90's Hit Parade #25

Luscious Jackson - Strongman/Energy Sucker

Funny how I can generate so many paragraphs on Smashing Pumpkins, who, as awesome as they are, I never really thought about a lot, but I'm not sure what to say about this pair of groovy tunes that I included on about 75 mixtapes in the late 90's/early 00's. Mostly, I find myself just wanting to talk about how hot the two singers are: gorgeous Jill Cunniff on bass and sassy Gabby Glaser on guitar. I always loved how their two voices interact. These two funky feminist joints are by far the highlight of their debut album, Natural Ingredients. I especially love the slinky groove on "Strongman," with bongos and flute providing the 70's sabor. Then that weird stretchy noise (could be extreme whammy-bar manipulation on guitar, but sounds more like a record being slowly "scratched" back and forth, or a reel-to-reel tape being manipulated) on "Energy Sucker" over the hard drums. They had some other great stuff to. The album started off with a good single, "Citysong," which had a nice video, and ended with this cool dub track called "LP Retreat" (not on Youtube). But the one other real killer they had was off their first EP, In Search of Manny. The video below is poor quality (probably off an old 120 Minutes VHS), but behold the greatness of "Daughters of the KAOS," below. P.S. the only video of "Energy Sucker online is this Power Rangers fan vid. The comments are hilarious. Apparantly, people have very strong opinions about Power Rangers.

Bonus Beat: