Other than a good Carter USM b-side, it's the new section I'm starting tonight ( I actually did it a few months ago with the Curve post). I'm going to write a bit about some records that I love and that were never hits (some of them were not even popular among my indie friends). All of them were released in the 1990's, which is perhaps my favourite decade in pop music.
The first one (the only one I actually have in mind now, but I promise to think about more entries) is Carter the Unstoppable Sex Machine's amazing 1991 album, "30 Something".
Carter USM, described by the New Internationalist as "the UK’s first real post-Thatcher pop group", put together 11 musically simple songs (they were two anarcho-hippies playing guitars over pre-recorded techno-hardcore drums and samples). But the interest of their songs lay in the lyrics, which tell such popular stories as alcoholism, the first Iraq war, racism in the army, consumerism or home violence.They may sound bleak, (and they are), but this record is above all loaded with witty, black humour.
