70: Heavy Vegetable’s Frisbee (1995)

I’m beginning to feel like some of my choices are pretty obtuse, but you have to understand something about me. I really enjoy difficult music, and while a spare and simple ballad can move me just as much, musicians who bend the rules and break out of traditional ruts always stick with me. Rob Crow’s Heavy Vegetable wasn’t just melodic and swinging and toe-tapping, it was drop-D metal, and furious punk, and lovely male-female harmony and indirect approaches to songwriting that resulted in, if nothing else, some of the most innovative songs of the 90s. The compositions are electric jolts of WTF, most of them over just as you’re starting to catch on to the time changes and patterns. Most people want to ejaculate all over Pinback, but as nice as Pinback is, it doesn’t come close to reaching the creativity and sheer interestingness of Heavy Vegetable.

Heavy Vegetable “I Owe You” (mp3)