Discoveries Music Critic Winda Benedietti Sorts Through Her Statsh Of Compact Discs From 1997

If you listen very closely, you can hear the future sounds of rock ‘n’ roll.

It’s the squeaky-scratching of thousands of new CDs being shrink-wrapped.

It’s the drooling of record executive pondering dollar signs as they stand poised to engulf us with another year’s spate of albums.

It’s the sucking sound of money siphoned from our wallets as we hand over our hard-earned cash for those records.

It’s a new year. And a new crush of CDs are rolling toward record stores even as the New Year’s Eve champagne bottles are being tossed into the trash.

But before the deluge begins, in the tradition of all music critics, I’ve been assigned the daunting task of making some sense of the 1997 year in rock ‘n’ roll.

A year that found hair metal bands returning from well-deserved exile.

A year that found five bimbos called the Spice Girls giving the music industry a goose in the rear.

A year in which the term electronica became synonymous with hype.

Make sense of it? ITAL Sigh. UNITAL It seemed hopeless.

So I sat in deep meditation before the stacks of CDs that crossed my path last year. They are, in truth, only a portion of the total albums released. Still, if I piled them one atop the other they would likely stand three times my height.

Should I come up with a top 10 list? A top 100 list? Should I stand atop a tall building and pitch the entire lot over the edge?

Or how about this: In an entirely unscientific fashion, I’ll just peruse the good, the bad and the downright weird albums that nabbed my attention in 1997.

Certainly, many of these shiny slabs would have been better put to use as coffee coasters. But there are a good number of gems here worthy of picking up before you begin wading through the next musical onslaught.

Likely the 1997 year in rock ‘n’ roll will make no more sense than it did before. But at least you’ll have a bigger CD collection.

Get out your wallet “I can’t get that sound you make out of my head,” sings Doug Martsch, frontman and mastermind behind Built to Spill. It would seem he’s pinpointed the very character that makes an album scrabble its way above fellow CDs. They are albums that demand to be played - over and over and over again.

It seems only appropriate then, that Martsch’s Boise-based band was the first this year to smack my ears with a forward-thinking sound that refused to be ignored. “Perfect From Now On” (Warner Bros.) is filled with epic songs that adroitly traverse multiple tempos and mood changes. Martsch creates a skeleton of guitars and drums and then fleshes out his masterpieces with flourishes of keyboard and cello. The result is songs that journey from dreamy melancholy to pointed rocking. “I’m gonna be perfect from now on,” comes Martsch’s promise. Probably not, but he’s come awfully close this time around.

Expansive in its space-age darkness and earthly in its disarming melodies, Radiohead’s “OK Computer” (Capitol) is a delectable album that moves like a river - gushing at times in rock ‘n’ roll and wallowing at times in its conceptual depths. Lush with instrumentation and textured with noise, the album from this Oxford, England, fivesome crafts art-rock into something both edgy and lovely.

Speaking of depths, Pavement’s lyrics have been incessantly plumbed and regularly hailed by fans as deep and insightful. But with lines like “I swung the fiery sword/I vent my spleen at the lord” I’m not sure whether to call them profound or incoherent. No matter. With their latest album, “Brighten the Corners” (Matador/Capitol) it’s best to jettison your search for lyrical meaning and focus instead on singer Stephen Malkmus’ voice as it wings from lazy sing-song to delirious screech. Here, dissonance has been turned to delicious alt-rock. And although Pavement can sometimes go down like a cantankerous pill, in the end it’s a cure for the stale rock that ails you.

Take an altogether different trip through lyrical la la land with the latest from Ween.

“Mutilated lips give a kiss on the wrist of the worm-like tips of tentacles expanding in my mind.”

Eh?

There’s no telling what was going through this demented duo’s conjoined heads when they recorded “The Mollusk” (Elektra), but this album is fascinating in its bizarreness not to mention addictive in its schizophrenic range of loony-catchy melodies. Created by Gene and Dean Ween (not their real names), this album trips from the swirling spookiness of “Mutilated Lips” to the roguish Irish bar tune “The Blarney Stone.” Predictable they’re not. Crazily inventive they are.

David Bowie may be aging but his music isn’t. This old-timer took the best elements from the over-hyped “electronica” hoopla and injected it with his own well-aged pop sensibility for “Earthling” (Virgin). What he created is an album thick with cool mechanized beats and synthetic sounds - an album that whoops up on many of his young contemporaries’ flailing efforts.

Bjork also deserves praise for deftly splicing the electronic element with string orchestration on “Homogenic” (Elektra). Here, the Nordic songstress is both icily ascetic and touchingly human as her words float and elongate in beautiful Bjork fashion.

A check of the home front finds top honors going to Spokane’s Makers. Their album “Hunger,” (Estrus) is a tour de force of garage rock and roll played fast and fierce like it should be. Songs like “Small Town Depression” and “Hard Times” broil with disenchantment and an in-your-face coarseness that still remains fun to listen to.

Also in 1997, Spokane’s Too Slim and the Taildraggers brought us “Blues for EB,” a standout album grounded in blues and then textured with rockabilly, swing and Cajun turns.

Former Spokanite David Hayes released a compilation of romp-hard punk and roll on his now Las Vegas-based Very Small Records label. “Liverache: Tales from the Liver’s Edge” (a followup to the “Songs About Drinking Vol. 1” comp) is a two-record vinyl set of beer-swilling tunes from regional favorites like Elmer, Bomf and the Automatics along with muscular songs from now-defunct local favorites like the Flies, the Sissies and Velvet Pelvis. Add to that list ditties from Dwarf Bitch, Catapult and Schlong and you have a concoction that’ll leave you pleasantly punch drunk on punk.

Also worthy of your green

Morphine’s “Like Swimming” is like a high-board dive into sweet oblivion.

Sleater-Kinney’s “Dig Me Out” is amped-up, wall-of-riff relentless punk goodness.

Whisky Town’s “Strangers Almanac” makes me not mind all the hype about alternative-country music.

Old 97s’ “To Far to Care” is more alt-country, this time with a impudent punk pitch.

Joe Jackson’s “Heaven and Hell” is a devilishly inventive mix of pop and classical music.

Red Red Meat “There’s a Star Above the Manger Tonight” and Undertoad’s self-titled album - both are explorations into exotic rhythms and noises done with real talent rather than a blunt club.

A3 “Exile on Coldharbour Lane” - who knew a blend of techno, blues and gospel could actually work. And work well.

Money better spent on Chia pet

A beer, a Coke, a glass of wine - I suggest that you set whatever drink you like atop these CDs. They’ll do a fine job of protecting your furniture from those nasty water stains. Whatever you do, just don’t put them in your stereo.

You remember Snow don’t you? That white guy who thought he was a rap/reggae artist. Well, in 1997 he released “The Greatest Hits of Snow” (Elektra). Greatest hits? I thought he only had one - “Informer.” And if he had others, it’s only because people mistook them for the first. Give it up white boy.

Hair n’ spandex kings Slaughter came back for more in 1997 with “Revolution” (CMC). I wish they hadn’t.

W.A.S.P. also felt the need to rear their shaggy heads. But with their latest album “K.F.D.” (Castle Records) they just seem like aging, flat-voiced rockers struggling to shock rock with the likes of young whippersnapper Marilyn Manson. Trouble is, at 43, Blackie Lawless is just too old for this schtick. Time to hand over the black eyeliner Lawless.

On a local level, “Through the Eyes of a Child” from Mykey’s Outrage stands as the worst CD I’ve gotten from a Spokane group this year. Sorry boys but it’s true. I mean really, “I’m just another driver in search of a screw tonight” and “Sex, it’s a groovy thing/but you better wear a suit made of neoprene.” Work on your writing and your playing before you try again.

I hate to jump on the critical bandwagon. But I just can’t help myself. I feel it’s my duty to roundly pummel LeAnn Rimes for her “You Light Up My Life - Inspirational Songs” (Curb).

Uninspired could not possibly come close to describing this album that bears insipid renditions of “Amazing Grace,” “You Light Up My Life” and “Bridge Over Troubled Water.” The terms vapid and grating come closer to the mark, especially when it comes to her Sunday-school-goody-two-shoes versions of “God Bless America” and the National Anthem.

Hear that sound?

It’s me, jumping up and down on the saccharine gag-fest that is Rimes’ CD.

, DataTimes