Tag: Alternative Rock

2024, Music

Dark Matter (2024) by Pearl Jam

I love the first 15 years of Pearl Jam’s career pretty damn unconditionally. Even albums I didn’t love on first listen (Yield, Riot Act), I now quite like. But I definitely do not feel the same way about the last 15 years. I have liked none of their last four albums remotely as much as …

1986, Music

Express (1986) by Love and Rockets

I spent way too much time in my review of Earth Sun Moon obsessing over how these guys weren’t Bauhaus. It’s a weird review that I find hard to read now. I wish I had focused on the music so I could try to compare the two records and understand why I appear to have …

1991, Music

Pocket Full of Kryptonite (1991) by Spin Doctors

What a bizarre story. A bit like Ten but with way fewer sales and hits. “Little Miss Can’t Be Wrong” hit #17 in December of 1992. “Two Princes” hit #7 in April of 1993. (The album came out in August 1991.) When this came out, the world was apparently not yet ready for it. I’m …

1991, Music

Gish (1991) by Smashing Pumpkins

There are people, usually older people, who will tell you that Gish is actually the Pumpkins’ best album, or their only good album, or something like that. I suspect these people are either just old or they are being deliberately contrarian/curmudgeonish, or they are trying to be hipsters (“I liked the Pumpkins before they were …

1991, Music

Seamonsters (1991) by The Wedding Present

We all have musical sweet spots, things we like so much that we just eat up anything that fits into those sweet spots. This album, the first I have ever heard by The Wedding Present, hits me in a few of mine. And I left wondering, not for the first time, why it took me …

1996, Music

To the Faithful Departed (1996) by The Cranberries

I know this is not “the big one” but I was actually surprised how many of the singles from this record which I remembered, dare I say almost fondly. (I guess this means I’m getting old enough to just be happy to hear the music of my teens, even when I didn’t like it at …

2021, Music

Tonic Immobility (2021) by Tomahawk

I possibly anticipated this record too much, despite being sort of underwhelmed initially by Oddfellows. (And I’d say I’ve come to like it more than I did on my first listens, but I haven’t listened to it in forever.) There are things about this record that just aren’t completely working for me right now – …

2000, Music

Stories From the City, Stories From the Sea (2000) by PJ Harvey

PJ Harvey is one of the great songwriters of her generation, and this album is another fine example of her abilities. but the record marks a bit of a change in aesthetic for her (as far as I know) that I don’t exactly love.

2000, Music

Chocolate Starfish and the Hot Dog Flavored Water (2000) by Limp Bizkit

Limp Bizkit are so monumentally dumb that, while I’m listening to a Limp Bizkit record, I have trouble imagining there are dumber bands. Now, I know there are plenty of dumb bands, but the scale of the Bizkit’s dumbness is so immense that, during the album, you just sort of forget that there could be …

1990, Music

Nowhere (1990) by Ride

I’ve never gotten shoegaze, it’s just not anything that appeals to me on a fundamental level. Some of this comes from the nature of the genre – pop music drowning in distortion is still pop music – and part of it I’m pretty sure comes from not seeing it live at the time it was …

1985, Music

Flip Your Wig (1985) by Hüsker Dü

Time can really change perception, especially when it comes to cultural artifacts. I have read online abbout how this is one of Hüsker’s great albums, perhaps even their best. But I don’t hear it. I don’t know if that’s because I haven’t sat down and listened to New Day Rising recently or whether it’s because …

1995, Music

Garbage (1995)

As I have said way too many times, I do not like post grunge. Usually, post grunge takes something I like and basically ruins it. However, Garbage avoid many of the most irritating aspects of post grunge, if you can even classify Garbage as post grunge. (In fact, that false categorization may explain why I …

1990, Music

Facelift (1990) by Alice In Chains

Alice in Chains are, to me, the least immediately appealing of the big Seattle grunge bands. I think that’s because they have the least catchy songs – though Cantrell is a good songwriter he is not necessarily a writer of particularly catchy songs. Though I do wonder how much of my experience of this band …

1985, Music

The Head on the Door (1985) by The Cure

My general appreciation of The Cure keeps running into problems. The problem is that I had their singles collections for years and listened to them fairly regularly but didn’t get around to their albums until recently. And now I listen to them haphazardly: one from the early ’80s here, one from the mid ’80s there, …

1990, Music

Goo (1990) by Sonic Youth

Sometime between their earliest albums and Daydream Nation Sonic Youth learned how to write melodies and, as importantly, learned how to swing. (Obviously this happened gradually.) And that development is perhaps nowhere more apparent than on Goo, their most accessible album to date.Sure, calling a Sonic Youth album ‘accessible’ is a relative thing, but it’s …

1990, Music

The Good Son (1990) by Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds

I love Tender Prey. For me, it’s the culmination of the Seeds through their first era, a powerful combination of punk-influenced music and songwriting well beyond the quality of most punk albums.

1990, Music

Pills ‘n’ Thrills and Bellyaches (1990) by Happy Mondays

I’ve listened to a few madchester/baggy albums at this point and it’s safe to say that I just don’t get the genre. Now, I get very few dance-rock hybrids outside of Talking Heads’ version of that kind of thing, but this one I find particularly perplexing.

1985, Music

Up on the Sun (1985) by Meat Puppets

The more that I listen to the Meat Puppets the more it feels like they are one of the foundational bands of American alternative rock, setting the template for what was acceptable. When I was young and first encountering alternative, it felt like the diversity was baked in but original. The more I listen to …

1985, Music

Meat is Murder (1985) by The Smiths

One of two things is happening: either I am slowly – slowly – getting so inured to The Smiths that I no longer hate their guts – or I have listened to enough of the British music of the 1980s to finally understand why people thought they were such a big deal. I still don’t …

2000, Music

Razorblade Romance (2000) by HIM

To the extent the I know HIM I hate HIM. In 2011 I listened to Deep Shadows and Brilliant Highlights and Love Metal, panning both of them and giving the former a rare 3/10. (Music has to be bad for me to go that low.) The ensuing years seem to have mellowed me somewhat or …