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100 Best Albums of the Nineties

40. Neil Young, ‘Harvest Moon’ The title echoes Harvest, Young‘s countryish album of two decades earlier, and the music recalls its gentle flavor. Harvest was a mellow bestseller, an uncharacteristic middle-of-the-road pit stop in a decade of deeply personal and sometimes highly eccentric releases, and Harvest Moon also sounds as if it was made for […]

May 20, 2011

40. Neil Young, ‘Harvest Moon’
The title echoes Harvest, Young‘s countryish album of two decades earlier, and the music recalls its gentle flavor. Harvest was a mellow bestseller, an uncharacteristic middle-of-the-road pit stop in a decade of deeply personal and sometimes highly eccentric releases, and Harvest Moon also sounds as if it was made for lazy hammock-swinging afternoons. But beneath its placid surface are the craggy scars of middle age, when holding onto and cherishing love (see the title track) is a lot more difficult than finding it.

39. My Bloody Valentine, ‘Loveless’
Technically, this album isn’t instrumental ”” Bilinda Butcher’s dreamy croon wafts throughout, gently defining post-punk girlishness. Guitarist and resident genius Kevin Shields also sings sometimes. But the instrumental quality of the vocals ”” the fact that they matter as tone, not language ”” helps define Loveless’ new paradigm. No more would experimental bands require pompous poets ranting about lambs on Broadway. Sonic textures, from electrical-storm dissonance to feather-soft harmonics, could carry meaning and hit the gut. Imparting this truth and setting the stage for post-rock, electronica, Garbage and Beck, My Bloody Valentine vanished into the ether they’d generated. If they never return, Loveless was enough.

38. Soundgarden, ‘Superunknown’
Soundgarden‘s step up to rock & roll immortality came late in their day, after spells with both Sub Pop and SST Records, and after the band first grabbed the platinum ring with 1991’s Badmotorfinger. But this brutish beauty gave Soundgarden a lock on the “Led Zeppelin for the Nineties” crown. A heavy-metal band with punk-rock nobility and no time for lemon-squeezin’ corn, guitarist Kim Thayil, bassist Ben Shepherd and drummer Matt Cameron hammer Chris Cornell’s vocal anguish in “Fell on Black Days,” “Black Hole Sun” and “Like Suicide” into brilliantly warped power-thump sculpture.

37. Johnny Cash, ‘American Recordings’
It’s rare when forty years into a career, an artist unleashes an indisputable masterpiece. Johnny Cash pulled it off, though. American Recordings was the brainchild of Cash and producer Rick Rubin, who had the genius to recognize that Cash’s incomparable voice alone with an acoustic guitar and a clutch of great songs was a can’t-miss proposition. Cash’s own tunes (“Drive On”) align perfectly with apt selections by the likes of Tom Waits, Leonard Cohen and (no joke) Glenn Danzig. American Recordings is stark, stirring and, at times, even funny. Best of all it restored a master to much-deserved pre-eminence.

36. A Tribe Called Quest, ‘The Low End Theory’
The nice guys finished first. Queens-born and -bred A Tribe Called Quest brought you egoless hip-hop that let you dance to their smooth, jazzy sounds, chock with horns and upright bass and chill alongside their laid-back attitude. Producer Ali Shaheed Muhammad polished the mix, and MC Phife played a great second fiddle in rhymes about SkyPagers, the record industry and girls (“Tanya, Tameeka/Sharon, Karen/Tina, Stacy/Julie, Tracy”), but, really, it was Q-Tip’s show. His distinct nasal voice light and delicious, his liquid flow as warm and comforting as an electric blanket, his natural charisma shining through the speakers, Q-Tip makes The Low End Theory feel like an easy conversation with an old friend.

35. Wilco, ‘Being There’
The nineteen tracks on Being There are spread across two CDs ”” a sound aesthetic decision. Each disc functions as a self-contained entity digestible in a single forty-minute sitting. Together, both halves aspire to the nervy sprawl of double-album predecessors such as London Calling and Exile on Main Street, records that forged unified personal statements out of a bewildering variety of styles. Being There is a product of ambitious versatility, particularly in the string-band textures conjured by multi-instrumentalist Max Johnston and the pliant rhythms of bassist John Stirratt and drummer Ken Coomer. Wilco explore the clavinet-fueled funk of the Band on “Kingpin” and crank up the Sun Sessions-style reverb on “Someday Soon.” The band also bounces like the Beatles in a dance hall on “Why Would You Wanna Live” and evokes an air of desert mystery in “Hotel Arizona.”

34. Oasis, ‘(What’s the Story) Morning Glory?’
With their second album, the fighting Gallagher brothers embraced the Stones and Beatles comparisons, then went ahead and established themselves as a rock & roll force in their own right with tunes such as “Roll With It” and the glorious “Wonderwall.”

33. Eminem, ‘The Slim Shady LP’
Here’s where Eminem introduced himself as a crazy white geek, the “class-clown freshman/Dressed like Les Nessman.” Hip-hop had never heard anything like Em’s brain-damaged rhymes on this Dr. Dre””produced album, which earned Em respect, fortune, fame and a lawsuit from his mom.

32. Nine Inch Nails, ‘The Downward Spiral’
Trent Reznor has the shock-antic instincts of an old Hollywood B-movie producer. He made publicity hay out of the fact that part of this album was recorded in the L.A. mansion where Sharon Tate was murdered by Charles Manson’s gang; he also inspired arenas of teenagers to sing along to the unforgettable chorus of “Closer”: “I want to fuck you like an animal.” Yet this is finely wrought gore, a swan dive into Reznor’s deep vat of discontent, in which he vents as effectively in tense, muted moments (“I Do Not Want This”) as he does in the full-bore, machine-generated terror of the title track. In a genre ”” industrial rock ”” wracked with cliché, Reznor demonstrates the many shades of gray that make up abject despair.

31. Bob Dylan, ‘Time Out of Mind’
Having shed one persona after another for more than three decades, Bob Dylan finally found one he could embrace: brokedown, death-haunted bluesman. “I’m sick of love,” he groans on Time‘s opening track, and, man, he sounds it. That sets the tone for the ten songs that follow, a night journey that’s all roads and no destination, all outskirts and no town. The sad-eyed man of “Highlands,” a swirling sixteen-minute epic, is still moving, however, as the album ends, desperate to elude the reaper, nearly out of his mind with weariness, nearly out of time.

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