Revisiting SPIN's 1994 New Music Preview

Under ordinary circumstances, I would never even think of trying to write one of these after 9pm on a weeknight, but after taking a look at the depressingly paltry list of acts covered in this year's New Music Preview, I feel like I can probably handle it.

As you're already aware if you've been following this series, the amount of space SPIN devoted to actually previewing new music in its New Music Preview issues took a steep dive after 1990, and the '94 edition continued that trend in an extremely noticeable way: Only five acts are covered here. Someday, I'd love to know more about the factors that played into the magazine's rapidly waning interest in shining a spotlight on up-and-coming artists — specifically the type of unsigned and/or underground act that was still getting plenty of coverage in '90 — but for now, let's just dive in.

Luscious Jackson - We can give SPIN credit for some small degree of prescience with this pick, given that Luscious Jackson were still a few years away from their biggest (and really only) chart success with "Naked Eye." On the other hand, the group had strong ties with the Beastie Boys, who made them the inaugural signing to their Grand Royal label. (It didn't hurt that original Beasties drummer Kate Schellenbach was part of the lineup.)

Either way, Luscious Jackson counts as a genuine new music preview — their Natural Ingredients LP didn't arrive until August of '94, spewing out a few mildly buzzy singles and rocketing to No. 2 on the chart. (The Heatseeker chart, specifically, but that was sort of a badge of honor back in those days.)

Like a lot of '90s bands, Luscious Jackson imploded toward the end of the decade, only to reunite (albeit without keyboardist Vivian Trimble) after the passage of time built up enough nostalgia to fuel new music. They still had enough fans to go the PledgeMusic route, but the pair of post-reunion records they released flew fairly far under the radar; since 2017, they've been on what appears to be an indefinite hiatus. In retrospect, this seems like a shame — while I didn't have much use for their music at the time, finding it more vibe-driven than song-driven, they were really offering something fairly cool and unique.

New Kingdom - By the time this issue went to press, New Kingdom's debut LP Heavy Load had been in stores for a few months — not that most consumers knew it. The hip-hop duo was signed to Gee Street, the Virgin-distributed imprint that was home to Stereo MC's (who were part owners), PM Dawn, and an array of less well-known acts; like a lot of smaller labels, they weren't exactly well-equipped to break new artists, which is just part of why New Kingdom languished well outside the commercial mainstream.

The other reasons for their failure to ignite on the charts had more to do with their music, which was extremely forward-thinking — they're credited with helping lay the groundwork for the then-nascent trip-hop movement — and, as a result, never had a prayer of luring suburban kids to record stores. Listening to Heavy Load now, it isn't hard to understand why so many people never heard it — but it's also easy to recognize the many was in which Jason Furlow and Sebastian Laws were years ahead of their time. Good on SPIN for tabbing New Kingdom as an act to look out for in '94; it's too bad this pick didn't really pan out.

Given how indifferently the Gee Street catalog has been treated over the years — at one point, the label's assets were owned by Artemis, the short-lived, Danny Goldberg-led label responsible for Warren Zevon's last few albums and not much else — it's unsurprising that neither of the New Kingdom albums are streaming. It's worth digging up their stuff on YouTube:

The Spinanes - Bands don't get much more '90s than the Spinanes. Founded in 1991, this guitar/drums duo checked off all the boxes — they were from the Pacific Northwest; they had a raw, jangly, distortion-friendly sound; and Rebecca Gates' dreamy, slightly disaffected-sounding vocals conjured feelings of drifting through the world while also turning away from it. If you were in your teens or early 20s in the early-to-mid '90s, this music will likely remind you of endless afternoons, friends' sofas, low-stakes part-time jobs, and the nagging feeling — long since lost — that something better was just around the corner if you could only wrap your hands around it.

The Spinanes landed on this list by virtue of their 1993 album Manos, which, like so many critical darlings of its era, was released via Sub Pop. While no album could really sum up the Sub Pop aesthetic, Manos comes pretty close — which is to say it's almost equal parts delicate and ferocious, and always sounds juuuust a little too left of the dial to fit in on the Top 40, even during the more freewheeling '90s. And that's basically the story of the band: While their records were well-received by critics, and they did pretty well on college radio, they didn't sell a bunch. Drummer Scott Plouf left to join Built to Spill full-time in 1997, and Gates soldiered on for one more album with an expanded lineup before retiring the Spinanes mantle to launch a solo career. Manos fell out of print for years, but was reissued by Merge in 2018.

Jeff Buckley - Before he became a legend in death, Jeff Buckley was a widely anointed Next Big Thing whose debut LP, 1994's Grace, largely failed to fulfill industry expectations. Today, it's known as a beloved classic — and/or the record responsible for launching a flood of fucking "Hallelujah" covers — but at the time, Grace was a slow seller, and if you can bring yourself to peel back the layers of deification, it isn't difficult to understand why. If you're going to fall for a record like Grace, you've got to put in the time; it's a grower, with Buckley's slippery, elastic vocals serving as the glue that grips a series of rather diffuse melodies together. Upon first (or maybe even fourth or fifth) listen, it can sound like nothing so much as a group of talented people doing things that create a mood without really cohering. It is not, in other words, an album for everyone, and I myself have always stood outside the Buckley fandom, wondering for years what I was missing before finally accepting that we were destined to never connect.

Anyway. Like Luscious Jackson, Buckley is something of a 50/50 pick for this issue — it's true that the magazine was going out on a bit of a limb, given that Grace wouldn't arrive on store shelves until August, but on the other hand, he was the son of a widely respected singer-songwriter who'd won major-label backing after building a legend for himself the old-fashioned way: by headlining solo shows at a New York City nightclub and honing his stage presence until A&R execs came calling. In a different world — the world Columbia Records was hoping we lived in — Grace would have been one of the biggest releases of the year instead of clogging cutout bins.

Jawbox - I think the main idea that these SPIN posts keep coming back to is that it's easy to feel nostalgic for the music of the '90s because it represents the last gasp of an era when the mainstream was still equipped and willing to accommodate a wide array of sounds. But we also keep coming back to the underlying reason for that — namely, that major labels started pumping a ton of money into signing indie acts toward the dawn of the decade, leading to a lot of signings that were spurred more by a desire to purchase a winning lottery ticket than actual top-down belief in the music being made.

A lot of acts were crushed in the gears during this period, and Jawbox might be one of the best examples. When Atlantic poached the band from Dischord, sales expectations were mile-high, but the label never really knew what to do with them beyond commissioning a video for "Savory" and sending the group on tour with Stone Temple Pilots. Neither of these were bad moves in 1994, mind you, but one listen to For Your Own Special Sweetheart is enough to make you wonder who in the world thought the industry would be able to squeeze platinum out of this post-hardcore stone. Jawbox's stuff is heavily melodic, but it's also simply heavy in a way that the work of their more actively purchased peers was not.

Frontman J. Robbins probably summed up the era best in a 2018 retrospective piece on Sweetheart, telling writer Jeff Terich, “When [A&R exec Mike Gitter] took us to meet Danny Goldberg, who was president of Atlantic at the time, he barely got off the phone... I remember him saying something to us like ‘Honestly, I don’t really get you guys, but I trust Gitter and that’s enough for me. Welcome to Atlantic Records.’”

Jawbox disbanded after a pair of Atlantic releases, but reunited in 2019; their most recent effort, the Revisionist EP, arrived in 2022.