Sound Obsession

Welcome to Part 7 of my “100 Favorite Albums of the 1990’s” list! This part covers the late fall of '96 through early spring of '97 - the majority of my senior year of high school. '96 was a banner year in so many ways, and '97 was shaping up to be another great one - live shows, festivals, raves, and so many classic, era-defining albums across multiple subgenres of rock, hip-hop, and electronica. Nearly half of my 100 favorite albums of the 90's were released in this two year span - ’96 - '97.  Twenty of my 100 favorite albums of the 90's were released in '97 alone. ⁃ Will G. Originoo Gunn Clappaz:   Da Storm   (10/29/96) OGC were the last Boot Camp Clik members to release their debut "solo" album, and maybe that was by design. This rap trio were no slouches but, in retrospect, didn't have the charisma of fellow Clik members like Smif-N-Wessun and Heltah Skeltah. With uneven production from longtime Clik associates, including D...

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-...

2015 was an exceptional year for music.  Here are my top-ten favorite albums of 2015, and check out my ten runners-up and honorable mentions .  Hey, better late than never.  Enjoy. . . . 1. Ghost: Meliora (8.5/10) Meliora is Ghost's third LP, released in late summer of 2015. The title is a Latin adjective meaning "better" and so it is that the album continues an upward trajectory for the Swedish occult-metal band, adding to their mock-ecclesiastical mythos. Ghost's breakout debut Opus Eponymous mined a spooky mediaeval aesthetic exemplified by a traditional proto-metal sound, while their playful sophomore album Infetissumam (previously reviewed here ) skewed baroque, incorporating disparate elements like disco, surf-rock, and choral music. By contrast, Meliora is the band's take on 20th century modernity and futurism (its cover references Fritz Lang's 1927 sci-fi film Metropolis ) . Accordingly, on Meliora , the band's musical palette...