| TOP 60 ALBUMS 1993-2003 | |
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40 Dandy Warhols |
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39 Polvo Exploded Drawing (Touch And Go), 1996 Math rock’s swan song? These North Carolinians helped create it—they could tear it down. If death-by-genrecide makes for a messy crime scene, well, Polvo nevertheless wielded its implements like champs, serving up Mongolian cowboy campfire songs, abrasive punk ballets, heavy-metal dada ditties and four vinyl sides of fractured-fretboard fairy tales. As a result, an entire slide-ruled nation learned how to stop worrying and love the prog. The album title and back-cover artwork (depicting amp/speaker schematics) help hammer home the message: Artisans may need blueprints, but artists still get to draw outside the lines. (Fred Mills) |
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38 Godspeed You Black Emperor! f#a# (Kranky), 1998 If this Montreal nine-piece could’ve encoded a certain sound into the final, decaying chords of this sprawling instrumental epic—something that made the listener’s head explode like a microwaved puppy—would the band have considered using it? Proof beyond doubt that psychedelia is more than just effects-driven guitar music, this swells from frozen nights on a lunar desert to a stinging hornets’ nest of misery. Majestic, brooding and suicidally intense in a way that makes Angelo Badalamenti seem like just another film composer, f#a# is so perfectly realized it makes the rest of Godspeed’s career seem almost superfluous. (Jud Cost) |
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37 Sugar File Under: Easy Listening (Rykodisc), 1994 File Under: Easy Listening finally did what Hüsker Dü fans had been waiting for since Warehouse: Songs And Stories: It put Bob Mould on the radio. Though it’s easy to think of “Your Favorite Thing” as the record’s sole sliver of silver, the fact is it’s just one among a vaultful. Time has made antiques of other alt-rock artifacts, but Easy Listening actually sounds better nine years on. The album is the first time Mould fully surrendered to that spectre of melody that had been haunting him, and Easy Listening’s combination of blustery guitars and sweet, sweet songwriting finds it to be a worthwhile stalking. (J. Edward Keyes) |
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36 Beta Band The Three E.P.’s (Astralwerks), 1999 Imagine, if you will, an altered musical landscape where the usual laws of genre don’t apply. A place where Robert Johnson went down to the crossroads to meet not the Devil, but Beck; where the Beach Boys were produced not by Brother Brian, but by Dr. Dre; where George Harrison didn’t travel to Rishikesh to meditate with the Maharishi, but to Cologne to study with Holger Czukay; and where the Flaming Lips operate not from Oklahoma’s cultural vacuum, but atop Phil Spector’s wall of sound. No advance testing required; the Beta Band’s first recordings arrived fully certified and stamped “cool.” (Fred Mills) |
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35 Fugazi In On The Killtaker (Dischord), 1993 In acute need of a shake-up after 1991’s rut-riding Steady Diet Of Nothing, Fugazi rebounded with the shackle-breaking In On The Killtaker, beginning a graceful sidestep toward a more intricate—but no less biting—sound. The louds got louder, the softs got softer, the weirds got weirder. A pair of mid-album songs serve as a gauntlet: The squalls of the lengthy “23 Beats Off” give way to contemplative instrumental “Sweet And Low,” which in turn leads into a pair of indignant rockers. Not so much the end of an era as an expansion of the palette, Killtaker is the charged, exciting sound of new breadth from already accomplished aces. (Josh Modell) |
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34 Interpol Turn On The Bright Lights (Matador), 2002 Forget, for a moment, all the comparisons to long-gone British post-punk groups, NYC scene-mongering and evocations of the foppish Pretty In Pink zeitgeist. As of this writing, no band walks the Earth that sounds quite like Interpol or approaches its brand of metrosexual ennui. This debut carefully balances muscular, euphoric guitar rock (Bright Lights is at least three songs deep in the modern-rock singles department) and delicate, grave ruminations that singer/ guitarist Paul Banks shrouds in surrealistic imagery (the second half of the album could be a 4AD mini-LP). Indie rockers, goths, punks of the world: Unite and swoon. (Matthew Fritch) |
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33 Smashing Pumpkins Siamese Dream (Virgin), 1993 Ex-girlfriends and spaceboys and cherubs with lashes, love that ends ruined in smoldering ashes, Brian May bullets with butterfly wings—these were a few of Bill’s favorite things. Mayonnaise moonbeams and peroxide-haired bassists, male-model guitarists with wan, drawn-out faces, hummers and silverfucks sweetened with strings—these were a few of Bill’s favorite things. Billy Corgan might just spend the rest of his career unsuccessfully attempting to duplicate the nervy miasma of prog, goth and stadium rock he made so indelible on Smashing Pumpkins’ major-label debut, a bittersweet symphony for the ages. (Corey duBrowa) |
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32 Sunny Day Real Estate Diary (Sub Pop), 1994 Forget the hooded-sweatshirt historians who insist on placing Rites Of Spring at emo ground zero. Whatever silly name gets tacked on the last 10 years’ worth of earnest, guitar-heavy rock, much of it would’ve been impossible—or at least extremely unlikely—without Diary. Though it inspired far more below-average knockoffs than it did worthy heirs, the album stands as a triumph of individuality, combining basic rock elements in a newly thunderous way, supercharging post-hardcore with passion and, yes, emotion. Much credit goes to Jeremy Enigk’s cryptic voice and lyrics: Whatever the hell he’s singing about, he sure seems to mean it. (Josh Modell) |
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31 Built To Spill Perfect From Now On (Warner Bros.), 1997 Few artists would allow three years to elapse between their indie-ranks farewell and major-label debut; fewer still would seize upon the commercial possibilities this arrangement entails to issue a record whose shortest song lasts five minutes. But Doug Martsch isn’t your average artist, and Perfect From Now On isn’t your average album—psychedelia challenges indie behind the school backstop to a fistfight, then forgets to show up. One song even has Martsch wishing for silence (“I can’t get that sound you make out of my head/No one else around even seems to be noticing/It’s only small enough for me”). Thank Christ for the cacophony. (Corey duBrowa) |