Almost everything here seemed inescapable at the time but most of it is hazed by memory in 2023. Trying to listen clearly, it was hard to pick a trio of favourites. ‘You and Me Song’ is one of the two Wannadies tracks worth remembering, alongside the sugary wind-up of ‘Hit’. ‘#1 Crush’ is far from my favourite Garbage song of the era, but as a Garbage song of that era it’s still a perfect paradox – furious/horny, ambigendered, somehow both all atmosphere and all groove. “I will never be ignored” is the sort of line you sing from one side of the mirror hoping to break through to the other.
I could live without tracks by The Butthole Surfers and The Cardigans, but hearing them makes me see 1996 more clearly. Whether that’s a good thing depends on how you feel about the movie and your own past.
Of my top three, ‘Young Hearts Run Free’ asks for no defence and gives no quarter. The Romeo-ravished lyrics to ‘Local God’ are maybe a bit much in context, but “I feel like a local god when I’m with the boys” is real magic wherever you hear it. There was often something flimsy about Everclear’s riffs, but at their occasional best they managed to turn that into a sense of desperation – a band working themselves up for the show and the big escape to follow.
‘Talk Show Host’ sounds like a whole other movie. Most of the time when people say that about a song that means it has strings on it or tells a clear story. Maybe even both, if you’re lucky. Thom York sings some sort of story here – “I’ll be waiting/With a gun and a pack of sandwiches” – and synths provide the atmosphere, but it’s how the drums crunch into gear at 1.49 that really matters.
As action goes it’s not as operatic as what Baz Luhrmann serves fir breakfast on any given Thursday, but it still gives the sense that something’s happening that you want to pay attention to.
Blue Box // Recorder 