Since its inception, music has been as integral a part of Saturday Night Live as comedy is apparently supposed to be. My Dad was in high school when the show premiered and during lockdown decided to catch up on some of the classic episodes on Peacock. In an attempt to bond, he, regrettably, would often text his thoughts on the musical guests, particularly the punk ones. Needless to say, he wasn’t a fan. Here are some that apparently really got his blood boiling before I blocked his number as he was on the verge of a stroke.
16. The Pogues (Season 15, March 17, 1990)
So, actually Dad liked this one because he said he knew this song from when he used to hang out at the F.O.P. lodge and that it reminded him of the music from the old country. He also said you couldn’t do that one song anymore because of cancel culture and how come I don’t call anymore?
15. The Cure (Season 21, May 11, 1996)
Regarding this one, Dad didn’t really say much other than that guy’s mother must have done a number on him. Then he reminded me I need to call my mother more, which is a whole thing.
14. Teenage Fanclub (Season 17, February 15, 1992)
We don’t think Dad had any issue with the music, per se. He just didn’t understand why nobody takes any pride in their appearance anymore and that when he was that age you didn’t go on Carson looking like that. And would it kill them to get a goddamn haircut?
13. The Sugarcubes (Season 14, October 15, 1988)
Dad was mostly just amazed that “that Bjork wackjob” had been around since the ‘80s and was in a punk band. He followed that up with something about something in the water and socialism.
12. The Clash (Season 8, October 9, 1982)
I think Dad retroactively tried to claim he liked the Clash because he associates the song “Rock the Casbah” with Desert Storm back when America was still kicking ass. Mom said just take everything he said with a grain of salt because being on disability for so long was getting to him.
11. Rollins Band (Season 22, April 19, 1997)
Pamela Anderson hosted this one so I think Dad was mostly just pissed off that she wasn’t on the TV at the exact moment. Mom wasn’t sure if it was a good idea for Henry Rollins to be performing barefoot as that stage didn’t look very clean.
10. Patti Smith (Season 1, April 17, 1976)
Gerald Ford’s Chief of Staff hosted this one and Dad said it’s no wonder that peanut farmer won in ‘76 if that “liberal” Ford approved of this sort of bullshit. He said he was thankful Reagan came along four years later, but by then the damage was probably already done.
9. Blink-182 (Season 25, January 8, 2000)
My old man said these guys reminded him of those goddamn slackers with their skateboards that are always hanging around the 7-11, up to no good. Used to be a time when kids their age spent their summers mowing lawns and flipping burgers instead of going on TV with their cocks out like a bunch of goddamn hippies. (Pick up a copy of “Dude Ranch” on vinyl today)
First things first, “Reverberation” should consider itself fucking lucky to be on this list, even in last place. We would gladly kick this album out of here for not featuring Ian McCulloch in any capacity and replacing him with singer Noel Burke, but at the end of the day, it’s still officially in the discography. The funny thing is, it’s actually a pretty decent early 1990s alternative rock album, but this band is Echo & the Bunnymen like Dunkaroos are edible food: just barely.
“The Stars, the Oceans & the Moon” is that most dreaded of cash-ins, a re-recorded album of greatest hits that just remind you how good the band used to be. That said, Ian McCulloch’s now-weathered voice and new arrangements by Will Sergeant at least give a lesser-known banger like “Nothing Lasts Forever” a little more air, even if the opener “Bring on the Dancing Horses” isn’t bringing anything a 55-year-old with four bourbons in them can’t give you at karaoke. Stick to the originals.
The best cut on an album is called “It’s Alright,” and that’s an easy joke we’re not above making. By the time Echo & the Bunnymen proper had gotten back together, British retro-psychedelia was beginning to peter out on the last fumes of Brit-pop, and “Flowers” just didn’t have much to offer than weird titles and McCulloch’s still powerful voice. It’s not quite an album treading water, but this is unquestionably an album that can’t quite decide what kind of band made it.
Okay, the guys managed to get their shit together. “Siberia” is a significant step up from “Flowers” on pretty much every level, even if it seems designed in a lab to make guys with horn-rim glasses say they liked the early stuff better. It is unreasonable to ask a band in its fourth decade to come up with something as good as “The Killing Moon,” so we’re not going to. By this point, the band was whittled down to just Ian McCulloch and Will Sergeant, Les Pattinson having left after the first two reunion albums and Pete de Freitas dying in a tragic car accident. “Siberia” is pretty solid for half the crew being gone.
With “The Fountain,” Echo & the Bunnymen managed to do something astonishing for a veteran band: making something fucking weird. There’s a looseness to the band’s 11th album that was missing over the last few releases, which doesn’t exactly put it up there in the pantheon, but it’s good to hear Ian McCulloch and Will Sergeant having fun again. While the band has always been known for its eccentricity and intense guitar lines, discovering they knocked out a bizarre 1960s pop throwback like “Proxy” or the pun-filled “Shroud of Turin” really does make you appreciate that they still try. Plus, “Proxy” really is goofy.
“Meteorites” is the kind of album that you expect to act as the capstone to a legendary career, full of deep emotions that are wasted on idiots like us and infused with a palpable world-weariness. Then Echo & the Bunnymen kept making albums, so it does spoil the effect somewhat, but this is still the best of the band’s post-2000 albums by a fairly wide margin. Teaming up with producer Youth (formerly of Killing Joke) infuses the album with a more full, polished sheen than Echo & the Bunnymen fans might be used to, but honestly, what could you expect from these guys by this point?
Didn’t expect to see the band’s debut album, “Crocodiles,” all the way down here on the list, did you? That’s right, we’re crazy. But while “Crocodiles” has ferocious, astonishing tracks like “Rescue and “Do It Clean,” Ian McCulloch and the rest still had a lot of work to do before they really figured out the trippy, abrasive near-pop that that would make them immortal. “Crocodiles” is like watching a future champion play in a minor league; impressive, but still just AAA ball. Plus, they called a song “All That Jazz.” Just… don’t do that.
“Evergreen” was Echo & the Bunnymen’s big shot at relevancy during the Britpop years; hell, they even brought in Liam Gallagher at his hoarsest on backing vocals for “Nothing Last Forever,” which he probably did for half a bottle of vodka and some shit-talking. In many ways, “Evergreen” is the band’s most elegant work, full of huge, immaculately constructed ballads like “Forgiven” and “Empire State Halo.” Of course, the 1990s were a stupid time, and “Evergreen” didn’t get the rapturous reception it deserved. Instead, it went to the Spice Girls, so think about that for a while.
After “Evergreen” briefly charted and then disappeared into the dreams of middle-aged music nerds, Ian McCulloch and Will Sergeant regrouped for the softest, most pensive record of their career together. That doesn’t mean that Sergeant tones down the legendary angularity of his guitar work or that the duo was above throwing a brass section into a few tracks like “When It All Blows Over.” “What Are You Going to Do with Your Life?” can be summed up in a word: bittersweet, which feels appropriate for a band that, on some level, knew they had their last real shot about breaking big.
Echo & the Bunnymen’s second album improves on “Crocodiles” in virtually every way, including not having a terrible title. According to Les Pattinson, the band’s laziness basically corralled them into finding some kind of rhythm together, and thank god for that. “Heaven Up Here” stands shoulder to shoulder with the Cure’s “Faith” and Pornography” in terms of sheer atmospheric dread and spiraling instrumental madness, which probably means the two bands were sharing some of the same dealers. It is also likely the least commercial of all the band’s efforts, but sometimes you don’t need to be trying to achieve greatness.
“Echo & the Bunnymen” is the apex of the band as an attempted commercial entity, which makes sense when you know they fired the weirdo from the KLF as manager and got Duran Duran’s tour guy instead. If the band had been able to get Ian McCulloch from descending into Jim Morrison-like drunken stardom, it might have been their finest achievement, up there with huge cultural crossovers like U2’s “The Joshua Tree.” But as it is, this is still a band that, for just a moment, was able to lock into a perfect pop sensibility and produce a near-masterpiece.
WEA, Echo & the Bunnymen’s label at the time, rejected “Porcupine” as being too uncommercial, and the band themselves described the mood during recording as horrible and strained. Naturally, this produced one of the great bleak post-punk records of all time, a howling maelstrom of shattered pop like “The Back of Love” sitting alongside the trippy layered vocals and depressive poetry of “Higher Hell.” It’s a nervy, nervous album made by a band that was in its first phase of nearly falling apart, and it sounds like it, in the best way. We’re not saying that great music is always made by four white guys upset with each other in a small room, but “Porcupine” makes a pretty good case for it.
For decades now, Ian McCulloch has told the world not just that “Ocean Rain” is Echo & the Bunnymen’s best album but that it’s the fucking best album ever made. The thing is, he might actually have a point. “Ocean Rain” is a perfect synthesis of everything that the band has ever done, from the glorious shimmering strings that open “Silver” to the melancholy, wanderlust fantasy of “Ocean Rain.” This is an album in which “The Killing Moon” has serious competition in mystery and guitar hooks, like the wistful “Seven Seas” or the absurdly catchy “My Kingdom.” It’s an immensely dense album (literally, in that every instrument in the world, from a marimba to a 35-piece orchestra, shows up), but at the same time, as accessible as any pop album of the 1980s. Alright, McCulloch, you made your point.
Samiam later in their career always kind of rode that line between catchy punk and mainstream radio rock and this is the one where that line is crossed. This is a perfectly fine album but it’s also the one that you can almost imagine being played over the loudspeaker at your local supermarket.
After a six-year hiatus, they returned with this album and immediately something seemed off. All the elements are there for the most part but the recording sounds like it was done with a boombox placed in the middle of the practice room. The backlash to this was so bad that they released a remixed version in 2013 to fix the glaring mistakes but even this new version doesn’t really seem to have the goods.
It’s probably unfair to compare a band’s brand-new album to everything they’ve been doing for three previous decades, but then again life isn’t fair. We have to judge this one based solely on the music itself without any rose-colored nostalgia corrupting our judgment. The good news is the verdict is this a really good album with a lot of it sounding like something from their catalog in the late ‘90s.
1990 was a weird year for music. The punk and hardcore bands of the ‘80s had burned themselves out and the Whitesnakes of the world dominated the airwaves. This was the year Samiam released their first full-length and in a way picked up where Hüsker Dü left off even though it may be a little rough in spots.
Maybe it was the fact that nothing happened on Y2K, but by 2000 Samiam seemed to cool their heels a bit and relaxed into a mid-career cruise. Astray is both a little more angsty than its predecessor and also a bit more tame. We spent most of the year 2000 eating through our doomsday rations anyway.
Their second major label release and from a production stance, arguably their best-sounding record. Beebout’s vocals are clean but powerful and you can tell he was really swinging for the fences. This is the soundtrack to a slacker alt road trip to find the best thrift store two states over.
The second album for every band is tricky. While some bands make embarrassing cringe-tastic decisions on their second album (“Let’s add violins!”) Samiam instead solidified their sound and smoothed off just enough of the rough edges from their debut.
Their first major label release and their big breakout which earned them some modest airplay on MTV and even an appearance on the early Jon Stewart Show. The deep pockets of Atlantic Records afforded them better production but luckily they avoided the pitfalls of the overly slick and sanitized sound so many bands seem to fall into once Daddy Music Label opens their wallet.
What a sad fucking album this is but somehow it still makes you feel happy. Well, maybe not happy but possibly less depressed. Is it emo? Shit no. But it’s emotional as fuck. It almost feels like a concept album with the concept being life is shit especially when you’re broke and lonely.