The Year in Records
1990
Ten From Where You Weren't Looking
The best records of 1990 came out of a hangar in Wichita, a kitchen table in Cookeville, a room above a laundromat in Detroit and a ballroom at a sales convention. Very few of them came anywhere near this office. We went to them.
Every December we are asked whether it was a good year. It was a good year. It was a good year in the way the last several have been: almost none of it happened where the record business is.
Our list was made the way it is always made. The editors and the magazine's regular reviewers were each asked for ten records released between the first of December last year and the end of November this year. We spent an afternoon on Hudson Street arguing about them. Nobody changed anybody's mind about the order, so the order below is the average. The records that mattered, we noticed when we were done, were made by people who had jobs to get back to: aircraft mechanics, line cooks, a hardware store, a convention circuit, a farm.
The records that mattered were made by people who had jobs to get back to.
At the top is Claws Out, by Blackmarket Kittens. We put them on our cover four years ago, when their record had sold 340 copies. We do not raise the point to take credit. We raise it because the band has spent four years becoming exactly as good as we said it was, and then better, and the title song was written on stage during a set that was billed for forty-five minutes and ran three hours.
Second is Morning Colors, by Fiddle & Flag, who recorded it in Nashville this spring with Kay Ashworth conducting from the piano with a pencil. It is named for the flag raised at first light on every Army post, and it ends with Ashworth alone at the piano. It is the band's best record and the most quietly affecting record of the year.
Third is Annual, the first record by Mechanical, five aircraft mechanics from Wichita who tune to A440 because the manual says so. It is three songs long. One of them is about a vibration. We have learned more about engines from it than we expected to and more about metal than we thought there was left to learn.
The rest of the list goes from Huntsville, Texas, to Kapaʻa, on Kauaʻi, by way of Mobile, Lancaster County, Corpus Christi, Dallas and New Orleans. We have not heard a bad record among them. We have heard several that will be on next year's lists in other magazines, which will discover them then. We were glad to be early. We are always glad to be early.