Bands That I Like

93 Elton John Elton John The Elton Run is a great road-trip game: Using the radio’s scan and seek buttons, see how long you can keep a continuous streak of Elton hits rolling. It’s been proven possible to follow the Elton Run up I-95 from Virginia all the way to Boston. The hazard: One sixth of your listening will be devoted to “ Your Song ,” Elton’s most overplayed standard even though everybody is over it at this point (Sample lyrics: “If I was a sculptor / But then again, no,” I think we can all agree we don’t need to hear that cheesy line anymore.) But Elton has a staggering number of hits; At least one in the Top 40 every year from 1970 through 1995 (!). With his electric boots and mohair suits, he’s the prima of all donnas, sitting like a princess perched in his electric chair. He entertains by picking brains. He sells his soul by dropping names. And for all his camp flamboyance, he’s aged into the most beloved entertainer on earth. Elton’s got about a million compilatio...

92 Elliott Smith Elliott Smith Lo-fi, folk punk, and other mid-‘90s buzzwords didn’t help the ferociously talented Smith when he debuted with 1994’s Roman Candle to a public already softened up for the charms of post-grunge acoustics. Perhaps the album fell through the cracks because of the limited resources of its tiny label, or maybe because so much of Roman Candle sounds like Simon and Garfunkel after an idealism bypass. The album set the Smith template: unflinching portraits of bad love in a low-down town, recorded with sparkling clarity, his guitar squeaky, his voice unemphatic to say the least, the rolling prom rhythms hypnotic and terribly, unrelentingly sad. If total lack of effect is going to be your thing, you’d better know something about song-craft. Fortunately for Elliott Smith, he’s not just depressed, angry, and sarcastic, he’s also observant, literate, and musically accomplished. Never has “folk punk” been as classically defined as in Smith’s second album, 19...

91 EELS EELS After a couple of song-rich, keyboard-dominated albums released under the Man Called E moniker, Mark Everett morphed into the trio Eels with 1996’s [DreamWorks Records released] Beautiful Freak . At its best, the debut gave a trip-hop twist to the California singer/songwriter tradition; at its worst, it suggests one more bummed-out wise guy’s take on Beck’s collage-style rock. With a sense of humor that skews toward cynicism that’s alleviated occasionally by bouts of sincerity, Everett is not the likeliest subject to make a transcendent album about death. But he nearly pulls it off on 1998’s Electro-Shock Blues . The music is somber but not sedate, with bursts of saxophone, off-kilter orchestration, and outright noise evoking the turbulence beneath the deadpan vocals. The singer battles not only depression but also his penchant for irony, and his struggle to move beyond them makes for a fascinating if sometimes morbidly downcast listen. On 2000’s Daisies of the ...