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Barry Adamson - As Above So Below (Mute) 1998

Mr. Adamson was a bassist in both Magazine and Nick Cave's Bad Seeds. When he left that group in 1987 he did some film scoring, but eventually looped back around to dark jazz-inflected rock music. Found this one in a cheapie bin in Halifax... it has most of his quirky proclivities from the spy film trumpet staps and smoothed out Tom Waits-ish clatter and rasp.
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Adem - Homesongs (Domino) 2004

Adem Ilhan started out with Kieren Hebden (who now sports the alias Four Tet) in the British trio Fridge. While Hebden followed a more electronic route out to his new career, Adem kept to a more singer/songwriter tack... though still with a machine-enhanced multi-instrumentality. Nice quiet pop songs that are a little dusty, a little sunny, a little broken-hearted. Got it as a playcopy... liked it, bought the newest one... which is still at the store being used as a playcopy and therefore not yet part of the permanent collection.
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Adorable - Against Perfection (Creation/EMI) 1993


Adorable - Fake (Creation) 1994

Against Perfection came in second hand around the year of it's release... which was smack in a glut of shoegazer bands all riding the wave My Bloody Valentine had touched off. Adorable was much less ethereal and more phlegmatic than most of the herd, especially set apart by singer Piotr Fijalkowski's cocky vocals reminiscent of Psychedelic Furs' Richard Butler. The music had the prerequisite squall of feedback and circular bass lines, and was just catchy enough to demand repeated listening yet distant enough to not grow tiresome. The band never caught on either in UK or North America and the second album, Fake, was never release in Canada. I so loved the first one that I considered ordering Fake on import... but my cheapness got the better of me and I demurred. Finally I found it second hand several years later and it turned out, like so many albums I jones for long and hard, to be a little disappointing... but still with a couple of great tracks. And that was it for Adorable... the singer went on to for another group Polak... more on that later.
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Aereogramme - A Story in White (Matador) 2001

Once upon a time there was a pretty awesome Scottish instrumental post-rock group that wasn't Mogwai. It was actually called Ganger and released two great albums, the second called Hammock Time came out in North America on Merge records, and they then split up. One of the two bassists formed a new called Aereogramme that had vocals and everything. If the band had released an e.p. consisting of the first five tracks on A Story in White then their history would be unmarred. But they went on with another eight tracks on the album and three more albums after that trying to meld sub-Coldplay nonsense lyrics and pretty melodies to angry guitars and guttural shouting passages... not often a good mix. Those first five songs though....
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Afghan Whigs - Up in it (Sub Pop) 1990


Afghan Whigs - Gentlemen (Elektra) 1993


Afghan Whigs - Black Love (Elektra) 1996

I can't really remember whether I got Up In It first, or Gentlemen.... I remember finding the Sub Pop album in a last ditch sales bin at Urban Sound Exchange up on Prospect St. before it slunk away in the middle of the night under the pretense of renovations. In Fredericton "renovations" mean "let's see how much shit we can sneak out of here before the guys with the padlocks show up." But I digress. Whatever order I got them in the jewel in the Afghan Whig crown is most definitely Gentlemen. Singer/writer Greg Dulli is a hopeless romantic with a misogynist/pugilist heart and the song cycle on the 1993 major label debut proves it again and again. Especially effective is when, on the track My Curse, he turns the vocal over to Marcy Mays of Scrawl and the female perspective of the lover/slave relationship is given time. It'll break your heart... really. The Whigs continued on for a few more albums that were good in their own right. More recently Dulli has moved on to front Twilight Singers... a group that started off mixing the funky heaviness of the Afghan Whigs with a lighter tropical touch provided by Fila Brazilia... though the last work by Twilight Singers is much much closer to the Whigs at their most abrasive.