In around 1992, I heard Frente!’s (hereafter, Frente), cover of New Order’s masterpiece, “Bizarre Love Triangle.” Stripped down to singer Angie Hart’s vocals and guitarist Simon Austin’s light guitar arrangement, it dangled like a bauble amid the rest of the 120 Minutes slate driven, in no small part, by the incredibly photogenic Hart playing to the camera.

The cover was part of their name-making Marvin the Album that was used to spread Frente from being an Australian band to being a folky, fun band with international reach. In Summer 1996, after my first year at college where I’d been introduced to the Sundays, Frente returned with their second album: Shape which kept Hart’s angelic voice, but layered it into an ambitiously energetic, complex, Brian Wilson-esque psychedelia that, sadly, never got its due.

Let’ un-forget Frente’s Shape.

Once upon a time there was a band called Catatonia made up of bored and isolated young folks in Wales. They wrote clever and catchy songs. They sang in Welsh and English. Their singer’s voice was supple and ferocious; it could seduce and it could head-butt you as an opening salvo in a pub brawl. She was a sonic and cultural Boudicca. At a fevered peak in the 1990’s, Catatonia left Wales to try to make it bigger and became a commodity product adjacent to the “Britpop” narrative (viz. Blur and Oasis) as part of the “Cool Cymru” sound. That Catatonia never quite got their due, and that Catatonia’s final album is a complete piece that shows their versatility, capability, and uniqueness.

Let’s un-forget Catatonia’s Equally Cursed and Blessed.

I recall reading an interview with Elastica frontwoman Justine Frischmann years ago and, having been in and around the “Britpop” scene of the 1990’s, she remarked that she had expected the breakthrough in America Britpop band to be the Stone Roses.¹

It was funny to me, then, because I had never even heard of “the Roses” or even her own previous band at that time, Suede. But who knows why certain English-speaking acts go huge in the UK but not America: The Spice Girls made the leap, but Bush remained unknown in Britain; Radiohead crossed the briny deep and remained relevant in the UK, but Catatonia did not.

As it happened, Frischmann was the front-woman for a band that had a mixed leap: they landed a single or two in America, but were largely forgotten by the time of the release of their sophomore album, The Menace. So, that was the down side.

But the upside was their freshman album, the self-titled Elastica. Sexy, androgynous, flirty, witty, and funny, Elastica landed in the summer of 1995 with it’s provocative and catchy “Connection” hitting medium rotation on MTV. Shortly after “Connection,” “2:1” appeared as part of the Trainspotting soundtrack which helped lift Elastica’s profile.

Heading off to college in the Fall of 1995, Elastica was a resident in my dorm room CD changer. My earliest memories of schoolwork (doing “Contemporary Moral Problems” essay writing) have this album as soundtrack.

Giving the album (yet-) another listen after all these years, I couldn’t resist the pop hooks, the nostalgia, and fun of the album. I also couldn’t avoid the conclusion that I had memorized much of the lyrics incorrectly as I was unable to seine out the words through Frischmann’s Kensington accent which was further accented by snarls, slang, exclamations, and semi-orgasmic squeals. As it turned out, it didn’t matter: the hooky-ness of the songs, the energy, and the beat power over the fact that you didn’t hear every fourth word and, even if you did know them, many of the lyrics in toto are verbal experiments or lyrics à clef detailing some music-business society kerfuffle that you don’t have any context on anyway.

Don’t worry. Be happy.

Let’s go back to the midpoint of the 90’s and un-forget Elastica’s Elastica.