Sound Obsession

Welcome to Part 5 of my “100 Favorite Albums of the 1990’s” list! This part covers late fall of '95 to spring of '96 - my junior year of high school. During this time I was still deep into hip-hop, but my musical horizons were expanding quickly. 1996 ushered in a frenzy of musical exploration and discovery - 22 of my favorite albums of the 90's were released in 1996. It was a great year. By then, I had a driver’s license, which expanded my musical hunting grounds beyond suburban bus routes. I'd borrow my older brother's car (thanks!) to make trips to record shops across the DC metro area, including the HMV in Georgetown where a serendipitous conversation with a staffer there led to some great recommendations, including a jungle music compilation called This is Jungle Sky released in early ‘95 by Liquid Sky, the record label offshoot of the NYC emporium of the same name, which served as an axis for the Mid-Atlantic rave and underground club scene in the early t...

Welcome back to my “100 Favorite Albums of the 1990’s” list! I didn’t think it’d take me five years to get to Part 4, but here we are. As a reminder, this 100-album list is broken into ten parts comprised of ten albums apiece, ordered by release date. Some parts might represent one year's worth of music, others might represent several years. Two rules still apply - First, I must have acquired the album in the year of its original release, inclusive of a retroactive four months into the previous year (corresponding with a fall school semester). Second, each album must have made a real impact on me in the timeframe of its initial release. Part 4 covers the time between the fall of 1994 and the fall of 1995 - the entirety of my sophomore year and fall semester of my junior year of high school. At this point, I was beginning to step away from American alt-rock and grunge and moving onto electronic music, Britpop, and falling deep into hip-hop music . . . At first, it was the popular G-...

To borrow from a Brent Cobb album title, the dominant musical theme for me this year was "ain't rocked in a while."  Despite auditory excursions into electro, drum & bass, and country music, my craving for guitar riffage and six-string shredding was strong, and 2025 delivered.  Long time favorites like Deftones and Ghost returned with late career highlights while the next generation of Gen Z artists inspired by Gen X sounds - Doomsday, Die Spitz, and Rocket - picked up guitars and released outstanding debut albums. These are my top ten favorite albums of 2025, in alphabetical order by artist name . . . . Client_03:   Testbed_Assembly     (Client_03, 7/4/25) Electro has roots in krautrock, funk, and the cut-up rhythms of the nascent hip-hop scene - a cyborg groove built on 808s, synthesizers, and ...