5. The Van PeltSultans Of Sentiment
Out of all of the great American guitar records of the 90s, Sultans Of Sentiment just has a resonance for me. I love this sort of thing, Pavement, The Weakerthans, Built To Spill, Slint, Shudder To Think, all of that, but this album has an odd sort of warmth and melancholy that I sometimes find its contemporaries lack. I suppose it’s one of those real tricks of personal taste: it’s very difficult to really pin down the secret ingredient that makes this special for me. There is something amazing about all of those bands, something very human that comes from being bands. I like the clarity you get with a four-piece band, when they get it perfectly right: no textures and layers, it is what it is. My feller started playing me The Van Pelt – he’s quite into that 90s American indie stuff – but none of their other records grabbed me except this one. The lyrics are incredible: very kitchen sink, very Mike Leigh. They’re ambitious, but not always hyper-skilled at anything other than communicating on a real personal level, even when they’re being really lyrically obscure. There seems to have been this real love of poetry with those guys that a lot of scenes and movements might have rejected as pretentious. And the singer’s a bit like the vocalist in The Hold Steady, with that speaky-singy sort of thing, which I love.
