69 (album)

An experimental dream pop album, 69 was eclectically influenced by several artists, including mid-1980s Cocteau Twins,[11] Miles Davis,[12] Can,[12] and the "disregard for sonic structure" of dub music, whereby 69 "disappears into distant echoes that strikingly predict the succulent Seefeel." Music journalist Simon Reynolds described 69 as finding "unprecedented connections" between jazz, dub, acid rock, Sonic Youth-style "reinvention of the guitar" and Cocteau Twins circa Head Over Heels.[10] Ned Raggett of AllMusic said 69 shows the band felling "playful, mysterious, and inventive all at once, impossible to truly pin down."[5] He said the album was "never simply poppy nor completely arty, and definitely not just the Jesus and Mary Chain/Cocteau Twins fusion most claimed they were."[5] The record is characterized by its usage of feedback,[11] murmured, dizzy voices,[11][13] "vapor-trail guitars,"[13] "echo-laden rhythms,"[13] submerged grooves,[13] and its possession of "a very stripped down sound" with "tracks that at times straddle the line of music and noise."[14]

Although the band coined the term "dream pop" to describe their music, Matteo Losi of Ondarock noted that the British music press had difficulties describing A.R. Kane and 69 in genres, terming 69 as "proto-shoegaze / late wave", and the group's description in the press as the "black Jesus and Mary Chain" became reinforced.[11][15] One reviewer also created his own genres to describe the album: "dream-dub," "narc-psych" and "trip-wave."[15] Martin C. Strong, writing in The Great Rock Bible, said 69 was "avant-rock-styled" and "hard to pigeonhole yet seminal nevertheless."[3] Besides the Cocteau Twins and the Jesus and Mary Chain, critics drew comparisons between parts of the album and Lee Perry,[16] Gong,[16] early Pink Floyd,[16] the "experimental end" of Jimi Hendrix,[16] John Martyn,[10] Arthur Russell,[10] Public Image Ltd,[3] The Durutti Column,[3] Van Morrison's Astral Weeks,[10] and Robert Wyatt's Rock Bottom.[13] Reynolds would later describe the album as "an idyll midway" between Miles Davis' Bitches Brew and Cocteau Twins' aforementioned Head Over Heels.[10]

Music Arcades, calling the album "pretty elliptical," noted that some of the tracks on 69 are not songs, but "doodles in sound — but they also showed they could be very commercial when they wanted to be."[16] According to Simon Reynolds, there are two "obsessions" that musically and lyrically govern 69; the ocean–"where normal laws of gravity, acoustics and breathing are eluded", and sleep–"the sleep of beauty, certainty, but above all, the waking sleep of innocence, where every moment is liberated from the grid of adult forward planning, experienced full because free of past and future anxiety. Where these obsessions converge is in the womb."[10] In their 2011 book Beyond and Before: Progressive Rock Since the 1960s, music journalists Paul Hegarty and Martin Halliwell refer to the band being at the centre of Reynolds' idea of "oceanic music" and that the band reached new heights of rock experimentation on 69.[17] Geiger said that "sea water is in many ways also the element that binds the whole plate together. The water is as a symbol of beauty, liberation and innocence. The concept is regressive in the sense that it seeks towards the pre-language, the pre-born - in the end fetal huddled perfection."[18] Trouser Press said that the album is "mostly concerned with sensuality, but an enervated sensuality."[13]

The album contains ten songs. According to Ned Raggett of AllMusic, opening song "Crazy Blue" resembles "little else recorded that year or any other one", and contains a few plucked guitar notes, a sudden "jazzy scat-vamp" by singer Rudi "with his unique voice", followed by "a more direct poppish strum, the woozy line, "Ooooh...everything's gone crazy now," followed by a series of intense reverbed chime sounds and bongo-like percussion."[5] According to Raggett, "from there on in, things take a turn for the strangely captivating in song after song."[5] Both "Crazy Blue" and second song "Suicide Kiss" feature "lost and lonely listlessness" and languid jazz inflections.[10]

"Baby Milk Snatcher" appears to reference both the then-UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, who had become known as the "milk snatcher", and to oral sex, containing lyrics such as "baby suck my seed."[16] "Sulliday" features buried, measured percussion and evocative drones [5] Raggett described "Dizzy" as featuring a "mesmerizing call-and-response by Rudi with himself, veering between more gentle, direct vocals and echoed shouts, eerily foretelling much of what Tricky would similarly do years later."[5] The song features a sway of cello and vocals, counterpointed by a "catacomb of screams" described by Reynolds as combining John Lydon with Tim Buckley.[10]

"Spermwhale Trip Over" was described by Ott as an "oddly title masterpiece" and "the album's hallmark", saying "the track's present-tense update of the Cocteau Twins' ethereal elegies is perhaps the group's defining moment."[11] According to MusicArcades, the song "witters on about LSDreams."[16] The song was a singular influence on Bark Psychosis and the aforementioned Seefeel.[11] "The Sun Falls into the Sea" was described by Reynolds as "just incomparable: a mermaid lullaby not so much "accompanied" as almost drowned out by a sound like an immense quartz harp the size of a whale's exoskeleton, from which harmonics disperse and scatter as haywire as sunlight refracting beneath the ocean surface. It's not the notes played, but the untranscribeable opalescence of the stuff of this sound that's so unbearably lovely."[10]

69, alongside the band's other albums for Rough Trade, made a deep impression on emerging shoegaze, psychedelic and post-rock bands such as Flying Saucer Attack, Slowdive, Bark Psychosis and Disco Inferno.[22] According to Geiger, 69 is "both an important rock-historical document and a key liaison to the hybrid-like solutions of rock stereotypes that happened in the late 1980s and early 1990s. AR Kane's mixing of different musical genres show as a whole to these differing waves as shoegazer, ambient, trip hop and post-rock."[18] The album has been said to "strikingly predict" the sound of 1990s band Seefeel,[11] whilst "Spermwhale Trip Over" was a direct influence on Seefeel and Bark Psychosis.[11] "Suicide Kiss" has been said to predict "heavier" shoegaze bands such as the God Machine.[11] Tambala stated that highly regarded shoegaze band My Bloody Valentine's song "Slow", which he described as the birth of their signature "giddy, slip-sliding sound," was directly influenced by "Baby Milk Snatcher."[33] He recalled My Bloody Valentine "were a jangly indie band until we put out 'Baby Milk Snatcher'. Suddenly they slowed it all down and layered it with feedback. And they did it better than us, which was interesting."[30] "Dizzy" was observed by Allmusic for largely predicting the music of Tricky.[5]

Tambala recalled reading that in 1988, David Bowie was spotted in Virgin Megastore buying 69 and noted that later that year Bowie recorded the raw Tin Machine,[33] posing 69 as a possible influence on Tin Machine and quipping "Coincidence? I like to think not. Make of that little apocrypha what you will."[33] In 2012, Rob Fitzpatrick of The Guardian remarked that A.R. Kane's blending of "dub, feedback, psychedelic dream-pop, house and free jazz" can still be heard in modern artists such as Radiohead, Four Tet, Animal Collective and Burial.[30] As Ondarock described the scenario, "69 has been very influential, and like few other artifacts of its time. That said, it seems only right to reassess, under the purely aesthetic point of view, the fragrance bouquet: that unique mix where dub, pop, electronic, minimalism and rock instrumentation serene drown, eyeing the ascetic limbo of Talk Talk of Spirit of Eden and foreshadowing a thousand other things (not least 90% of the entire Too Pure catalog.)"[15]

Due to the success of 69, the band had "more money to buy music" and were "exposed to a lot more through recommendation and just through hanging out in different scenes."[8] This resulted in the band following 69 with the EP Love-Sick (1988) and the double album, i (1989), which was also met with critical acclaim. Ned Raggett of The Quietus said that "compared to the filigrees and fillips that began [on 69], i almost bursts out of the gate."[34] The band recalled "we kinda broke into the candy store and went mental with Love Sick and i – somebody should have stopped us! The indie scene was new to us; I thought indie meant from Indianapolis. Our first bass player Russell introduced us to a lot of 'dark' music (Swans, Buttholes, Nick Cave) and our second bassist Colin introduced us to certain classical ideas and progressive, intellectual stuff."[8] In 2012, Tambala "smilingly" recalled that "69 is a gem. We wanted to go as far out as we could, and in doing so we discovered the point where it stops being music."[30]

At the end of 1988, numerous critics ranked the album on their lists of "Albums of the Year"; Melody Maker ranked it 5th,[35] Spex ranked it 28th,[6] Rockdelux ranked it 36th,[6] whilst Q included it in their unordered list of the top 50 "Recordings of the Year."[36] In 1999, The Guardian ranked the album at number 78 in its list of "Top 100 Albums that Don't Appear in All the Other Top 100 Albums of All Time Lists"–a list which featuring the greatest albums that do not appear in other lists of the greatest albums of all time,[6] and in 2007, they included it in their list of "1000 Albums to Hear Before You Die."[6] Ondarock included the album in its ongoing list of "Rock Milestones."[6] In The Rough Guide to Rock, Ben Smith named it one of the best albums of the decade.[37] Jim DeRogatis included the album in his 1996 list book Kaleidoscope Eyes: Psychedelic Rock from the '60s to the '90s.[38] Acclaimed Music, a site which uses statistics to numerically represent reception among critics, acknowledges the album as "bubbling under" its list of the all-time top 3000 albums.[39]