100 Best Albums of the Nineties

100. Moby, ‘Everything Is Wrong’

Moby‘s first major-label album didn’t seem promising at first ”” a little techno dude trying his arty hand at pop-song form, New Age movie music and blues-metal guitar. But Everything Is Wrong turned out to be one amazing record, mixing up styles with earnest curiosity and that rarest of techno-dude traits, a sense of humor. “Feeling So Real” and “Everytime You Touch Me” are stunning disco anthems, while the mellow passages roam from Eno-like lyricism to classical gas. Moby buzzes with excitement, a Christian club kid who can’t stop raving about the DJ who saved his life last night and can’t wait to tell the story in sounds.

99. Luna, ‘Penthouse’

Dean Wareham made his name with the Eighties dream-pop trio Galaxie 500, but he really found his muse in these scandalously beautiful guitar ballads. His foxy voice slinks along the languid guitars as he plumbs his foolish heart in the back of a New York cab, going home alone after another night of fancy drinks and lucky toasts. Wareham purrs some sly one-liners (“It’s no fun reading fortune cookies to yourself”) but the music celebrates the pleasures of being too young, too rich, too pretty and too single, shopping for true love while getting lost in Chinatown.

98. Buena Vista Social Club, ‘Buena Vista Social Club’

Here’s an idea for a blockbuster: Take L.A. rock guitarist Ry Cooder, stick him in a Havana studio with a crew of legendary Cuban musicians and just let the old guys play their asses off. Against all odds, Buena Vista Social Club defied Nineties-pop formulas and became a huge word-of-mouth hit.

97. The Magnetic Fields, ’69 Love Songs’

Love Songs was both an arch concept album and a feast, sixty-nine tunes that explored all kinds of love: the giddy kind, the heart-crushing kind, the kind between gay cowboys. Stephin Merritt’s meticulous ditties were great on paper and even better as music: cheap, catchy and packed with surprises, mixing stark punk rock with swishy Tin Pan Alley and budget girl-group sonics.

96. Aphex Twin, ‘Selected Ambient Works, Volume II’

No beats, no tunes, no titles: Aphex Twin updated Brian Eno’s mid-Seventies concept of “discreet,” or ambient, music for the sunrise comedown hours after a hard night’s rave. Richard D. James created an enriched, wraparound style of burp-and-whoosh programming, the perfect soundtrack for pulling the pieces of your brain back together after spilling them all over the club floor. The first dance album to celebrate the rhythms in your head.

95. Nirvana, ‘MTV Unplugged in New York’

Surrounded by lilies, the flowers of death, Kurt Cobain sat on a soundstage almost five months before his suicide and made his last self-portrait. The morbid set list, ending with Cobain’s quietly desperate “All Apologies” and the Gothic folk tale “Where Did You Sleep Last Night,” fascinates, but the music’s life force contradicts it. Although it eschews one major facet of Nirvana‘s genius ”” the band’s way with noise ”” Unplugged reveals the brilliance beneath that roar: the melodic gifts, troubling insight and deep intelligence of an artist whose loss still hurts.

94. Billy Bragg and Wilco, ‘Mermaid Avenue’

It could have turned into a reverential school project ”” earnest folk rockers dutifully writing music for lyrics left behind by the sainted Woody Guthrie. But Mermaid Avenue is a loose, rollicking set that brings the best out of everyone involved. On “California Stars,” Wilco deftly capture Guthrie’s sweet, poetic side, while Bragg and Natalie Merchant duet affectionately on “Way Over Yonder in the Minor Key.” This album celebrates Guthrie by putting listeners in touch with a flesh-and-blood man, not a museum piece.

93. Air, ‘Moon Safari’

Air’s Nicolas Godin and Jean Benoit Dunckel were a couple of cerebral keyboard geeks from Versailles, France, where they obviously don’t get out of the studio much. Their space-pop debut, Moon Safari, was a truly obsessive hommage to easy listening, a sublime Eurocheese omelet. They built their music out of classic Sixties French schlock: bongos, castanets, vintage electric piano, dream-weaver synths and shag-carpet organ straight from the soundtracks of movies like Un Homme et Une Femme. The music is full of hidden jokes, as when “Remember” replicates the distorted drum intro from the Beach Boys hit “Do It Again”; Air’s Brian Wilson allusion isn’t some Smile-era obscurity ”” it’s a beach-party blowout. Loads of American bands tried to emulate the fab tackiness of 1960s French pop. But Moon Safari proves that the French really do it better themselves.

92. The Flaming Lips, ‘The Soft Bulletin’
The Flaming Lips camped out in their own studio for two years making The Soft Bulletin and came up with their wildest, wittiest art-rock statement yet: long-windedly engrossing songs built out of stray details, like the reverberating piano power chord that becomes the foundation of “What Is the Light” before segueing seamlessly into a space-cadet instrumental in “The Observer.” Tracks like “The Gash” combine disparate strains of hippie techno and indie rock into a strange and beautiful whole, somewhere between Abbey Road and 90210.

91. The Pixies, ‘Bossanova’
Bossanova was the Pixies‘ most straight-ahead rock album. But by their warped standards, it was still safely off the mainstream. Joey Santiago’s body-slamming guitars, Kim Deal’s measured, penetrating bass and David Lovering’s elemental drums sounded denser and tougher than on their first two albums, but some things hadn’t changed. Black Francis’ surreal lyrics were still open to conjecture; even he has stated he doesn’t entirely understand them. “Is She Weird” might be about a prostitute; “The Happening” might be about aliens landing in Las Vegas; “Down to the Well” is probably about sex. But content is almost incidental to these songs; what stands out is the beat that throbs like a hangover, the fever-dream atmospherics and the pelvis-grinding abandon.