when you first discovered MTV, and even if you didn’t like the song, it’s certainly a part of you now. There’s plenty of ’90s canonization going on right now, partially based on the fact that the people who were in high school in 1998 now have all of the disposable income, and partially because the Internet has made it way easier for artists well past their maximum saturation points to hold onto the fans who could develop into lifers.
Thus, we’ve been getting comebacks from ’90s icons of all sorts, from New Kids on the Block and the Backstreet Boys to Lisa Loeb and everybody on those Sugar Ray package tours. Of course, the great artists from that era have stuck with us (or moved on to other, better projects), but there are a handful of welcome comebacks, including Spacehog.
After some time spent on side projects and re-charging some batteries, Spacehog are back with a new album called As It Is On Earth coming out on April 16, and they played a tiny cobweb-shaking show at New York’s Mercury Lounge last month. I always loved them—as a huge fan of David Bowie, I always enjoyed their glam-centric approach to alt-rock.
They always deserved to be bigger than they were, but their one famous contribution to radio culture, “In the Meantime,” holds up exceptionally well. It manages to successfully merge sci-fi soul with post-grunge radio crunch, and the hook is absolutely killer. Before the show, I was with a few friends of mine at a bar, and somebody else queued up “In the Meantime” on the jukebox. As we listened to it there, and then a second time at the show, my friend turned to me and said, “This very well might be the best one-hit wonder of the ’90s.”
He may in fact be right (it’s certainly better than “No Rain”), but in order to come to some kind of conclusion, it’s necessary to examine some of the other contenders and to apply a little bit of science. READ FULL STORY »
