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Baker's Dozen

Flip Your Wig: Bob Mould's Favourite Albums
Nick Hutchings , June 18th, 2014 10:55

With his new, eleventh solo album Beauty & Ruin just released, the Hüsker Dü and Sugar man gives Nick Hutchings his top 13 records

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Garbage - Version 2.0
Oh no, Version 2.0, wow - what a cool record. That was a great record. I wasn't familiar with the first album, got this one and fell in love with it right away - I just thought, "What an amazing piece of work." And riffing off of Loveless, it had some of the similar elements - the density, the droning, the real pop structure but it was a little bit more mechanical.

Shirley [Manson] was great. I liked the whole feel of it, 'cause it had elements of dance music in it, a lot of the beats and people were remixing their stuff at that time. It was a really nice spot in time for me, when I started taking a break from rock music and started heading towards electronica. It was that and There Is Nothing Left To Lose, Foo Fighters - those two sort of lived side by side with me in that time period.

Shirley was really captivating - the structure of the songs, really meticulous; clearly they knew how to write very complicated songs. A studio band but compositionally they were doing a lot of things like key modulations off of choruses and then they'd get to the end and re-modulate. A lot of the fun stuff people hadn't been doing since the 60s pop music - a lot of the Jimmy Webb kind of tricks people forgot about - they were bringing that kind of stuff back that I loved. Just the sophistication in song writing. That was a great album, a really fun record.