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eponymous hiphop?
Posted on December 10th, 2007 by Scraps.
Categories: Music, Albums, Lists.
It was only when I began actively compiling Eponymous Albums That Aren't Debut Albums -- now up to 86 items -- that I became aware that there seems to be a much lower percentage of eponymous albums in hiphop than elsewhere. Does that seem true to anyone else?
eponymous update
Posted on December 6th, 2007 by Scraps.
Categories: Music, Albums, Lists.
The list of eponymous albums that aren't debut albums is up to fifty. A surprising number of them are from musicians who actually had an eponymous debut, but chose to repeat the title.
eponymous but not first
Posted on December 5th, 2007 by Scraps.
Categories: Music, Albums, Lists.
Over at the useful and fun website Rate Your Music, I have begun a list of eponymous albums that aren't debut albums. I've seeded the list with twenty albums, and am takin suggestions for more (I have to add them myself). I'm only interested in standard albums of new material: not compilations, box sets, etc.
slough of despond - a list in progress
Posted on December 4th, 2007 by Scraps.
Categories: Music, Songs, Lists.
Months ago I promised our friend Joy the bartender a mix of bleak, dark, depressing songs, and finally got round to recording it a couple days back. It's far from perfect; in its eventual final form I wouldn't be surprised if I replace half of these:
ten bands with vowels in their names
Posted on September 17th, 2007 by Scraps.
Categories: Music, Lists, Comedy.
Abba: The vowels in their name stood for vowels in the group members' names as well.
The Velvet Underground: Introduced zeugma into rock lyrics.
The Monkees: I think the "y" in monkey is voiced like a consonant, don't you? Yuh. Monkey-yuh. Right? So they picked up a vowel here.
The The: Still cracks me up! The The. The The The The The. The.
Van Der Graaf Generator: The doubled "a" is surprisingly common among Dutch bands, but is eschewed by Frisians.
Van Morrison: Not actually a band, but a person. His real name is Van.
Ebn-Ozn: Lost two of their vowels in a lawsuit, sparking their satiric masterpiece "AEIOU and Sometimes Y".
Styx. Name doesn't look like it has any vowels, yet it does. Look closely.
AEIOU: The only band name to have all the standard vowels of the alphabet, in alphabetical order!
XTC. Technically not qualified for the list, but I didn't think I could leave them off.
one for the well: top 50 xtc songs
Posted on May 24th, 2007 by Scraps.
Categories: Music, Songs, Lists.
Velma told me today that my name had come up at my old online home, The Well, when discussing XTC -- it was opined that Scraps would doubtless have a list of top 50 XTC songs. And so, of course, I do.
Top Fifty XTC songs:
- Earn Enough for Us
- Great Fire
- Making Plans for Nigel
- 1000 Umbrellas
- The Mayor of Simpleton
- Collideascope
- The Wheel and the Maypole
- Life Begins at the Hop
- Pale and Precious
- Towers of London
- No Thugs in Our House
- Generals and Majors
- Scarecrow People
- That Wave
- Respectable Street
- Season Cycle
- Beating of Hearts
- Jason and the Argonauts
- The Mole from the Ministry
- Love on a Farmboy's Wages
- Ten Feet Tall
- The Meeting Place
- Human Alchemy
- All of a Sudden (It's Too Late)
- Another Satellite
- Pink Thing
- Senses Working Overtime
- Dear God
- The Loving
- Day In Day Out
- Vanishing Girl
- Funk Pop a Roll
- The Man Who Sailed Around His Soul
- Washaway
- Big Day
- Then She Appeared
- Ball and Chain
- Me and the Wind
- War Dance
- Burning with Optimism's Flames
- Deliver Us from the Elements
- River of Orchids
- Love at First Sight
- Dear Madam Barnum
- Snowman
- Wake Up
- Sacrificial Bonfire
- Across This Antheap
- English Roundabout
- This Is Pop
The last few could easily be replaced by any of nine others.
updating 1999
Posted on May 11th, 2007 by Scraps.
Categories: Music, Albums, Lists.
I borrowed a few 1999 albums from the library to try to fill some of the many listening gaps in my 1999 top fifty list. A few quick notes:*
Mos Def's Black on Both Sides is probably one of the twenty best hip-hop albums I have ever heard.** It may end up in my 1999 top ten. It's long, but engages my interest all the way through, and its musical textures are right up my alley.
Sigur Rós, Ágætis Byrjun. I'm trying to give this a fair shot, but through two listens in headphones at work I've been thoroughly bored. Not only does this seem to be all about sound with little attention paid to structure, nothing about the sound grabs me. It just feels meandering and moody. Maybe something will snap into place some listen down the line.
Flaming Lips, The Soft Bulletin. Somewhere between the previous two. Intermittently engaging, sometimes very interesting. I'm remembering a lot from play to play, which is always a good sign. I tried this album years ago, and it left me cold; ever since I've grouped it with Mercury Rev's Deserter's Songs, albums from the same period that lots of people thought were right at the top of the year and that didn't put me off but didn't grab me, either. I came back to The Soft Bulletin because I was blown away by "Free Radicals" from At War with the Mystics (and listening to that song again now it reminds me of a Ween song from Pure Guava, but I can't remember the name).
Marion Brown, Live in Japan. I've only listened to this once, but it sounded great, with long songs that never palled. This will make the list, but I haven't begun to learn it yet.
*I'm trying to figure out how to get substantial writing done here. I haven't had time to flesh out ideas into the kind of posts I like, so I am trying writing quicker, shorter things, to see if I can build them into more substantial posts.
**An area in which my opinion means fuckall.
1999: another shortlist for the incredibly pointless 999 albums project
Posted on April 14th, 2007 by Scraps.
Categories: Music, Albums, Lists.
I am slowly compiling a list of my favorite 999 albums from 1951 to the present, playing by the same rules as the 99 albums list (no best-of compilations, etc). I'm doing this a year at a time. This is the second shortlist: my 1999 top fifty (the first twenty to twenty-five will probably make the final list). 1998 through 2000 was the most intensely obsessive stretch of new music listening in my life; this list may be the peak of albums that make people go "who the hell is that"? Yet in these three years I was more aware than ever of all the albums I didn't and couldn't hear, all the new music I couldn't follow. Many -- most -- of the albums in rateyourmusic's top fifty are ones I never heard, or heard once, or heard one song from. When Sonicnet got eviscerated by MTV and I lost my job professionally keeping up with new music, I abruptly gave up on digging for new music on my own, letting stuff come to me more than I pursued it; since then most of my active searching has been through the past, and there are far fewer obscurities on my new music lists.
Choosing among the top three in 1999 is one of the toughest decisions for me in any year:
1999
- The Dismemberment Plan, Emergency & I
- Of Montreal, The Gay Parade
- Magnetic Fields, 69 Love Songs
- Lilys, The Three Way
- Fiona Apple, When the Pawn...
- Sleater-Kinney, The Hot Rock
- Self, Breakfast with Girls
- Randy Newman, Bad Love
- Applesaucer, Applesaucer
- The Vandermark 5, Simpatico
- The Negro Problem, Joys & Concerns
- Abigail Grush, The Phantom Beat
- Kristeen Young, Enemy
- Bis, Social Dancing
- Dave Holland Quintet, Prime Directive
- Les Savy Fav, The Cat and the Cobra
- R. Stevie Moore, The Future Is Worse than the Past
- Shannon Wright, Flightsafety
- Wilco, Summerteeth
- Opeth, Still Life
- Pinback, Pinback
- Sam Prekop, Sam Prekop
- Joel Forrester & People Like Us, Believe It
- Lamb, Fear of Fours
- Joe Henry, Fuse
- Greg Brown, One Night
(a live album, but the songs are mostly otherwise unrecorded; originally issued on vinyl in 1982, but the cd resissue is the complete show.) - Archer Prewitt, White Sky
- We, Square Root of Negative One
- Built to Spill, Keep It Like a Secret
- The Roots, Things Fall Apart
- Friends of Dean Martinez, Atardecer
- Jason Falkner, Can You Still Feel?
- The Beta Band, The Beta Band
- The Aluminum Group, Pedals
- The Olivia Tremor Control, Black Foliage
- U.S. Maple, Talker
- Owsley, Owsley
- Hovercraft, Experiment Below
- Blinker the Star, August Everywhere
- Etienne Charry, 36 Erreurs
- April March, Chrominance Decoder
- Prince Paul, A Prince Among Thieves
- The Music Tapes, First Imaginary Symphony for Nomad
- XTC, Apple Venus, Volume One
- The Science Group, A Mere Coincidence
- Oneida, Enemy Hogs
- Kristin Hersh, Sky Motel
- Clare Cooper, Valentine
- Steve Coleman & Five Elements, The Sonic Language of Myth
- Clive Gregson, Happy Hour
1989: the first shortlist for the incredibly pointless 999 albums project
Posted on March 11th, 2007 by Scraps.
Categories: Music, Albums, Lists.
I am slowly, in my copious free time, compiling a list of my favorite 999 albums from 1951 to the present, playing by the same rules as the 99 albums list (no best-of compilations, etc). I'm doing this a year at a time. This is my 1989 top forty (the first twenty to twenty-five will probably make the final list):
1989
- The Pixies, Doolittle
- Volcano Suns, Thing of Beauty
- De La Soul, Three Feet High and Rising
- NoMeansNo, Wrong
- XTC, Oranges and Lemons
- Kirsty MacColl, Kite
- Dave Holland Quartet, Extensions
- Peter Blegvad, Downtime
- Joe Jackson, Blaze of Glory
- My Dad Is Dead, The Taller You Are, The Shorter You Get
- Thinking Fellers Union Local 282, Tangle
- Bob Mould, Workbook
- The Momes, Spiralling
- Lou Reed, New York
- Television Personalities, Privilege
- Jane Siberry, Bound by the Beauty
- Steve Lacy, The Door
- Elvis Costello, Spike
- Lyle Lovett, Lyle Lovett and His Large Band
- Glass Eye, Hello Young Lovers
- Bob Stewart's First Line Band, Goin' Home
- 3 Mustaphas 3, Heart of Uncle
- Lounge Lizards, Voice of Chunk
- Thinking Plague, In This Life
- 10,000 Maniacs, Blind Man's Zoo
- Pere Ubu, Cloudland
- Bel Canto, Birds of Passage
- Shrimp Boat, Speckly
- The Frogs, It's Only Right and Natural
- Neneh Cherry, Raw Like Sushi
- The Ex, Joggers & Smoggers
- Michael Penn, March
- Marilyn Crispell, Live in Zurich
- Jack Walrath, Neohippus
- Ut, Griller
- Muhal Richard Abrams, The Hearinga Suite
- A Confederacy of Dunces, Tsk, Tsk, Tsk
- The Wedding Present, Bizarro
- K.D. Lang, Absolute Torch and Twang
- Boiled in Lead, From the Ladle to the Grave
bad rhymes
Posted on March 9th, 2007 by Scraps.
Categories: Music, Lists, Badness.
The Wombat File is asking for everyone's worst song couplets of all time. Help out this worthy cause.
I would also like to collect here rhymes that are forbidden until further notice. At the top of my list is "use/abuse". Any word where you have a good shot at guessing the rhyme word before the next line starts is a possible contender. Hall of fame entry: "museum/see 'em".
sunday top five
Posted on March 4th, 2007 by Scraps.
Categories: Lists, Stuff, Cartoons.
Top five incomprehensible animated characters:
5 - generic Peanuts parent*
4 - Kenny
3 - Boomhauer
2 - Mushmouth
1 - Donald Duck
*perhaps not strictly qualifying as animated, since never visible
lost sides
Posted on February 15th, 2007 by Scraps.
Categories: Music, Lists.
I've been going through some old mix tapes. In a way mix tapes were more fun than mix cds, in the same way that vinyl record programming could be more rewarding: you can fool around with the sides. You also had four primary positions available -- the first and last songs on each side -- instead of two.
The best mix tape I made, though, might as well have been a cd. It was a thematic loop:
Moebius: a mix tape
side one
Gruppo Sportivo, "Mission a Paris"
Shudder to Think, "X-French Tee Shirt"
R.E.M., "Hairshirt"
Pavement, "Cut Your Hair"
Barbara Manning, "Scissors"
Chickasaw Mudd Puppies, "Words and Knives"
Brian Eno, "Dead Finks Don't Talk"
My Dad Is Dead, "I Had a Dream"
Blake Babies, "I'm Not Your Mother"
Juliana Hatfield, "My Sister"
Peter Blegvad, "Daughter"
Railroad Jerk, "Call Me the Son"
Pylon, "M-Train"side two
the Motors, "Airport"
the Pixies, "Motorway to Roswell"
the Raincoats, "Off Duty Trip"
Lowell George, "I Can't Stand the Rain"
Pal Shazar, "Three Sheets to the Wind"
Thinking Fellers Union Local 282, "My Pal the Tortoise"
Tortoise, "Along the Banks of Rivers"
Wire, "Sand in My Joints"
Culture, "International Herb"
Volcano Suns, "Bumper Crop"
MX-80 Sound, "Fender Bender"
Tuxedomoon, "Crash"
the Residents, "Die in Terror"
Mission of Burma, "Smoldering Fuselage"
I think I need to make a mix this weekend.
sunday top five
Posted on February 11th, 2007 by Scraps.
Categories: Music, Songs, Lists.
Top five songs about waiting:
5 Pere Ubu, "I Will Wait"
4 Pretenders, "The Wait"
3 Velvet Underground, "Waiting for My Man"
2 Ed's Redeeming Qualities, "I Will Wait"
1 Matthew Sweet, "I've Been Waiting"
Top five songs about waitressing:
5 Tori Amos, "Waitress"
4 Jane Siberry, "Waitress"
3 Heavens to Betsy, "Waitress Hell"
2 Suzy Bogguss, "Eat at Joe's"
1 "It's an Art," from Working
personal radio
Posted on February 7th, 2007 by Scraps.
Categories: Music, Songs, Lists.
Phil Ford at Dial M for Musicology issued an Ipod Random Challenge a while back that has resulted in several interesting posts. The lists are supposed to be annotated. I'm going to stick to one observation per song, which may have very little to do with the actual song. A few of these are songs I'll be writing about eventually in the Song Project.
Here are the first twelve songs my ipod (a Zen microphoto, actually, but i hate the name Zen) served up:
- Ultravox, "All Stood Still"
Ultravox polarize me: I love their robo-synth uptempo stuff like this and "Sleepwalk", which are like Gary Numan songs with more active menace. I hate their languorous stuff, because I think they still sound robotic, but with overemotive Bryan Ferry-type music the effect to me is like an obscene parody of passion. - Self, "Meg Ryan"
Self is probably best known for recording a version of "What a Fool Believes" -- and an album of originals -- entirely with toy instruments. "Meg Ryan" is not from that album. - George Harrison, "Wah Wah"
Recommended listening in a footnote in the great Donald Barthelme story that consists of a letter from a man to a psychiatrist explaining why he's agreeing with his girlfriend's decision to end her therapy and buy a piano. - Quasi, "Our Happiness Is Guaranteed"
My favorite science fiction song ever.top five science fiction songs:
5. Devo, "Jocko Homo"
4. Gary Numan, "Are 'Friends' Electric?"
3. the Pixies, "The Happening"
2. the Dismemberment Plan, "Memory Machine"
1. Quasi, "Our Happiness Is Guaranteed" - Soft Boys, "Strange"
My favorite Robyn Hitchcock song. I'm a sucker for this kind of eerie sound. - Tin Huey, "New York's Finest Dining Experience"
From their great and underdiscussed new wave or whatever -- art pop? goofy post-punk? -- album Contents Dislodged During Shipment. - Undertones, "It's Going to Happen!"
Oh, these guys are another entry for the Best Album Is Not The One Everybody Says It Is list. Both their second and third albums are better than their nearly unanimously preferred debut. - X, "Nausea"
Does their great slow menacing thing. I saw them live more often than any band in my life. - Dead Kennedys, "Nazi Punks Fuck Off"
And this is the band I saw second-most often. Wow. (I use the past tense because it's really unlikely I'll see anyone more often than this. Well, maybe Joel Forrester.) What a great punk song this is, fierce and smart and no-bullshit, a barrage. - Charles Mingus, "Pussy Cat Dues"
One of the half dozen songs I'm most likely to whistle idly. - Lambchop, "Let's Go Bowling"
A vividly sad song. - "You Must Meet My Wife", from A Little Night Music
I really want to learn this with Velma to sing in piano bars. It is hilarious, and while the man gets most of the singing the woman gets most of the best moments, with "yes that much seems clear" and "no I'd strike her first" two of my favorite line deliveries in all of Sondheim.
My player is heavily weighted to the pop song side of my taste; I do most of my listening while commuting, and I enjoy having (mostly) songs I've known long and well.
That was fun.
sunday top five
Posted on February 4th, 2007 by Scraps.
Categories: Lists, Stuff.
Top five fictional stalkers:
5 Inigo Montoya
4 Charles Kinbote
3 Rupert Pupkin
2 Ahab
1 Gollum
five things
Posted on January 18th, 2007 by Scraps.
Categories: Lists, Stuff.
Richard at The Existence Machine tagged me to write five things about myself that You probably don't know.
I've done this one before, on my more personal weblog, but that post wouldn't really fit here, since I amuse myself by treating Parlando as a more purely subject-oriented weblog, not so much about me except in the ways that can't be avoided. It's an interesting exercise for me here on two levels: first, I don't have a sense of how much I have generated any expectations about who I am here at all; second, I don't yet have that good an idea who You are. But I'll try.
1 - I barely went to college. I thought I technically never graduated from high school, but my parents maintain this isn't so, if I recall correctly (and see below). I went to a program that was supposed to be three years of high school and three years of college (a really bad idea in my case). We "commenced" from high school after three years, and received the remainder of our credits to graduate from high school in our first year of college. But once in college, I transferred out of the program. I don't remember ever receiving a high school diploma, and I dropped out of college in (I think) less than a year. I'm not specifically sorry about this, but my entire education is a series of missed opportunities for various reasons, and I am very sorry I never went to a good college, and missed the whole college experience (for good and ill, yes).
2 - Yet my first full-time job when I arrived in New York in the mid-1980s was helping edit volumes of litcrit for the Chelsea House Library of Literary Criticism (under the supervision of Harold Bloom, though I never met him). I loved that job. Most of my days were spent researching at the NYU and Columbia libraries. I'd never burned out on academic criticism in school, and I almost entirely got to read and choose what I liked. Mostly I was editing chapters on obscure authors, some of whom were a revelation to me, but occasionally I got a major author that no one else wanted, and those were great fun. I got to do huge chapters on Dickens and Wordsworth, for example.
3 - I have a godawful memory for the events of my life. Even my recent past is hazy. Specific events come back to me if the memory is triggered in some way, but even then the memory won't feel lived in (especially visually); it will be more of a narrative memory. I remember things I hear much much better than things I see.
4 - I read slowly. I read everything as a voice in my head, so if you read something aloud, that's the basic speed I read at, and that is considerably slower than most readers I know; but I also stop frequently to think about what I've just read.
5 - I will buy any book that has a cover by Leo and Diane Dillon.
horsing
Posted on October 4th, 2006 by Scraps.
Categories: Lists, Words.
Five recently released racehorse names* beginning with E, once claimed but now available to the public:
- Earn Your Burger
- Encourage To Steal
- Elbow's Call
- Enjoy the Soup
- Elmo
Five unclaimed race horse names beginning with E:
- Eau de Humanity
- Ex Pole Dancer
- Efeeba Fillya
- Eat Grits
- Ergot
* according to the Jockey Club
top five ian frazier lines
Posted on March 22nd, 2006 by Scraps.
Categories: Lists, Words, Comedy.
Top five Ian Frazier lines:
5. I'm writhing around like a carp here.
4. Behind the intelligence, etc., is an attitude best summarized.
3. Then I pulled all of the other knobs, and nothing came out -- a metaphor.
2. Some critics have called him the white Paul Laurence Dunbar.
1. We are all deeply sexual beings.
top five initially overlooked influential albums
Posted on January 24th, 2006 by Scraps.
Categories: Music, Albums, Lists.
Luke asked for "Top five albums, musical genre of your choice, that (a) were completely missed in 'Best of' lists and year end polls in the year of their release and (b) have become more influential to their musical genre than albums that were in 'best of' lists and year end polls."
5. Talk Talk, Spirit of Eden (1988)
Yes, it's the new wave band that did "Talk Talk" and "It's My Life". No, this doesn't sound anything like that. Spirit of Eden is as massive a stylistic break as can be found in any band's catalog. It's not electronic, it's not pop songs -- it's barely songs. It has the quiet and majestic sweep of classical music without the bombast of prog rock; it has astonishing shifts of mood and power. It's delicate, but swells to moments of huge beauty. It's... hard to describe. I don't know if its influence has been nearly as great as the other albums on this list, but I hear the sound of this album in a lot of moody music that's come since: Tindersticks, Doves, Mogwai, Sigur Ros.
4. Wire, Pink Flag (1977)
Probably got more attention in the U.K. than it did here initially; it did not make the 1977 Voice Critics Poll list. The stripped-down, laser-tight, precise yet urgent punk of Pink Flag paved the way for turn-of-the-decade postpunk bands like Gang of Four and Mission of Burma, and is still heard today in the sound of bands like Spoon and Elastica (who famously had to pay for copping a riff from this album, though I think it was no more of a cop than many others that go unpaid). Wire were not content to stay in one place: their next album, Chairs Missing, is weirder, stylistically and structurally more ambitious and varied, moody, subtle, still urgent and tight. Chairs Missing hasn't had nearly the influence of Pink Flag, but it's my favorite rock album ever.
3. Slint, Spiderland (1991)
Love it or hate it, this is where post-rock begins. I love a lot of it, myself, at the same time that I think it's basically prog rock in a new more respectable guise. There's nothing here that you can't find in some of the art-rock of the previous twenty years -- Can, Univers Zero, Faust, etc -- but this is the album that coalesced the angular, pointy-headed sound of a hundred albums in the next decade, half of them seemingly coming from Chicago.
2. Big Star, #1 Record (1972)
Big Star didn't quite sound like nobody else at the time: the best songs of Badfinger and the Raspberries have the same ringing guitars and power-pop hooks and harmonies. But Big Star did it best and most consistently, and unfortunately by far least successfully. The first two Big Star albums were commercial stiffs, but their sound is preserved in a thousand power pop singles since. More than any other band, they focused the sound of the Byrds and the Beatles' pop singles and turned it into a genre. Probably best known to mainstream rock fans via the Bangles' cover of "September Gurls".
1. Killing Joke, Killing Joke (1980)
Bradley Torreano at Allmusic sums it up well: "Since 1980, there have been a hundred bands who sound like this; but before Steve Albini and Al Jourgensen made it hip, the cold metallic throb of Killing Joke was exciting and fresh. The harshly sung vocals riding over the pulsating synth lines of the opener 'Requiem' have a vigor and passion that few imitators have managed to match. The precise riffs and tight rhythms found in songs like 'Wardance' would influence a generation of hardcore musicians; yet 'The Wait,' with its thrashing guitars and angry vocals, would find itself covered on a Metallica album only six years later. That such a bleak and furious album could have such a widespread influence is a testament to its importance. . . . [T]his is an underground classic and deserves better than its relative unknown status." In a year in which a few influential cult albums made it onto the Voice Critics Poll list (Gang of Four's Entertainment! at #10, X's Los Angeles at #16, the Feelies' Crazy Rhythms at #17, Joy Division's Closer at #22, even Young Marble Giants' barely-disqualified-for-this-list classic Colossal Youth at #25), Killing Joke's debut didn't make the list. I don't remember anyone particularly talking about it at the time. I never heard it on the radio, even the briefly surviving new wave stations; I was turned on to it by my friend Jim Maier, who I think shopped randomly for odd music things and also turned me on to the two Tubeway Army albums pre-"Cars". (British readers may not know that "Are Friends Electric?", a smash over there, was nothing over here.) That first Killing Joke album was like a blast of the industrial dancefloor future. It was like being blasted in a wind tunnel. It was awe-inspiring and cathartic and disturbing. It inoculated me to the sound of Nine Inch Nails, which consequently seemed like attitudinal silliness pasted over music I'd already heard; later, Marilyn Manson would allow me to appreciate Trent Reznor's relative maturity and subtlety. Today the first Killing Joke album sounds a little tinny, a little thin; it needs a good remaster sprucing-up. But in the meantime I can still turn it up loud.
hindsight is a bitch
Posted on January 11th, 2006 by Scraps.
Categories: Music, Albums, Lists.
I'm listening, for the first time in a few years, to Teenage Fanclub's Bandwagonesque. It's pleasant in a pop-buzzy way: low on grabby hooks, but consistently melodically interesting. Never great, never bad.
But, hey, Spin Magazine? I have not forgotten that you guys called this the best album of 1991.
A short list of better pop and rock albums from 1991:
- The Pixies, Trompe le Monde
- Nirvana, Nevermind
- Matthew Sweet, Girlfriend (doing the same kind of thing as Bandwagonesque except much better)
- Soundgarden, Badmotorfinger
- Throwing Muses, The Real Ramona
- Richard Thompson, Rumour and Sigh
- De La Soul, De La Soul Is Dead
- R.E.M., Out of Time
- Superchunk, No Pocky for Kitty
- My Bloody Valentine, Loveless (I hate it, but historically it's a greater album by far than Bandwagonesque)
- Slint, Spiderland
- U2, Achtung Baby (I'm not a fan, but it has to be listed as a legitimate contender)
I could make a list of thirty more 1991 albums I think are better without trying hard, but that would be a more personal list. I think that any of the above albums, though, would be objectively better choices, with the benefit of hindsight (though the choice was an eyebrow-raiser at the time) than Bandwagonesque. (Well, okay, The Real Ramona is a personal choice, but it belongs with the albums above, damn it.) Note that with Nevermind, Loveless, and Spiderland you have three of the most influential rock albums of the decade to choose from (though predicting Spiderland at the time would have been a three-cushion shot, and pretty far off Spin's somewhat more mainstream brief).
There've been worse calls -- somehow the Village Voice Critics Poll for 1985 thought Talking Heads' Little Creatures was the album of the year, although at least 1985 was a pretty crappy year.