Sound Obsession

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-...

Part 3 of my "100 Favorite Albums of the 1990s" list covers my freshman year of high school and the summer that followed.  This was a major transition period for me musically.  Fall of '93 was peak grunge before a steep drop-off the following year. I'd owned a cheap electric guitar for a while by then (a metallic blue Yamaha Pacifica with a black pick guard and Floyd Rose tremolo), but played it poorly.  The full extent of my prowess on the axe was banging out some Nirvana riffs and stumbling my way through the intro to Jimi Hendrix's "Purple Haze."  Truthfully, by early '94 I was losing interest in rock music and the dreary elitism it seemed to demand, not to mention the skill and patience it took to learn how to play the guitar.   Kurt Cobain's suicide and the inevitable disbanding of Nirvana in the spring of '94 felt like the end of an era.  The rise of Beck and the Beastie Boys shortly thereafter felt like the start of another.  A summer ...